As 1950s SF expert Bill Warren says, MONKEY BUSINESS (1952) is a funny film to see once, but despite the charm of Cary Grant, Charles Coburn, Marilyn Monroe and Ginger Rogers, it doesn’t hold up to repeated viewings.
In the last of his four films for director Howard Hawks, Grant does his usual amazing job as a chemist working on a rejuvenation formula. One of the chimps the lab uses as guinea pigs gets out, mixes up some chemicals and bingo, success! Grant finds he no longer needs glasses and can perform somersaults — though as Warren points out, nothing else changes physically. Mentally, though, he regresses to around 19, which makes hitting on boss Coburn’s secretary (Monroe — and Coburn telling her “Find someone to type this.” is still a funny line) feel perfectly normal. Never mind what his spouse (Rogers) will think.
That’s the premise of the film: people drink the formula (the chimp dumped it in the water cooler) and start acting like a teenager or, if they get too much, a little kid (or more accurately the movie cliche version of both). Unsurprisingly, Grant and Rogers are great in the leads (Coburn and Monroe are good, but they have less to do) but their antics wear thin — and why does Coburn conclude the research is a success? It’s hard to imagine anyone paying to stay physically the same and de-age themselves mentally (binge-drinking at the nearest bar would probably have similar results). It’s not as bad as Films of Howard Hawks says (the author loathes the movie) but it ain’t great. Though I did enjoy it first viewing.
A minor point is that this may have some contemporary-for-1952 stuff I’m not picking up on, like when Grant gets a new suit and hairstyle; they don’t look that different to me but I’m assuming they’d look Young and Hip to the original audience. “Every now and then you feel compelled to sit and stare at a piece of paper hoping it will speak to you.”
CAT VIDEO FEST 2025 is the follow-up to the collection of cat videos TYG and I saw last year, the high point being a mangy (literally) and flea-bitten cat ending up adopted, sleek and comfortable, though most of the videos are more light-hearted. Nothing that isn’t available in infinite quantities on the Internet, but still fun.
While it’s not from The Asylum, I assume THE RISE OF THE BLACK BAT (2012) is the same kind of mockbuster, in this case mockbusting 2012’s The Dark Knight Rises. The Black Bat was a pulp hero who preceded Batman and quite possibly influenced him, though his skill-set — blinded, he acquires the ability to see in the dark — means he could also have inspired DC’s Dr. Mid-Nite.
This film version — I’m guessing the original is public domain — has a mobster blind crusading DA Anthony Quinn (which as the name of a well-known actor throws me in a way it wouldn’t have in the 1930s) who undergoes an operation to save his eyes; he remains blind in daytime but becomes perfectly sighted in pitch darkness, then adopts the Black Bat identity to strike fear into the hearts of the criminals he wars upon (and guns down — like a lot of pulp heroes, he has no qualms about killing). Unlike Monkey Business, this doesn’t even watch well the first time — it’s low budget with minimal acting talent and pads the story with several minutes of bikini-clad women posing for a beauty contest. “It’s bizarre to imagine that a man dressed in a black mask who runs around in the dark carrying a gun would be up to anything but no good.”
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