Well, I really can't understand why some people talk so bad about MONKEY SHINES - that's a real good one from Romero! Not only is the idea (the "evil" part of the human soul and behavior is the suppressed animal instinct that sometimes breaks through)in general fascinating - but it is also very well brought on the screen! Romero is often blamed for his unspectacular kind of filming, for his "low aesthetics" (especially his films of the 80ies) etc. but if you look a little deeper, you'll see how much sense his special kind of filming makes, for example as a means to show and develop characters. By the way: the beginning sequence is so great - in a way it shows the "poetry of a car accident" (does this sound perverted?). I appreciate the way of handling the topic of being handicapped - MONKEY SHINES is THE SEA IN ME (2004, directed by A. Amenabar) as a horror movie! The film not only works on a philosophical level but is also - of course it has to because it's a horror movie - very thrilling, even though Tom Savini doesn't go as far with his FX as in his splatter flicks. The only thing I didn't like was that the effect of the serum wasn't explained in a scientific way - this makes the story look like some old-fashioned mad-scientist-story from the early decades of the 20th century... And of course: you'll also find the characteristic Romero-sense for dark humor in this one, too.
Review of Monkey Shines
