Baboons in the, er, whatever: “Blood Monkey”

Well, you gotta give F. Murray Abraham this much: he never phones it in. Give him a role in a movie—could be Amadeus, could be Star Trek: Insurrection—and he just bares his teeth and dives right in. You have to respect (even just grudgingly) an actor who brings the same effort to playing a rubber-faced alien that he does a famous composer. So I guess I shouldn’t be surprised that he brings an equal–or possibly greater—amount of zeal to his role of mad scientist in Blood Monkey. “What? An obsessed scientist searching for a murderous, hyper-intelligent, prehistoric baboon? Yes! Yes!”

Oh, did I give the plot away? Sorry. Yeah, so Blood Monkey is about a cluster of amazingly stupid grad school students who journey into the unspecified jungle (Thailand) to link up with a famous researcher (Abraham) and…um…research stuff. Primates, I guess. One of the kids invoked Dian Fossey (and then helpfully explains to everyone who she was—like a bunch of oceanographer’s needing to be told who Jacques Cousteau is). It’s a refreshingly multi-culti bunch of dumbasses: There are the three Americans—the jock, the princess (who brings a make-up kit), and the dork—an Indian girl filming everything Blair Witch style; and two Brits who are reasonably intelligent and level-headed. I don’t remember any of their names. Sue me.

Our merry band of morons tromps through the jungle until they meet up with Professor Hamilton. From the outset, Hamilton seems a bit off. First, he comes off as imperious and gives lofty speeches about how what they will do will change science forever. Second, he’s accompanied at all times by Chenne (Prapimporn Karnchandra, who is making me look forward to my next assignment more and more), a ferocious native woman who wields an AKS-74U and treats the students with roughly the same respect the Japanese afforded their prisoners at Cabanatuan.

So, Hamilton marches our idiots to sheer cliff and challenges them to rappel down it into a valley untouched by human beings. Question: how does he know humans have never been down there? Dunno, and it’s probably best not to ask. Anyway, they rappel down with some kvetching, and the jock makes some single-entendres about girls “going down” (pay attention, this is character development here). Only problem is the dork panics about thirty feet from the ground and freezes up. Ever resourceful Chenne solves the problem in the easiest way possible: she cuts his line.

Okay, now there’s a crippled member to deal with. Oh swell. So they find a suspiciously new camp and decide to settle in. That night around the campfire, Hamilton shows them the skull of a heretofore unknown primate. Big sucker with a great big brain. “Guess what we’re here to find.” He says (I’m paraphrasing).

“Uh, what happened to the people who were here before us?” they ask.

“Good night.”

Ok, it’s a little more involved than that. There some discussion of how smart and cunning it must be with a cranial cavity that size, and some speculation that it could be the missing link. “This species is thousands of years old!” Hamilton enthuses. Uh, hang on doc. Thousands? What? Did you go to primatologist school in Alaska during the Palin administration? Wouldn’t it be millions?

Well, whatever. The important thing is that that night the uber-baboons urinate on them. Yes you read that right. And they really get in some firehose action, I mean, they were laying down a field of fire. Those baboons must have slammed some venti-sized lattes before they unloaded on those poor students.

So, being peed on by monkeys is a bad omen as much of the rest of the movie is spent watching these people being chased by the uber-baboons. Of course, most of the time we don’t see the baboons, but instead see the action through baboon-o-vision (it’s like regular vision, but orange hued). We see one at the end, and that’s too bad since it’s so badly rendered by CGI. The baboons make short work of just about everyone including Hamilton, whom the baboons kill with the same kind of booby-trap Schwarzenegger used to kill the Predator. So, the baboons obviously saw that movie. Everyone dies, baboons win. End of movie.

I found this movie vaguely interesting because…well, mostly because of the hot Thai chick with the stockless AK. In my defense, though, there really wasn’t much else competing with her.

But as long as we’re discussing baboons, let me assure you that they are mean SOBs. I had a coworker, a GunSilverbackMonkey who’d been posted in the Congo and used to hunt the things (along with damn near everything else that crawled/walked/breathed on that continent). The local village had a problem with hoards of baboons rushing their fields en masse, and attacking the village children working there. Baboons creeped him out because not only were they powerful enough to tear limbs out of their sockets, but they recovered their dead. Like Marines. So he’d set up on a hill overlooking the fields in his ghillie suit with his .308 rifle and when the baboons rushed, he’d shout to the kids to duck, then shoot over their heads at the rampaging baboons. True story. He had the pictures to prove it (after the point-defense, he’d skin the dead ones and give the meat to the locals), as well as the stuffed baboon paws he used to stage so it looked like they were sticking out of his desk drawers. It was really eerie in his office.

Okay, so that’s Blood Monkey. It sucked, but F. Murray Abraham still gave it 110%. You rock, F.