SHAKMA (aka NEMESIS, PANIC IN THE TOWER, 1990)

Streaming on Tubi!
Directed by Hugh Parks, Tom Logan
Written by Roger Engle
Starring Christopher Atkins, Amanda Wyss, Ari Meyers, Roddy McDowall, Robb Edward Morris, Tre Laughlin, Greg Flowers, Ann Kymberlie, Donna Jarrett & Typhoon as Shakma!

One absolutely insane monkey makes SHAKMA a goofy but effective little monster on the loose movie!

Experimenting on a chip in the brain that manages aggression, researcher Professor Sorenson (Roddy McDowall) and his students play a role-playing D&D style game in their free time, locking down the building they experiment on apes in, wandering around in the dark with walkie talkies and collecting imaginary treasure. Turns out the experiments sometimes have the opposite effect on the apes, and a particularly fiery babboon named Shakma has to be put down after he attacks one of the students. But death didn’t take for Shakma, and while the students are nerding it up in the dark hallways of the locked down building, Shakma is stalking them and ready to go primal on them until they croak.

The best thing about this film is the fact that the monkey is absolutely insane. Using a real baboon named Typhoon whenever they could, watching the bulbous-assed and fuzzy-haired monkey charge toward the kids is nightmare fuel. There are multiple instances when Shakma goes totally apeshit, banging on a door full of teeth, monkey fists, and claws that shows a level of aggression I have never seen in an animal. Had it been CG or a puppet, I don’t think it would have had the same effect. Turns out, a little research tells me that a female baboon was placed on the other side of the door for those spaz-out scenes, so it’s no wonder the horny monster’s acting abilities were so convincing. Still, simply seeing a real ape barrel down a hallway after these clueless kids is worth the price of admission alone.

The problem is that this film is repetitious as all get out. Shakma bangs against doors over and over and over again. He chases folks down halls as if the movie I watched was skipping. Much of the plot with the dimwitted kids involved doing and redoing things in order to trick Shakma and it really bogs down the story to a staggeringly slow pace. The attacks are brutal, though, and the effects are quite effective, but after seeing Shakma do his thing thrice or four times, it gets rather tedious.

The ending of SHAKMA does have some teeth, though. No one really gets out unscathed here, and it’s interesting to see this “monster in the house” film end so bleakly, especially since some of the cast, BLUE LAGOON’s Christopher Atkins, A NIGHTMARE ON ELM STREET’s Amanda Wyss, and a schoolboy crush of mine, KATE & ALLY’s Ari Meyers, were pretty well known at the time. SHAKMA feels a bit antiquated with the remedial computer graphics as well as the quaint use of AD&D, still the monkey stuff rocks. All in all, SHAKMA delivers a lot of scares (though at times it feels as if they are on repeat), and that monkey is one insane animal I would never want to meet in a dark or lit alley.