Why is this movie called Blue Monkey when there is no blue monkey?
Who the hell knows.
Its original title was Insect!, which makes considerably more sense considering the movie involves a rapidly growing bug, green goo, cocoons and an increasingly unfortunate number of people becoming insect food. But Blue Monkey it is, and honestly, a title that makes absolutely no sense somehow fits a movie this gloriously ridiculous.
And I mean that as a compliment.
I don’t ask every movie I watch to be great. Sometimes I don’t even need it to be particularly good. Just let me have some fun. Give me a monster, some questionable decisions, a few people I actually want to survive and preferably at least one character stupid enough to walk directly toward the thing everyone else is running away from.
Blue Monkey understands the assignment.
Welcome to the Hospital of Doom
Everything starts when an old man winds up in the hospital after being bitten by something and eventually vomits up what looks like a giant slug.
This should probably be everyone’s first indication that they’re having a bad day.
Detective Jim Bishop happens to be at the hospital because his partner has been shot, which puts him in exactly the right place for the increasingly bizarre shit that’s about to happen. He eventually gets friendly with Dr. Rachel Carson, one of the few people in this hospital who seems to understand that perhaps the strange creature pulled out of a man’s body deserves slightly more concern than everyone is giving it.
Because instead of destroying the damn thing, the doctors take it back to the lab.
Naturally.
They stand around watching it squirm in a dish. They try to dissect it. It bleeds bright green goo that looks like the liquid inside one of those juice-filled candies. They stare at the old man’s X-rays and theorize that they’re dealing with some kind of parasite.
Someone even suggests contacting a higher agency.
Hospital administrator Roger isn’t particularly interested in that idea because, according to Roger, the safety and care of the patients are his top priority.
Okay, Roger.
Nothing says patient safety quite like keeping the mysterious murderous organism in-house under what appears to be a glass cake cover.
And that’s where Blue Monkey becomes the kind of creature feature I love. Everyone is just sensible enough to recognize that something is horribly wrong while simultaneously making decisions guaranteed to make everything much, much worse.
Stupid People Doing Stupid Things
You can’t have a proper monster movie without people helping the monster along, and Blue Monkey has plenty of volunteers.
There’s the lab assistant who’s supposed to be watching the killer slug but wanders off with her boyfriend instead. There are several sick kids roaming the hospital because apparently nobody can keep these little shits in their rooms. Eventually, they find their way into the lab and become fascinated by the glowing green blood coming from the creature.
Then one of the kids starts screwing around with chemicals the hospital has been experimenting with.
You can probably see where this is going.
The kids decide the bug might be hungry and feed it a chemical that’s basically a growth hormone.
Good job, kids.
At this point I stopped blaming the bug for anything.
The humans extracted it, kept it alive, poked at it, failed to secure it properly and then a bunch of unsupervised children fed it the exact thing required to turn Slug Bug into Super Bug. What the hell did everyone expect was going to happen?
Meanwhile, whatever infection arrived with the creature is spreading through the hospital. More people get sick. The building is headed toward quarantine. Roger isn’t happy because Roger apparently thought keeping everything quiet would somehow prevent the giant parasite situation from becoming inconvenient.
It does not.
Once nobody can leave, people panic and start turning into assholes, because that’s another requirement of the genre. The staff who can get out don’t particularly want to hang around and become infected, while Jim and Rachel are increasingly stuck dealing with a disaster nobody bothered stopping when the monster still fit underneath the cake cover.
Can We Talk About the Drunk Old Ladies?
Forget the monster for a minute. I loved these women.
Two older patients spend a good portion of Blue Monkey ignoring whatever the doctors tell them to do. They’re mischievous, they drink when they’re not supposed to and the woman with the glasses in particular couldn’t give less of a shit about hospital rules.
When Fred dies, his poor wife is devastated.
Her friend’s solution? Booze.
I respect it.
They’re surrounded by infection, panic, questionable medical professionals and eventually a gigantic bug turning the basement into its personal pantry, and these two are operating on an entirely different frequency.
There are also enough personalities scattered around the hospital to keep the movie from becoming nothing but Monster Eats Random Person #4. Dr. Judith Glass increasingly comes across as the shadier of the doctors, while Rachel realizes something is seriously wrong and eventually becomes Jim’s partner in trying to figure out what the hell they’re dealing with.
And then there’s Bug Guy.
By the time Jim and Rachel head into the basement, the creature isn’t a slug anymore. It’s enormous. It looks like somebody threw a scorpion, an earwig and a giant fly into a blender and gave the result antennae. It’s bigger than a man, producing offspring and leaving green slime and cocoons everywhere.
Human beings are food now.
Jim has a gun, because apparently Detective Jim thinks bullets are the answer to Giant Insect Situation.
But Bug Guy?
He wants to get closer.
Why?
He wants a picture.
“Insects are superior to man,” he says, and suddenly you understand that this guy might actually be rooting for the bug.
Of course he needs a closer look at this magnificent super-insect. Never mind that the magnificent super-insect is enormous, hungry and standing in a basement filled with its offspring and human cocoons.
This is what I mean when I say Blue Monkey is fun. You need that guy. You need someone whose sense of self-preservation disappears the moment he sees the monster because LOOK AT IT!
Stupid people doing stupid things. What kind of horror movie would this be without them?
Maybe the Bug Isn’t the Biggest Idiot Here
Eventually the creature has had enough of everybody invading its nest and starts chasing them, which seems pretty reasonable under the circumstances.
Jim and Rachel are still intent on saving people and stopping the thing. The kids are trapped. The hospital is quarantined. Roger has created one hell of a mess for himself. Dr. Glass is still shady. We’ve got the old ladies, Bug Guy and a monster that’s popping out babies like a rat.
People live. People die. Some die rather gruesomely.
I’m not telling you which ones.
That’s part of the fun, especially when you’ve got a movie populated with characters you alternately want to protect, smack upside the head or hand another drink.
And somehow, after everything the creature does, Blue Monkey even leaves you with a strange question at the end:
Do you feel a little sorry for the bug?
Because I kind of did.
It didn’t check itself into the Hospital of Doom. It didn’t ask to be dissected. It certainly didn’t ask a bunch of nosy kids to feed it experimental growth hormone. Humans created most of this disaster themselves and then spent the rest of the movie desperately trying to contain it.
Maybe Bug Guy had a point.
Okay, probably not.
But it’s something to think about.
🔥 The Verdict: WATCHABLE
Is Blue Monkey cheesy? Absolutely.
Does its title make any f*cking sense? Not that I can determine.
Do I care? Not even a little.
Give me a giant insect, green glowing goo, drunk old ladies, unsupervised children making catastrophic scientific decisions, a hospital administrator who should have called for help about an hour ago and a bug scientist who wants to get closer to the enormous murderous creature because he needs a better picture.
That’s all I ask.
Blue Monkey isn’t trying to reinvent the creature feature. It just gives me the exact kind of ridiculous monster-movie fun I showed up for.
And sometimes that’s more than enough.
