BLOOD MONKEY is yet another poor effort from the Sci-Fi Channel. I'm tired of watching all these crappy movies, but something propels me on – maybe I'm hoping to find another like the ONE decent effort I saw, which was AZTEC REX. BLOOD MONKEY isn't it; it's another film that's been made in the Thai jungle which is the sole redeeming feature of the production. Otherwise we're in extremely familiar territory as a group of youths are whittled down, one by one, by a mysterious, unseen killer in the jungle.
This film borrows heavily from the whole BLAIR WITCH PROJECT idea of using hand-held camera footage to enhance the immediacy of the horror. The problem is, this idea has literally been done to death now, so the twist ending isn't shocking but a rip-off and the hand held footage is just an over-laboured bore. The cast of nobodies are uniformly bad and don't get me started on the technical aspects; it's amateur night all around. F. Murray Abraham follows the tradition of once-great actors dragging their reputations through the mud and the monster is seen exactly once, in a single split second CGI shot at the end, where we find out it isn't a monkey at all but an ape. The scene in which the monkeys are urinating over the tents is one of the worst imaginable and even the gore effects amount to a single, albeit effective, makeup job. The rest is just noise and inanity, signifying nothing.
This film borrows heavily from the whole BLAIR WITCH PROJECT idea of using hand-held camera footage to enhance the immediacy of the horror. The problem is, this idea has literally been done to death now, so the twist ending isn't shocking but a rip-off and the hand held footage is just an over-laboured bore. The cast of nobodies are uniformly bad and don't get me started on the technical aspects; it's amateur night all around. F. Murray Abraham follows the tradition of once-great actors dragging their reputations through the mud and the monster is seen exactly once, in a single split second CGI shot at the end, where we find out it isn't a monkey at all but an ape. The scene in which the monkeys are urinating over the tents is one of the worst imaginable and even the gore effects amount to a single, albeit effective, makeup job. The rest is just noise and inanity, signifying nothing.