The Mad Monkey Review

Recently abandoned by his wife and having become something of a bachelor, Dan Gillis (Goldblum) is commissioned to write a script with an up and coming british director, who's alluring sister Jenny is difficult for both of them to resist. Dan does some secret detective work about the director, and becomes locked into a wed of deception and greed.

by Jack Yeovil |
Published on
Release Date:

01 Jan 1990

Running Time:

108 minutes

Certificate:

18

Original Title:

Mad Monkey, The

The plot - such as it is - of this fairly useless production has screenwriter Goldblum, loitering glumly in Paris, being lured by his crippled agent (Richardson) and a stereotypical crass producer into working on an apparently doomed project, a personal adaption of his own artsy novel to be directed by British movie brat Fletcher.

There is, however, more than a touch of presumably unintentional irony at work here in that almost all the complaints the characters in the film make about the ridiculous picture Goldblum is supposed to be working on apply equally to The Mad Monkey itself, a Spanish-British-French melange with a mildly bankable American star name.

The film of Goldblum's book never really gets made, because the director is apparently interested only in filming black-and-white close-ups of his sister's face as someone out of shot performs oral sex on her. This blinding revelation spins the film off into Betty Blue territory, and the heroine is similarly afflicted with a wide self-destructive streak that naturally forces our Jeff to wind up the film fishing for corpses in an acid bath.

One of those international disasters, this is partially redeemed only by the outstanding performance of Miranda Richardson, who does a lot of very clever and effective things with a ridiculously written role. And no monkeys.
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