Reviewed by

Christopher Armstead

What exactly are we going to do with you Salieri? Damn ‘Amadeus’ was a great a movie and make no doubt that F. Murray Abraham was great in that great movie. ‘Bloodmonkey’ is a long way from Amadeus but if I’ve said it before I can’t say it enough; if you’ve got a problem with some job that some actor takes, then why don’t you give that actor a call and offer to pay his Brentwood mortgage, his Land Rover payments, his child support and pay off his bookie for a year. I know I have no interest in doing anything of the sort so Salieri, you keep making all the Bloodmonkey’s, and Shark Swarms you need to make to keep your ass off of fries brother. But just because I appreciate your need to eat doesn’t mean appreciate having to sit through this movie. Just letting you know.

Abraham plays crazy ass Professor Hamilton who is holed up in some jungle. Now they might have told me where this jungle was located, but I obviously wasn’t paying close enough attention. Some of his assistants in this jungle have trapped some kind of beast that has the professor all geeked, but alas they didn’t trap it good enough and by the time the prof makes it to the locale, his assistants now only exist as bloody shreds. Too bad, so sad.

On the other side of the earth a group of twenty something college students are about to get on a little plane and head to this remote jungle location for the rare and precious opportunity to study under the esteemed Professor Hamilton, and they consist of the usual array of kids we see in these films such as the bitchy hottie, the geek, the idiot jock, the introspective eventual hero dude, the good girl, and the character who I’m fairly certain is the one who eventually is gonna be yelling ‘WE’RE ALL GONNA DIE’. She’s a female in this one, but this is a character that is normally Race and gender non-specific.

There’s no Black guy though. We often make fun of the predetermined fate of the Black Guy in movies like this, but that’s all in good fun so don’t stop casting them because I’ve heard that Black actors like to eat to. So our kids land on a beach, get picked up by a local in a truck who drives into the jungle, stops in the middle of nowhere and tells the children, while scared out of his mind, to get out because this is as far he’s gonna go. Okay kids, it’s time to get back into the truck and head back to L.A. I’m thinking, but no, they follow the trail to nowhere in particular and almost get eaten for their trouble until Dr. Hamilton’s hot, but pathologically violent Asian assistant Chenne (Prapimporn Karnchanda) saves their asses.

So they meet the Professor, who’s obviously completely out of his mind, and they follow him even deeper into this unchartered jungle where he informs them that their mission is to study this rare, huge brained, brutally violent MIT brilliant group of primates he’s discovered. He kinda left out the part where he needed them as bait for these things. And so one by one our kids are getting eaten by monstrous gorillas on one end, and being setup by the duplicitous Professor and his hot assistant on the other end. Is there any way out of this mess for our kids?

The answer to that question is actually the best part of what is an awful, awful movie. And hey Blood Monkey’s, listen up! Eating me is one thing but pissing on me… yeah, we got problems. The main problem with ‘Bloodmonkey’ is that it simply moves too slowly to be a decent action horror film. It just prods and prods along with very little happening and quite honestly it takes too freaking long for the kids to start dying. Perhaps if they had used that time to develop our one-dimensional characters, but nope, it’s dragged along for no particular reason other than what I’m guessing were failed attempts at suspense. Another issue, since I’m guessing the bulk of the budget went to pay for Mr. Abraham’s trailer, is that we don’t get to see the killer monkey’s until the last scene, and then they weren’t even monkey’s but some kind of mutated CGI Silverbacks. Maybe ‘Silverback Attack’ would have been a better title for the flick as opposed to ‘Bloodmonkey’. Then again maybe not. I just googled that title to see if it was available and as it turns out it ain’t. Save yourself the trouble and save your job by not Googling on that and clicking on what comes up. Please.

Once we do finally get to see the super intelligent flesh eating gorilla’s, we find out why they kept them under wraps because it was just one chintzy CGI ape, and only one. All that being said ‘Bloodmonkey’ did have a pretty decent ending to it and though he may have been in a bad movie Mr. Abraham still acted well in it, as did most of the young inexperienced cast. I also kind of dug the scene where F. Murray turned into Jet Li for a minute and roundhouse kicked one the students, then chest punched him a good twenty feet into some crevice. Where it came from I don’t know, but the only other anthropologist I know of who could do something like has the first name of Indiana. Awesome. But alas, septuagenarian director Robert Young just didn’t give his film any real tension or suspense and he just paced the thing too dang slow. We didn’t expect a heckuva lot from a movie calling itself ‘Bloodmonkey’, but we didn’t even get what little we did expect out of it.