Going Ape MONKEY SHINES

By RICHARD CORLISS

Allan Mann (Jason Beghe) is a clever, hunky, athletic law student. Make that was. For Allan is hit by a truck and wakes up a quadriplegic. He is told to look on the bright side: "You'll get all the best parking spaces." But for Allan, this is a life near death. His mother (Joyce Van Patten) cloys and crushes. His girlfriend runs off with the surgeon who may have botched his operation. His nurse, a sulky sadist named Maryanne (Christine Forrest), cares more for her parakeet than for her patient. And Allan's best friend (John Pankow) is a mad scientist of the cybernetic age, Cuisinarting the genes of capuchin monkeys. One of these -- she's called Ella -- is placed in the care of the comely Melanie (Kate McNeil), who trains simians to function as the hands of the disabled. As Allan's new housekeeper, Ella is a dream. She fetches; she spoon-feeds him; she even does windows. The clever little monkey has a mind of her own. Whoops! She wants to give it to Allan.

Who'd've thunk it? A horror movie with brains and guts. That is, as it happens, the theme of George A. Romero's Monkey Shines: a battle of intellect vs. instinct, the moral vs. the feral, Allan man vs. Ella monkey. Ella learns to know Allan, through a kind of transspecies ESP, and to love him, with a frightening intensity. He is seized with visions, from Ella's point of view, of the creature's nocturnal rambles as she acts out his jealousy and frustration in the most violent form; and Romero films the images as if through a late-night monkey cam. In one of the rages Ella is transmitting to him, Allan bites through his lip, and Ella, with a lover's bold devotion, gently licks the blood. She is not so gentle in drawing blood from the women she sees as rivals for the man and the mind she must possess.

The first few scenes are klutzy; Romero has never been the subtlest director of actors. But once he gets past the early exposition, he takes energized control of the subject (his script is based on Michael Stewart's novel) and gets a tough-minded turn from Beghe, his soap opera-handsome young star. Beghe must show all Allan's suicidal anxieties, homicidal anger and heroic resourcefulness while strapped in a wheelchair. His finger can hardly move, but his performance does, splendidly.

True to the genre, Romero runs clever twists on mandatory horror-movie citations like the Psycho shower sequence (Mrs. Bates is a monkey) and The Old Dark House climax (Ella pulls the power switch). And at the end, Monkey Shines soars into that rarefied sci-fi air where melodrama meets metaphor. Romero, best known for Night of the Living Dead 20 years ago, has grown up here, grown past Hitchcock homages to fix on the war of mind and body that everyone ceaselessly wages. While he's at it, he has made the smartest dark fantasy since David Cronenberg's 1986 update of The Fly and the best monkey movie since the original King Kong. -- By R.C.