Monkey Shines

“Once there was a man whose prison was a chair. The man had a monkey, they made the strangest pair. The monkey ruled the man, it climbed inside his head. And now as fate would have it, one of them is dead.”

Allan Mann (Jason Beghe), a young athlete left a quadriplegic, wants his independence back more than anything. His friend Geoffrey Fisher (John Pankow) brings him Ella, a trained capuchin monkey who can fetch, feed and open doors for him. George A. Romero lets the bond grow closer than anyone intended, and the film treats dependence on another creature as a trap that can close from the inside.