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Saturday, October 3, 2015

31 days of Halloween 2015: Day 3


Blue Monkey
1987
William Fruet

An elderly man is wandering around a greenhouse when he gets pricked by a strange plant. Soon after, he collapses and is hospitalized with a bacterial infection. He dies and the infection emerges in the shape of a big worm that crawls out his mouth. A bunch of dumb kids feed the worm some experimental growth powder, and before long, a giant  praying mantis/fly monster is rampaging through the hospital. The building is locked down an no one can escape, it's up to a lone cop (Steve Railsback) to try stop the monster before it snips off any more heads.

Blue Monkey contains zero monkeys and barely even contains a monster since the giant bug doesn't make an appearance until nearly an hour into the 96 minute run. Things play out like a mixture of the Fly (1986) and Alien (1979) but with just a hint of 50s style monster films. Blue Monkey can never quite built up the momentum to be exciting, and doesn't manage to fall back on atmosphere or even impressive effects. The films starts out with some delightful gross-outs, but just never follows up on it later on. There's plenty of opportunity for satire or commentary about hospitals and health care but, the movie just seems content to barely scrape by on its premise. Blue Monkey could have been a minor cult classic, but instead it ends up kind of middling. The best thing about it is the VHS cover, which is outstanding. Just look at that for 96 minutes instead.

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