Blue Monkey (William Fruet, 1987)

Never get rid of your VCR. That's one of the top rules of horror movie fandom. For the first time since my review of Blood Beach a few years ago, I went back to the world of videotape for Blue Monkey, a film that has not been released on DVD or Blu-Ray and is not currently streaming. Someone did post it to YouTube, but the sound was out of sync with the image. I have a warm, fuzzy feeling for VHS since I grew up in the '80s, and an '80s movie about a giant bug terrorizing a Canadian hospital is a highly appropriate way to spark up the VCR again.
For a giant bug rampage movie, Blue Monkey has a surprisingly solid cast made up mostly of Canadian comedic actors comfortable with improv and a couple of strong American character actors who had fallen off the Hollywood A-list. The Americans are Susan Anspach and Steve Railsback.

Anspach, who died last year at the age of 75, had a strong run in the early '70s acting in Hal Ashby's The Landlord, Bob Rafelson's Five Easy Pieces, Herbert Ross and Woody Allen's Play It Again, Sam, and Paul Mazursky's Blume in Love (a movie I'm not too fond of, but the cast is wonderful). Her career looks on paper like a switch was flipped. Immediately after the Mazursky film, she did TV movies for the rest of the decade, followed by an erratic string of supporting roles and TV appearances for the remainder of her career. Anspach says she was blackballed from the A-list by Jack Nicholson after a particularly nasty breakup with him in the mid-'70s. I'm inclined to believe her, but whatever happened, she deserved a better career.
Railsback had a brief moment of leading-man fame in the late '70s and early '80s when he played Charles Manson in the Helter Skelter miniseries, Prewitt in the From Here to Eternity miniseries, and the title role in The Stunt Man, where he shared the lead with Peter O'Toole. He's continued to work steadily as an actor in several interesting but lower profile roles in indie, horror, and cult movies.
The Canadians in the cast include a pair of SCTV vets, Joe Flaherty and Robin Duke, Don Lake as an absent-minded entomologist, veteran character actor John Vernon, and future writer/director Sarah Polley, who was eight years old at the time of the film's release. Polley's character delivers the line that gives the film its title, if you're wondering why a movie about a giant bug is called Blue Monkey.
Blue Monkey begins in the greenhouse of excellently named elderly woman Marwella Harbison (Helen Hughes). An elderly gent named Fred (Sandy Webster) stops by to assist with some greenhouse business and ask Marwella out on a date. While examining a rough-looking new plant someone has sent Marwella, Fred cuts his finger on the stem and proceeds to collapse next to his pickup truck a few minutes later. He's rushed to the emergency room and looked after by two doctors, Dr. Rachel Carson (Gwynyth Walsh) (a nod to the Silent Spring author?) and Dr. Judith Glass (Anspach). Meanwhile, a police detective from the city has been shot while pursuing a suspect and is also rushed into the emergency room, accompanied by his partner, Detective Jim Bishop (Railsback). Dr. Carson handles poor Fred, while Dr. Glass moves back and forth between the patients. It's quite an afternoon at this small-town hospital, albeit a small-town hospital with an enormous, futuristic, high-tech genetic research lab that is also mysteriously but conveniently building lasers. (Hey, I just roll with this shit and never doubt it. Each movie lives in its own planet.) Also, this hospital/lab used to house an insane asylum, which explains the maze of corridors that will make our giant bug very happy.

Long story short, when Fred cut his finger, something got inside him, and that something is growing fast and wants out. What initially looks like a large, discolored turd crawling out of the mouth of Fred is our bug in a larval state. When a ragtag group of child patients (including Polley) get into some explore-the-hospital hijinks, they find the bug trapped under glass but unguarded because a couple of hospital employees snuck off to smoke a joint and get it on. The kids decide the bug is hungry, so they pour a random box of blue powder on it, because children are fucking idiots. That blue powder is some kind of genetic growth substance, and our bug, already growing fast, explodes in size. Meanwhile, everyone who had contact with Fred starts getting sick, except for the two patients who snuck in some Jack Daniel's and got wasted. It's like I've been telling everyone for years, booze is good for you.

Wait, I'm not making this long story short. There's a lot going on in this first half, and I didn't even mention the pregnant woman going into labor and the director of the hospital and the smartass kid with leukemia. Things get a lot more focused but also a little duller in the second half, which involves the hospital being quarantined, with orders from the government to blow the place up, killing everyone inside, if the mysterious illness continues to spread (and they don't even know know about the damn bug yet), and a lengthy chase scene between the killer bug, which is actually multiple killer bugs, which are hermaphroditic, which just laid a bunch of eggs, which are turning into little killer bugs, and the hospital staff and patients. Oh shiiiitttt! Good thing they have lasers, for some reason. The second half of the movie is basically Aliens on the supercheap, with lots of running, hiding, and fighting in dimly lit corridors. I was less entertained by this half, but I'm one of those weirdos who generally prefers the buildup to the explosive climax.

Blue Monkey was the last in a long string of horror movies for director William Fruet before he moved on to a lengthy career in television. Fruet got his start in the movie business in a few '60s acting roles, but things really kicked off when he wrote the screenplay for the great Canadian indie Goin' Down the Road, a character-based road movie about a couple of unemployed friends in rural Novia Scotia bored with small-town life who move to Toronto and continue to have a miserable time. The movie plays a bit like what would happen if Mike Leigh wrote Strange Brew and John Cassavetes directed it. I loved it. Fruet also wrote another Canadian indie, Rip-Off, a coming-of-age movie about four teenage boys. After making his debut as director with a heavy drama about rape and family coverups and unwanted pregnancies, Wedding in White, Fruet mostly worked in horror, directing The House by the Lake, Funeral Home, Baker County, U.S.A. (not a title that screams horror movie, but it's one of the many post-Deliverance evil redneck slashers), Spasms, Killer Party, and, of course, Blue Monkey. He also squeezed in an erotic thriller, a vigilante action movie, a documentary, and a TV movie melodrama in between the horror projects. After Blue Monkey, Fruet spent the next 15 years working in television, specializing in horror, fantasy, sci-fi, and action series, and he closed out his career making a few supernatural and sci-fi-themed children's movies, the last one in 2011. He's still with us, and I hope he's enjoying his retirement.