Blue Monkey (1987)

[kooshmeister]

I remember seeing this at Blockbuster all the time, but never rented it. The title always confused me. "Blue Monkey?" Really? Oh well.



The story begins in a greenhouse owned by an eccentric elderly woman named Marwella Harbison. She's the type who talks to her plants and plays music for them. Handyman Fred Adams stops by to do some work on the light fixtures and comments on how one of her plants is drooping. It's a weird-looking thing with yellow flowers. According to Marwella, it came from a newly-formed volcanic island off the coast of Micronesia. Its current state happened overnight and Marwella is at a loss to explain what could've caused it.

Fred inexplicably hurts himself on the plant somehow, as though he pricked his finger on a thorn. However, Marwella claims the plant has no thorns and neither she nor Fred can make heads or tails of what could've pricked him. Nevertheless, he seems okay, and after bidding Marwella goodbye, he walks out to his truck, whereupon he immediately starts feeling strange and collapses. Marwella calls 911.

One ambulance ride later, and Fred has been taken to the Hill Valley Clinic with a very high fever. On call are Doctors Rachel Carson and Judith Glass, who are astonished to see that the man has already developed gangrene where he pricked his finger. Attention is taken away from Fred when police detective Jim Bishop brings his partner in with a nasty gunshot wound. The two had been involved in a stakeout that went sour, and Jim's partner got shot at point blank range. However, Rachel is confident that with surgery, he ought to be okay.

In the adjacent bed, Fred begins convulsing and winds up vomiting an insect pupa out of his mouth. After this, he seems to stabilize. The pupa is hurriedly contained in a belljar in the hospital's in-house laboratory. Rachel is concerned that whatever Fred had might be contagious, and orders mandatory checkups of everyone, including Jim. When Jim comes back clean of any mysterious parasitic insects, Rachel decides to show him around the hospital, including their high-tech research facility where they're testing out new and powerful surgical lasers.

Attempts to x-ray the pupa prove futile, so it is decided to slice it open. In doing so the doctors unleash a particularly feisty insect-like critter, but with Jim's help, they're able to get the thing contained. Meanwhile, Fred isn't doing so hot; in addition to having been parasitized by the insect, he's come down with a mysterious disease the creature was carrying, and when Judith Glass attempts to revive him with shock paddles after he suddenly goes into cardiac arrest, his chest violently explodes. Ick. She and Rachel quickly realize that the insect has a particularly nasty disease, and it's highly contagious and could spread throughout the entire hospital. Hospital director Roger Levering is resistant to quarantining the facility for fear of causing a panic, but Rachel is at least able to get him to bring in entomologist Elliot Jacobs in the hopes of identifying the mysterious insect.

But before Elliot can arrive, a bunch of kids from the hospital's pediatric ward, completely unsupervised, roam the halls. The lab technician tasked with guarding the insect specimen is lured away from her post by her boyfriend, an orderly from the laser lab, for a little hanky-panky, leaving the insect completely unguarded and allowing the kids to waltz right on into the lab without anyone noticing. Seeing the bug, they decide to feed it some bluish powdery substance one of them finds in a bottle on a shelf, but an argument over who gets to pour it into the jar with the bug results in them pouring too much. Hearing the technician and orderly returning, the kids beat feet, leaving the amorous duo to the tender mercies of the insect, which has broken free of its glass prison and grown gigantic, promptly killing them both.

Elliot Jacobs arrives and he, Rachel and Jim survey the carnage, and Elliot is horrified when he discovers that the bluish powder the kids fed the thing was a growth hormone. Now the insect is giant and it could be anywhere. "Anywhere" turns out to be the utility tunnels underneath the hospital, where the creature kills a hapless janitor and then begins building an Alien-style nest for its brood. Now it's up to Rachel, Jim and Elliot to figure out how to stop the bug, while Judith struggles to deal with the consequences of the disease the creature has spread throughout the building, before the military, summoned by New York's Lincoln Institute (a facility for disease prevention), takes drastic measures...

Blue Monkey is a very weird movie, but, its nonsensical title aside, I quite like it.