Based upon the graphic novel Dark Town Kaja Blackley
Screenplay Written by Sam Hamm
Directed by Henry Selick
** (two stars)
RATED PG 13
What social distancing and a state mandated "Safer-At-Home" policy has wrought...
Dear readers, if you happen to be ensconced in your own homes due to a global health crisis as I am, I am undoubtedly certain in between moments of calm and panic, you are finding ample time to watch television shows and movies you otherwise may not have had time to view before. And to that end, you may even find yourselves watching material you never had any intention of seeing. In my case, over the last 24 hours or so, I watched a movie that I had never had any intention of watching...and I mean never. And for the love of Pete, I watched the thing twice!
The movie in question is the live action/animation hybrid known as "Monkeybone," starring Brendan Fraser and directed by Henry Selick, best known and regarded for the stop-motion animated features "Tim Burton's The Nightmare Before Christmas" (1993) and "Coraline" (2009).
For some background, I do vividly remember seeing the trailers for the film in theaters and immediately knowing that even the possibility of seeing it at all was less than zero. I mean--everything about it looked to be negligible at best! Juvenile toilet humor, puerile jokes designed for Middle Schoolers that actual Middle Schoolers could outdo creatively. And...well...Brendan Fraser. Nothing against him personally for I have never met the man but considering the bulk of his output during that period in time, an oeuvre that included "Encino Man" (1992), "George Of The Jungle" (1997) and "Bedazzled" (2000), there was truly nothing to convince me that I should give anything in which he starred half a chance whatsoever.
I remember the film being a box office bomb that faded from view rather quickly and I hadn't given it even one thought until just yesterday, when I was drowsy and flipping through channels and I spotted the movie on cable. In a fashion that was nothing more than "what-the-hell," I turned to the film, watched it all the way through and then, proceeded to find it within my On Demand feature and I watched it again!
Now...watching "Monkeybone" twice in a little over 24 hours is not meant for you to take it that I was just blown away by what I saw. Truthfully, there was much more to actually admire about the movie than I would have ever thought possible. But that being said, it is also a chaotic, tonal mess of a movie that I am still wondering precisely who was this experience designed for.
Too smutty for family audiences. Too surreal and grotesque for smaller children by a wide mile. Too infantile for adults. In its entirety, Henry Selick's "Monkeybone" is something that did spin my head around as it did feel to exist within its own broken kaleidoscope universe where Kafka-esque demons and Freud-ian themes fueled by rampant bodily function jokes and a level of special effects that have not aged well, making for a film that looks almost 10 years older than it is, all crash together in a blink-or-miss it, hellzapoppin', cartoonish head trip. For better or for worse, I haven't quite seen anything like it.
"Monkeybone" stars the aforementioned Brendan Fraser as Stu Miley, an artist now cartoonist whose vulgar comic strip character Monkeybone, a more than randy and raunchy little monkey, has become widely popular and is now getting ready to star in his own animated series...much to Stu's reluctance and skepticism. Shying away from the spotlight, Stu exits a bash in honor of the upcoming series and potentially lucrative merchandising with his girlfriend, Dr. Julie McElroy (Bridget Fonda), a sleep institute researcher who cured Stu of his chronic nightmares by having him change his drawing hand from right to left, a move which changed his macabre artwork into the Monkeybone comic strip.
On the night Stu plans to propose to Julie, a car accident leaves Stu in a coma. While his body is connected to life support, and his heartless sister Kimmy (Megan Mullaly) is itching to pull the plug, Stu's soul descends to Down Town, a carnival-esque landscape populated by all manner of monsters who are entertained by watching people's nightmares in the Morpheum movie theater. While he is befriended by the kindly, cleavage baring waitress Miss Kitty (Rose McGowan), all Stu wishes for is to escape and wake up to his true love Julie, but he is forced to schlep around his Psychological Baggage in actual luggage, await life or death judgement by the Reapers and is constantly tormented by Monkeybone himself (voiced by John Turturro), obnoxiously, tastelessly sprung to life from his imagination.
Upon meeting the malicious Hypnos the God of Sleep (Giancarlo Esposito) and his laconic sister Death (Whoopi Goldberg), Stu plots to steal an Exit Pass to return to his body but is foiled by both Hypnos and Monkeybone, for Hypnos wishes for Monkeybone to steal Julie's chemical substance of "nightmare juice," which will give him increased power and Monkeybone...well, all he wants is to have Julie all to himself.
As you can witness from the plot description, there is actually a real story being told within "Monkeybone," a story more complicated than those aforementioned trailers ever suggested. Henry Selick does indeed carve out an evocative dark fable aesthetic with the stop-motion animation, costumes, set design and puppet effects, giving Down Town a real sense of creepy gravity as it is all so firmly connected to Stu's own subconsciousness.
The dream sequences, all black and white, shadowy and filled with one disturbing image after another, are especially effective as they feel like they could live in the neighborhood next to either Terry Gilliam psychological torments or David Lynch's body horror. And as the diminutive demon Hypnos, Giancarlo Esposito again proves that he is incapable of delivering a less than committed performance, even in a film this ridiculous, for when he informs Stu, whom he has trapped in a golf course made of quicksand, "When you dream, your monkey ass is MINE!"
Markedly less successful is the titular character himself, who, as it is so painfully obvious, is essentially named after an erection, making this film an endless stream of unimaginative double entendres ("I'm going to have to CHOKE MY MONKEY!!" yowls Stu as he chases after Monkeybone who has himself just taken a swan dive into Miss Kitty's cleavage and darted away) and scatological humor (watching a more than game Brendan Fraser, as the possessed Stu, gyrating his pajama clad nether regions directly into the camera in anticipation of finally bedding Julie is something I now cannot un-see).
Yes, this is all so Freud-ian as "Monkeybone" is indeed a movie about sexual repression and the fear of it being unleashed and therefore, uncontrollable as Stu's morally conscious Superego is at war with his own primal id, which is Monkeybone. And yet, somehow it is all mashed together with a corporate satire, some very nasty humor subversively placed underneath all of the relentless loudness (I really do think I heard a rape joke--not a good look), imaginative slapstick courtesy of Chris Kattan who plays a deceased gymnast possessed by Stu's soul (don't ask) who is chased by a team of surgeons as his vital organs fly out of his body without any sense of rhythm other than "FASTER!!! FASTER!!!!"
Composer Anne Dudley's rampant circus fairground film score barrels along as Bridget Fonda looks pretty and worried, Whoopi Goldberg's head explodes only to replaced by an identical one and the threat of nightmares being unleashed all over the world onto its victims from the flatulent anus of a Monkeybone plush toy gives you an idea of what sitting through this thing was like and why I just could not truly believe what I was seeing..and therefore, made me wonder just how in the hell did it even get made in the first place.
Clearly Tim Burton's "Beeltejuice" (1988) was the blueprint and certainly Robert Zemeckis' "Who Framed Roger Rabbit?" (1988) and perhaps, Charles Russell's "The Mask" (1994) were thrown in for good measure as well. And yet, Henry Selick did not have as strong and as assured of a creative hand as those films whatsoever. Truth be told, for a film that was released in 2001, it has not aged well at all--as it actually looks as if it was made the same year as "The Mask." Furthermore, it felt as if Selick possessed an ocean's worth of ideas, filmed every single one of them and never really thought about how they would eventually congeal together, which (again) made me question just who is this movie for.
Now, in fairness to Selick, I did indeed just discover as I was poking around the internet after watching this movie (again...I watched it twice!), that Rose McGowan revealed in recent years that Selick was fired from the film by the studio midway through the production, which makes me wonder if the clash between an honest, artistic expression and cold, commercially driven prospects was the cause for this calamity.
Even so, I watched and kept watching and kept watching, unable to really turn myself away as I knew that so much of what I was seeing was kind of regrettable. It is really quite the movie to be able to achieve a certain one-of-a-kind quality and yes, Henry Selick's "Monkeybone" is indeed quite the movie.
It is as if Henry Selick drank a vat of nightmare juice when he made it.
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