Popular reviews

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  Review by Sally Jane Black 2

  Me, to my roommate: "This is what all the DnD games I played in college were like. I can't tell you how many friends I lost to a crazed baboon. Of course, we eventually realized we should just let the crazed baboon play. That's how I met my friend Nathan."

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  Review by Tony the Terror 666 ★★★★ 21

  Shakma!! Best name ever? Maybe!

  Probably the least known of the late 80’s “killer primate” movies but also maybe the best! This is ridiculous trash and it is lovely. A group of students lock themselves in a building to play a Dungeons & Dragons style game with professor Roddy McDowall only to discover a crazed baboon is locked in with them. Now, that alone is enough to sell me, but then there’s the fact that the main character is played by Christopher Atkins and just like most 80’s gaybys, I had the most insane crush on him. Like, him in The Blue Lagoon was what made me realize I was a big ol’ loud and proud dick hungry ‘mo. So obviously I…

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  Review by Dave Taylor ★½ 4

  Monkey Vs. Door: The Movie

  When this pissed off monkey is fucking shit up, it’s pretty badass.

  But the set up of nerds role-playing D&D is next level lame…and who the hell decided this needed to be 100 minutes long?!?? Nothing here speaks to a runtime over 85 minutes.

  Plus, I’m pretty sure even in the early 90’s the lack of emergency fire alarms would have been against building code. 🤓

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  Review by belial_carboni ★★★ 4

  SHAKMAAAAA!!!!!!!!!!

  Poor little Shakma. I don't know about you guys but I was totally routing for that little feller. I mean how else would you act if broke down Mark Hamill, his girlfriend broke down DJ Tanner and all their nerdy ass scientist friends did experiments on you? Pretty freakin pissed is how you would act! And even murder spree-ey! Shakma nailed that murder spree. Little cute hands tearin up people left right and centre!

  Shakma is a clunky 90s cheesefest that's full of hilarious hijinks. Pure scenes of goofy scientists walking through hallways with their dorky gigantic walkie talkies. Some of these scenes are drawn out and will definitely test your patience. Luckily they are always interrupted by the…

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  Review by nathaxnne [hiatus: blast injury] ★★★ 8

  Shakma is the horror-movie equivalent of the kinds of PC or Atari games in the late-70's and early-80's that would have had greater resolution and functionality if they had just been text rather than a series of doors and rooms and passageways and keys and weapons as seen from above and there were varying pixels to differentiate the player from monsters or NPC's and most of the time was spent wandering around trying to get out of somewhere. If you attempted to translate that experience into a dork lock-in that was so proto costumes hadn't even been invented yet and had as your protagonist an enhanced-rage baboon who is justifiably angry for a lifetime spent in cages being drugged and…

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  Review by theironcupcake ★★★½ 14

  "Shakma! Shakma, stay! Shak - Shak - come on, Shakma! Come on! Shakma! SHAKMA! HEY! Sit! Stay, Shakma! Stay! Leave it! Shakma. Hey, hey, hey! Leave it, Shakma! Shakma, leave it! Shakma! Shakma!"

  Mini-Collab w/ Rob
  (Previous review here.)

  I'm always ready to go bananas for Typhoon (aka SHAKMA) the angry baboon! Look at that little scamp, scampering about! There is no door or human being that he will not launch himself against in his medically-induced fury! Feel that primal-primate rage!

  Are you familiar with the part of The Towering Inferno when Robert Wagner makes the brilliant decision to turn off the phone lines in his office prior to some canoodling, meaning that he and girlfriend Susan Flannery can't call…

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  Review by Helen ★★★★ 9

  This review may contain spoilers. I can handle the truth.

  A zombie baboon attacks the most inept group of larping scientists? 

  ..... Or did it? 

  
  HEAR ME OUT!

  
  I am not convinced that the crazed baboon ever existed! I think Sam went fucking psycho killer after he euthanized it because of the guilt he felt since it was his baboon - and only imagined not killing it. 

  First of all, he’s not around for any of the attacks - except when it “attacks” him in the end... but he finds all the bodies. The wound we see on him is actually a knife wound from when he attacked and killed Kim because we know she had a knife on her. 

  He incinerates the baboon in the end thus erasing ANY…

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  Review by matt lynch ★★★ 4

  The flat-out ridiculous logline -- a hyper-aggressive laboratory baboon terrorizes a group of LARPing grad students who've intentionally locked themselves into a research building -- occasionally gives way to some genuine scary stuff, mostly due to the "performance" of a clearly dangerous animal (frequently enhanced by some excellent puppetry). You'd run out of fingers counting the scenes of this red-assed menace shrieking and flipping out, pounding on flimsy doors and throwing anything that happens to be nearby clear across the room. Sometimes it even appears to verge on cruelty, as if some reluctant PA in a metal cage was just off camera poking the poor thing with a stick or something.

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  Review by joecamel ★½

  It's the animalistic sensation that brings your blood to a boil! That primal feeling that sends a chill up and down your spine as your heart pounds faster and faster!! It's...MONKEY MADNESS FEVER!!

  Oh boy, what a stinker! I don't know why but for some reason I had high hopes for this one and it just did not deliver.

  On paper it sounds pretty cool. A group of nerds playing a weird RPG are picked off one at a time by a vengeful baboon. So simple but definitely a recipe for success. Unfortunately they executed this premise in the most boring and laziest way possible. The kills all play out in pretty much the same repetitive fashion and there's only…

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  Review by Jordan Beaumont Anderson ★½ 6

  Imagine the worst possible interpretation of: medical students are slashed to death by a crazed baboon during an all-night polytechnic-sanctioned larping session.

  Mostly scenes of various Saved by the Bell extras cowering in fear while an obviously distraught monkey actor beats his head against a series of poorly built doors.

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  Review by Brian ★½ 1

  Film #2 from Hoop-tober 3-D.

  The Five Stages of Shakma

  I. Denial
  “Oh god...Shakma is about live action role-playing med students who find themselves hunted by a psychotic baboon. How did I not know this? How was I not informed? I thought this would be something respectable, like Monkey Shines! Between the chintzy Casio keyboard score and the gauzy, overlit photography, this looks like it was produced for after-school Canadian television! What manner of purgatory is this?! It’s like a misguided Saved by the Bell spinoff, resplendent with high-waisted jeans, fade to black act breaks, and a cast seemingly lifted from the pages of a JC Penny’s catalogue! Where’s the real Shakma? Why have you abandoned me, God?!”

  II. Anger…

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  Review by theironcupcake 2

  Shakma is notable for two things: It’s one of the only killer baboon horror movies, and it’s one of the only horror movies in which LARPing is a prominent story component. The movie takes place entirely in one wing of a med school on one day, in which a nerdy professor and a small group of his nerdy students are testing an experimental rage-inhibiting, but sometimes rage-inducing, drug (it’s … not a great drug) on their titular pet baboon during the day and then getting their LARP on in the evening. At first, a baboon seems too goddamn silly to be the focus of a decent horror movie. They’ve got massive mutton chops, comically prominent ass cheeks, and they’re the…