BLOGTOBER 10/18/2023: LINK (1986)
It was very upsetting to me to learn that Richard Franklin's LINK was the first of the killer lab chimp movies from the late '80s. In my mind, it's like, MONKEY SHINES was both novel and really pretty good; SHAKMA was not that good, but it's inoffensive and has a fun premise; and then um...LINK also exists. Even though I watch nonsense like this voraciously, something in me said, "Well, I know about SHAKMA, and that's probably the same as knowing about LINK," and then I just never followed up. Turns out that LINK predated them all, and it is also maddeningly stupid and insane.
I was somewhat relieved to learn that the director started thinking about this 1986 movie in the late '70s as "a sort of JAWS with chimps". It's much easier for me to think of LINK as another JAWS ripoff than it is for me to conceive of it as an original work that inspired the vastly superior MONKEY SHINES (1988) and the dismissable SHAKMA (1990), whose main crime is just being really half-baked. LINK is about how like...so Elizabeth Shue plays a zoology student who asks famous professor Terrance Stamp if she can be his assistant, and he's like "Uh can you cook and clean?" and she pretty much says "Well I'm a woman so duh, yes" and then without any further discussion she moves into his English cottage waaaaaaaaaay the fuck out in the middle of nowhere and just starts cleaning up after him and his dirty, horny, violent chimps. And you're like, doesn't she have class? How can she be literally shoveling shit at this guy's extremely remote house with no car and a phone that barely works? Why didn't she ask this guy what she'd be doing there? Why didn't he TELL her what she'd be doing there? What IS he doing there actually? He's vaguely doing IQ tests on the animals, but he's also just quickly selling them off, like they're all used up already, so...what was the point of this again?
Link himself is an ex-circus monkey whose main thing is lighting fires and smoking cigars, which Elizabeth Shue haughtily objects to--but how can we have an anti-animal abuse statement in a movie where an animal is actively smoking a cigar? At least it feels like pretty much everybody is being abused in this movie, since Mme Shue then has one of the strangest and most unnecessary nude scenes I've ever seen in my life, when Link walks in on her getting ready to take a bath and she just stands about six inches from him letting him ogle and breasts and crotch. And I mean there's no directing this ape, it's pretty much a given that if you stand a naked woman in front of him he's going to stare, and he does, and I really had to wonder if there was any discussion about this scene, if there was any protest, if there wasn't a better way to squeeze nudity into a movie where there's both a boyriend and a dashing older mentor, if it's really absolutely essential for Elizabeth Shue to drop trow and awkwardly stand very close to an ape who she is supposedly unhappy to see, for what feels like a long time.
This is one of those movies in which something ridiculous and confusing happens so frequently that it's really hard to generalize about the experience of watching it. To give you a useful idea of what it's like, I'd have to list almost everything that happens in it, but unfortunately (fortunately?) this has been the speed run season of Blogtober, and that's not in the mail. So I guess I'm going to call it a night on LINK, because I have now seen it once for the first time, once to refresh my memory on what I wanted to say about it, once to torture my unfortunate husband because I didn't want to be alone about it, and...that's more times than I've seen some movies I've really like! So I'll just encourage you to drive your own self crazy with it, and finish up by saying that I found myself wondering which was more uncomfortable for Elizabeth Shue: the apesploitation scene from LINK, or the assault toward the end of LEAVING LAS VEGAS, which I'd imagine the cast and crew at least took seriously? We may never know, but at least now I have an excuse to surface one of my favorite moments from the excellent series High Maintenance. I'm eternally grateful to whoever uploaded this to YouTube, because now I don't have to be the only person in the world walking around singing this song to myself on a regular basis:
And that's all I have to say about that. I'll just add that while I was scrounging for images for this post, I found this Alamy stock photo from the scene where Elizabeth Shue is rescued by Link from one of the many vicious dogs that surround Terrance Stamp's place. This is such a weird, non-representative still from that movie, but it's kind of cool just because it's such an odd choice. The End!
