In monthly column The A-to-Z of Trash, bad movie lover Eliza Janssen takes us on an alphabetically-ordered trip through the best bits of the worst films ever. This month, she still has a place in her heart for the bizarre climax of Monkeybone, Henry Selick’s failed odyssey into an underworld à la Beetlejuice.
Monkeybone
Was the 2001 flop Monkeybone Henry Selick’s crack at Beetlejuice? I wrote about the frustrated collaboration between Selick and his The Nightmare Before Christmas producer Tim Burton in this feature, and the two goth guys are still irrevocably linked together in the minds of Hot Topic shoppers. Burton’s 1988 fantasy Beetlejuice is getting a big, buzzy sequel this year—with surprisingly positive reviews surrounding its premiere at the Venice Film Festival, no less—whilst Selick’s Monkeybone is rarely remembered with any nostalgic fondness, if it’s remembered at all.
In both films, protagonists are sent to luridly-coloured underworlds, after meeting their untimely demises. The title character in both films is a pesky, cartoonish ghoul who offers our heroes help while secretly trying to steal their life essence. But Burton’s spooky classic is brightened by its kid-friendly broadness, centring Winona Ryder’s emo teen Lydia Deetz as the audience’s analogue to a loud, crazy afterlife. Selick’s Monkeybone is racier, perhaps pitched at grown-up stoners who watch South Park: Rose McGowan as a bodacious catgirl probably birthed at least a few dozen furries, and the eponymous Monkeybone is a laborious metaphor for protagonist Brendan Fraser’s sexual inhibitions.
Fraser is in peak dorky beefcake mode here, playing introverted cartoonist Stu who descends into the infernal ‘Down Town’ after a car crash puts him in a coma. It’s populated by bizarre practical-effects nightmares, figments of the subconscious imagination—including his own cartoon creation Monkeybone, a sort of hedonistic Jiminy Cricket sprite brought to life by manic stopmotion and John Turturro’s voice acting. After some nonsense with Whoopi Goldberg as Death herself, it’s the venal Monkeybone who gets revived into Stu’s body, quickly ruining his life and engagement to Bridget Fonda.
Visually, Selick’s storytelling looks as original as you’d hope, but the narrative feels entirely borrowed from Who Framed Roger Rabbit?, Beetlejuice, and Cool World (which is a worse film than this one TBH). The only bright spots are the game performances. Fraser relishes his goateed transformation into Stu’s monkey-possessed self, grooving to The Commodores’ ‘Brick House’ at a fancy industry banquet.
The cast is dotted with familiar faces from the worlds of sketch and sitcom comedy, like Megan Mullally, Dave Foley, and future Breaking Bad co-stars Giancarlo Esposito and Bob Odenkirk. The sequence that redeems the film in my eyes is championed, however, by an actor who I’d otherwise never expect to award as MVP: Chris Kattan.
Fraser is stuck in Down Town for way too much runtime, and once he finally gets out he’s trapped in the reanimated corpse of a gymnast (Kattan) with a broken neck. Fumbling his way off the operating table, Fraser-inside-Kattan must race to the banquet where Monkeybone-inside-Fraser is planning on, uhhh, using farting stuffed toys to infect humanity with a nightmare-inducing drug.
Whatever. The point here is Kattan’s physical comedy, as he works against his busted limbs to save the day and even pull off the film’s big emotional climax—all while doing a pretty solid impression of Brendan Fraser’s affability and deep voice. There’s a moment in which Stu realises his only escape might lie in trusting the ruined body’s muscle memory: he closes his eyes, spreads his arms wide in a floor routine pose, and leaps onto horizontal bars, sticking the landing and surprising himself. I buy it: I like it.
Monkeybone is not a good film. Its grotesqueness is more off-putting than exciting, and it’s juvenile in a way that children wouldn’t appreciate. But in the movie’s style—or perhaps despite it—this bizarre body-swap of an action climax works, even as Fraser is weirdly sidelined in his own vehicle. Selick couldn’t manage to make something that drew audiences into his vision like Burton did with Beetlejuice, and nobody’s craving a 2024 sequel with more of Turturro’s annoying monkey. A movie about Fraser puppeteering a dead gymnast across LA, as Bob Odenkirk’s surgeon eagerly scoops up his fallen organs for donation? That sounds more like a figment of Selick’s imagination I’d like to see.
