The Gift (2015)

Monkey status: Monkeys are featured in this film

The Gift is a psychological thriller directed and written by Australian actor Joel Edgerton. He also appears in it as the creepy old friend who shows up to unsettle Simon and Robyn, played by Jason Bateman in an uncharacteristically non-comedic turn and British actress Rebecca Hall.

First thing that struck me was that two thirds of that main cast are not from the United States of America, yet their characters definitely are. The story is set in some unnamed environ of Los Angeles, and Edgerton has to put on an American accent the entire time. There are a few moments when he fails and those inescapable Aussie vowel sounds come floating through. Maybe this helps to make his stalker-like character seem even creepier – like what’s up with that guy’s voice, anyway? What I’m saying is putting on that shoddy accent must have been a conscious choice.

Because he’s the guy who wrote the thing, too! Couldn’t this have been set in Melbourne? I guess Americans wouldn’t want to watch that. And none of us want to see Jason Bateman pretending to be an Aussie.

Monkeys are used here as a device. Bateman’s character is established quite early in the film to have a phobia of monkeys, to the extent that a monkey doll given as a gift to his unborn child is about to become trash.

Weirdo Gordo, his old stalker-friend, uses a monkey mask and a range of monkey toys to mess with his head. There’s a great shot of Gordo filming himself in a mirror while wearing a monkey mask that looks a bit like a converted Curious George mask.

Joel Edgerton appearing as Curious George

So there are no real monkeys in the film, but the countenance of the animal is used multiple times as a plot device. It makes me wonder why they chose the monkey. Many people are afraid of clowns for their near but not-quite human features. Maybe a monkey phobia would stem from the same source. This means that Gordo appearing as a monkey or a provider of monkeys highlights the less than totally human way that Simon (Jason Bateman) sees him.

Either way, The Gift shows us that monkeys can be creepy even when they aren’t alive. I enjoyed the film, it was a tight thriller that kept me guessing until the end. But a scene with a real monkey is probably the only thing that would have elevated it to any more of a glowing review.

The Jungle Book (1967)

Monkey status: Monkeys are featured in this film

The Jungle Book features some of Disney’s most famous depictions on non-human primates. They even show us a rudimentary society comprising only monkeykind, living in what looks like the ruins of Angkor Wat in the days before it was filled with guys in Bintang singlets.

Mowgli’s story of trying to find his place in the jungle was based on Rudyard Kipling’s experiences in India. It follows that most of the animals in the film are indeed animals found on the Indian sub-continent. The monkey scene, however, throws that way out of wack.

King Louie is obviously an orang-utan, so what is he doing in India? Was he an exile from some distant kingdom in the Sumatran jungle? Was he the survivor of a foiled regicide attempt, forced to leave his land forever with only a cohor

Baloo’s somewhat insensitive use of apeface

t of his most loyal? He waits in his temple in the Indian jungle like Napolean on St. Helena, craving the red flower of the man-cub’s fire to launch an attack back on his homeland.

In that sense he’s kind of like Danaerys Targaryen – a denied ruler wanting to return to their ancestral homeland with weapons of flame and destruction. Obviously George RR Martin cribbed a lot from this movie.

For some reason, he didn’t carry over the whole jazz influence. Louie is voiced and named after Louis Prima, and Prima wasted no time adding whole pages of scatting to the script. Apparently they initially modeled and named the character after Louis Armstrong, but then thought that they would come under fire for casting a black man as an ape.

Imagine the gruff-voiced Armstrong as King Louie. I can imagine it lending a far more sinister air to Mowgli’s whole encounter with the monkey exiles.

Other notable monkeys in the scene include the white-haired monkey who plays a big leaf like a lute. Most of the monkeys seem to have shocks of human hair, or maybe they are just wearing wigs.

Either way the scene with the monkeys adds a lot of question and subtext to this old Disney classic in a way that only a scene with a bunch of monkeys can. What does it mean? We’ll probably never know. Why do the monkeys want to be like Mowgli anyway? He himself is rejecting his humanity through most of the film. The monkeys, unlike Bagheera and Baloo, have their own community and microcosm of a society. The only thing they are lacking is fire, which they only need for – oh, right. Revenge. All themonkeys want is revenge. A dish best served banana-flavoured.

Initial tagline – The jungle is jumpin’

La La Land (2016)

Monkey status: There are no monkeys featured in this film

2016 was a year of looking backward. Make something or other great again was the rallying cry of an awoken mass, clinging to rose-coloured visions of a past that they probably weren’t around for.

It seems like Damien Chazelle, the director of La La Land, was doing much the same thing. His film is a journey back through the decades to a time before the postmodern and the cool and the great second wave of deconstruction in 2002. Damien Chazelle watched Casablanca instead of Saturday morning cartoons, and then he made

No paparazzi for this overlooked celeb

this film.

And it must have hit a nerve because it was huge. It was nearly the winner of the Oscar for the Best Picture – it was probably the closest any film has ever gotten to that spot without ever getting it, in a the most awkward way possible. I’m talking of course about when the crew behind the film got up on stage only to be informed that the wrong name had been read out.

So everyone was along for the ride down memory lane and casting Hollywood in this lovely nostalgic violet hue. For the most part, Chazelle and his lead actors Ryan Gosling and Emma Stone catch the past zeitgeist of the Hollywood hopeful and the story of actors and entertainers trying to fight their way onto the silver screen.

The progression of the overlooked ape figures in Hollywood

But there were no monkeys. Again the story of the furrier end of the casting room queue have been left out of Hollywood’s history. We get all kinds of tributes to old past and dusty things like Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall and James Dean – but where is the fellow who played the original King Kong? Where is Bonzo? Where is the famed statue of Mighty Joe Young outside the La Brea Tar Pits?

Characters sing and dance down Sunset Boulevard, over the hands and feet of Charlie Chaplin and Shirley Temple. But where are the attempting opposable little hands of Crystal the Capuchin? She is the top of the monkey A-list but she hasn’t even had a little square outside of Mann’s Chinese Theatre set aside for her.

As you can tell the whole thing drives me bananas. Chazelle has made a fine film if you like watching people sing and dance and like watching strange beige coloured hairless primates balance precariously on two legs and wear clothing and eat foods other than those that we can forage from shrubs and trees – I could go on.

When will the day come when Hollywood will honour its monkey heritage. We will be there ready on that day.

The Fly (1986)

Monkey status: There are monkeys featured in this film

This film was the progenitor of the hackneyed horror tag-line Be Afraid. Be very afraid. This is a little surprising when you know this film as it is anything but your conventional horror movie. Its plot is a slow descent from the uncomfortable into the hellish, and there is no final girl or bittersweet resolution here. This film is a balls-out journey down the tubes.

This is what it looks like when David Cronenberg make a love story

Ostensibly it was a remake of the 1958 film of the same name, although both are based on the same short story. This film was directed by David Cronenberg, and it has him all over it. David Cronenberg sees the shape of the human body as a suggestion rather than a rule. The result is a film that has haunted people since it came out, and probably made more vomit.

The role of the monkey in the sci-fi film is often as a test subject, and that is certainly the case here. Ill-fated scientist Seth Brundle (played by Jeff Goldblum) has two baboons that he keeps in cages in his laboratory and one of them ends up being the first victim of his ‘telepods’. The monkeys in this film are Hamadryas baboons, which is famous for its snowy white Krusty the Klown hair.

Brundle is essentially trying to invent teleportation, but organisms keep getting Cronenberged when he sends them through his machine. So this film also features a very gruesome monkey death or two.

That’s one good-looking primate

The first baboon is placed in the teleportation pod and comes through the other side as a plate of pulled pork. This is the first violence or gore that we see in the film and it sets the stage for all of the wacky shit that is going to follow. But what a sad end for a monkey. Even the poisoned dates of Raiders of the Lost Ark were more humane than this weird gooey end. But that’s Cronenberg for you.

In the original cut of the film, this is the only monkey scene. However, there is a deleted scene that contains one of the most horrific monkey situations in the history of film.

The monkey-cat

Brundle, already a hefty way into his metamorphosis, uses his telepods to combine the genetic material of his remaining baboon anda cat. The result is a grisly chimera called a ‘monkey-cat’. The thing attacks him, presumably blinded by panic and anguish, and Brundle, probably in much the same state of mind, beats it to death with a pipe. If that sounds like something you would like to see you can check it out here:

So in this film about the borders of what is human being chipped away, monkeys play a pretty significant role. It is easy enough to imagine a script where this turned out a bit differently and it was one of the baboons in the other telepod – there is an alternate reality out there somewhere where there is a film of Jeff Goldblum climbing around a lab in a half-man half-monkey outfit. Out version is of course way grosser.

It is also notable that the soundtrack for this film, by notable composer Howard Shore, contains a track called ‘Baboon Teleportation’. This is probably the only time in history that there is going to be a good reason to call a song that.

I wonder what the baboon thought it was doing in that thing