FilmBlather.com

"Excuse me, I have to go CHOKE MY MONKEY!"

There's a special place in my heart for movies that create new worlds for us to inhabit. And while Monkeybone, claiming to be "from the director of Tim Burton's The Nightmare Before Christmas could have benefited from actual Tim Burton involvement, there's enough imagination involved here for the movie to sneak by. The film has been bashed to death, in many places and for many reasons, but give me a resurrected Olympic gymnast hanging off of a hot-air baloon with his organs dropping out and picked up by manic doctors giving chase below and I'm yours for two hours.

Stu Miley (Brendan Fraser) is an artist whose creation, a cartoon about an obnoxious chimp named Monkeybone, has just made it big. He's been signed to do a tv show and a truckload of obnoxious tie-in marketing. But Stu wants none of it. At a celebration party following the premiere of the series' first episode, he just wants to take his girlfriend (Bridget Fonda) and go home. He gets in the car and begins to pull out of the parking lot when a huge inflatable Monkeybone toy in the back seat expands and causes S. Miley to get into an accident.

While Fonda's character remains unharmed, Stu goes into an coma in which, the doctors say, he will remain indefinitely. His mind, though, goes somewhere else again. He enters a world whose monstrous-looking inhabitants feed off of others' nightmares. Hypnos (Giancarlo Esposito), looking oddly like a bumblebee, is the ruler of this world and Monkeybone (voiced by John Turturro) is one of its primary residents.

To escape, Stu must obtain an Exit Pass, which he can only do by entering "Thanatopolis" and stealing it from Death's clutches. If this sounds bizarre, consider that Death is played by Whoopi Goldberg dressed as a pirate. Miraculously, Stu accomplishes this feat, only to have the pass stolen by Monkeybone, with whom he thought he was getting along just fine. Monkeybone uses the pass and enters Stu's body in the real world, taking him out of his coma and starting wreak havoc on those around him in his plot to generate more nightmares to feed those who remained in his world.

Monkeybone doesn't exactly leap out of the starting gate; the opening minutes are disorienting (unintentionally, methinks) and not particularly interesting. But stay with it; the proceedings liven up rather quickly. Whoopi Goldberg as Death immediately brought a smile to her face; to my delight, her character turned out to be central to this manic movie's plot. Brendan Fraser gives his trademark dorky fish-out-of-water performance that never seems to grow old. And then Saturday Night Live's Chris Kattan, in what is by far his best performance, shows up as the aforementioned Olympic gymnast, and by then the film had me.

The film, based on a popular graphic novel, is dark, uncondescending, and it has a brain. God only knows what Tim Burton could have done with this wonderful tale, but Sam Hamm, experienced at turning comic books into movies, fills it with enough oddities and non-sequiturs to keep my attention. Monkeybone has been called many bad names but, while it was probably nothing extraordinary, I think you should see it. I liked it.