Dark Force Entertainment, with sales and distribution expertise provided by MVD Entertainment Group, looks to the New Year for the Blu-ray debut of director William Fruet’s 1987 creature-feature thriller, Blue Monkey. The street date for genre fans to snap this up is on Jan. 19.
Let’s get this out of the way right up front. Blue Monkey was a stupid title. It was Insect for a while, but when the rubber hit the road and it opened theatrically in Los Angeles in late September of 1987 the title had reverted to Blue Monkey. So, it was, and remains, Blue Monkey.
Filmed in Toronto, Canada during the winter of 1987 (for tax purposes), Blue Monkey stars Steve Railsback (Helter Skelter, The Stunt Man, Lifeforce, Plaguers, etc.) as a police detective who ends up being in the right place at the wrong time and because of that helps saves the day.
The “wrong time” begins like any good creature feature, in little old lady Marwella Harbison’s (Helen Hughes — Incubus, Visiting Hours, The Amityville Curse, etc.) greenhouse. Her friend, Fred Adams (Sandy Webster), stops by to say hello and accidently cuts his finger on her new exotic plant, which she had just obtained from some remote island in the Pacific. How odd, she thought, it’s not supposed to have thorns.
In no time (think: The Blob and the old man getting the stuff on his hand) Fred has an allergic reaction and collapses. He’s rushed to the hospital (which will end up being the “right place”) and before Dr. Rachel Carson (Gwynyth Walsh — her theatrical debut … perhaps best known to Star Trek fans as B'Etor) can even figure out what is ailing poor Fred, he coughs-up some sort of larvae.
Carson, snags it, sends it down to the lab to be checked out and then filmmaker William Fruet (The House by the Lake, Spasms, Bedroom Eyes) spends the next few minutes putting the rest of the elements in place (pay attention, they are all important).
First, Carson wisely puts Marwella in isolation, but her drinking buddy, Dede (Joy Coghill), sneaks into the hospital with a bottle of booze (important plot element). Detective Bishop (Railsback) arrives with his partner, who had been wounded in shootout, and in a meet-cute moment Carson takes him on a tour of the hospital (all designed to foreshadow things).
Meanwhile, back in the lab, Carson’s assistant, Doctor Judith Glass (Susan Anspach — Five Easy Pieces, Play it Again, Sam, The Big Fix, etc.) bombards the larvae with x-rays and dissects the strange creature … and then isolates it in something of a bell jar and tells her helper, Alice (Cynthia Belliveau) to keep an eye on it.
Let the terror begin! Soon, anyone who came in contact with Fred, falls ill, Fred dies gruesomely, Alice takes a short break and comes back to … oops, there goes Alice! The creature, a giant insect (Ivan E. Roth — Night of the Comet, Dead Heat), is growing and laying eggs at an incredible rate … the hospital is surrounded by troops, anyone trying to escape is killed. It’s a feeding frenzy and all appears to be hopeless, except, remember Marwella? She remains completely unfazed by her exposure to it (can you guess why).
Blue Monkey is part Blob, part Alien, part Outbreak, all mixed together as a terrific creature-feature. The clock is ticking (in two hours the hospital will be blown up) and Bishop and Carson have a limited time to stop the giant insect … can they do it?
On Blu-ray for the first time, a new hi-def transfer, uncut, from the original 35mm negative, from Dark Force Entertainment on Jan. 19!!
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