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Released
1988 · FILM

Monkey Shines

A quadriplegic man's life takes a terrifying turn when the trained monkey assisting him becomes increasingly possessive, blurring the line between loyalty and deadly obsession.

“Once there was a man whose prison was a chair. The man had a monkey, they made the strangest pair. The monkey ruled the man, it climbed inside his head. And now as fate would have it, one of them is dead.”

Directed by
George A Romero
Written by
Michael Stewart, George A Romero
Runtime
113 min
DramaHorrorSci-Fi

Synopsis

A quadriplegic man is given a trained monkey to assist him with daily activities, but as time passes, the monkey begins to develop complex emotions, including affection and anger, toward its master and anyone who comes too close to him.

Credits

Actors
Editor
Production Designer
Director of Photography
Writers
Director

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How many hands made this film

The scale of the collaboration

Principal cast & crew: 18

These are the principals we have on file — the full crew ran to the hundreds. Every film this size was made by far more hands than any credits list ever names.

Why a floor?

This is a minimum, not a total. We only count the credits we’ve captured so far, and coverage is uneven — a blockbuster might show a few hundred names while another of the same size shows a couple dozen. The real crews all ran into the thousands. The number here only grows as full credits are enriched — so we frame it as a floor, never a headcount.

Craft leads on file

Edited by Pasquale BubaShot by James A ContnerScored by David ShireDesigned by Cletus Anderson

Box Office

1988 · Box office

📉 Underperformed — grossed 0.8× its budget

Why 2.5×?

Cinemas keep roughly half of every ticket sold, and a wide release’s marketing often costs about as much again as the film — so a movie needs to gross around 2.5× its production budget just to break even theatrically. It’s a rule of thumb, not the studio’s ledger (home video and streaming come later).

Worldwide gross

$5.3M

Budget$7.0M
Worldwide gross$5.3M
break-even (2.5×)

Opening weekend: $1.9M — 36% of its US run. Front-loaded — most of its money arrived opening weekend.

Opening week (7-day): $2.9M — 55% of its US & Canada run.

Peak 1,181 theaters

Also known as

  • Der Affe im Menschende
  • Monkey Shines: An Experiment in Fearen
  • Incidents de parcoursfr

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