Monkeybone - almost a bizarre twisted masterpiece

We are moving to our winter venue at Newstead Tennis & Squash Centre so please buy a $5 ticket now or bring cash on the night. The venue is licensed so please buy drinks there and support our hosts.

Monkeybone is a bizarre twisted masterpiece – for perhaps 60% of its run time. The only venture into live action film by the maestro of stop motion, Henry Selick (The Nightmare Before Christmas, Coraline), Monkeybone tells the story of successful cartoonist Stu (Brendan Fraser) who falls into a surreal dreamscape known as Downtown after a car accident. Bizarre shenanigans ensue when his creation, the oversexed Monkeybone, escapes Downtown and possesses his body in the real world.

The world of Downtown is a fantastically strange creation, equal parts Dali and Picasso. Full of brilliant creature effects that bring to mind Del Toro’s monster work, it is a representation of the collective unconsciousness. You can only imagine what the movie would have been if Selick’s vision had been allowed to come to the screen as the creator intended.

But, in a tale as old as time, 20th Century Fox hired a brilliant genre-defining creative, gave him his dream project and, then was scared by the results, butchered the edit and dumped Monkeybone into cinemas with what little advertising it got marketing it as a boner comedy.

Set up for failure, Monkeybone has taken its time to be appreciated for what it is – a flawed but brilliantly weird film with a ridiculously stacked cast that overcomes the grubby studio hacks to be a fascinatingly enjoyable almost-ran. Or have I just drunk the film nerd kool aid again? We’ll find out when we decide if this movie is Rad, Bad or Mad!

We are moving to our winter venue at Newstead Tennis & Squash Centre so please buy a $5 ticket now or bring cash on the night. The venue is licensed so please buy drinks there and support our hosts.