shakma

*½

Brought to my attention by some internet friends who review movies, I watched the 1990 “baboon goes berserk” horror flick, Shakma. I thought it would be the ideal Sunday night horror movie, and it turned out to be amusing dreck, but nothing more. The film has a script that simply doesn’t even try. It is just constructed to get some young adults trapped in a building (a research hospital) so they fall prey to a killer. There’s still the wandering of halls, the unknowing walk towards their own peril. Roddy McDowell’s career had one last shot in the arm with Fright Night (1985), but by the time he starred in Shakma, it had once again sort of stagnated. With films that followed carrying such dubious titles as Mirror, Mirror II: Raven Dance and Angel 4: Undercover, Shakma was an example (along with the previous year’s awful, Cutting Class) of McDowell’s career utilizing what Fright Night had provided him. He is mostly in one room, operating walkie-talkies as his med students participate in a medieval-fantasy themed game, looking for clues in certain rooms on certain floors throughout his building. At the beginning McDowell’s professor is show surgically opening Shakma, the baboon’s skull in order to inject a serum to hopefully reduce aggressiveness. Instead, the damned thing is a flesh-eating, unhinged beast that aims for your face and throat, ready to devour and drink your blood. Christopher Atkins was at the tail end of his “young dreamboat heart throb” part of his career, still innocent-faced and sweet, with Amanda Wyss (of A Nightmare on Elm Street) his girlfriend. Wyss, I thought, was absolutely beautiful. Probably no more beautiful than she was in this movie. Ari Meyers simply has nothing to do but look cute. Her career—notice a trend here—wouldn’t exactly flourish after this, either (Kate & Allie actually came before this film so that was perhaps her most noticeable part in her rather undistinguished career). Those that remain are pretty much fresh-faced young adult actors serving the film as baboon fodder. The film, to me, isn’t all that worthwhile. It has a few moments that perhaps deserve giggles instead of gulps in the throat. The baboon was certainly up to the task, banging around the place, up against doors, hopping all about. It was a fierce little monster. McDowell has his brief fleeting “I’m quite a star compared to these other chumps” part in the film as the scientist fooling around with a brain, injecting it with a serum he thinks should be of help to the baboon, and dejected by how his work wasn’t a success. But the film’s funniest expressions belong to Adkins, trying to summon rage, hysteria, horror, grief, and bad ass, instead producing over-the-top reactions that prove his range was a bit limited. Wyss was okay to me; I didn’t think she was all that bad because she doesn’t try as hard as Adkins to produce the performance needed for the part. She’s so pretty, that it really didn’t matter to me. She didn’t knock your socks off with her performance, and her character wasn’t exactly all that well developed, but that could be said for all involved. There’s no attempt to even calculate a decent story to revolve around the baboon…it uses the slasher formula with little effort at injecting life into it. And by 1990 the slasher genre itself was waning, wearing out its welcome.

After the reviews I’ve read pretty much saying similar things as I felt, I’d say see this for the baboon (as other reviews do), but don’t expect to be dazzled. Atkins doing battle with Shakma at the end is particularly a doozy. The fact that the girls are no better off that the guys is actually a refreshing downer aspect; the scene in the bathroom stall where Wyss almost gets away but doesn’t is certainly a bummer. And you get to see bloody bodies, torn to shreds by Shakma. Atkins insisting on bringing the bodies together really only added the bonehead to boneheaded.