Featured Creature: The one that's an anthro murder mystery

 

Title: Link aka Link The Butler

What Year?: 1986

Classification: Mashup/ Irreproducible Oddity

Rating: It’s Okay! (3/4)

 

In considering the possibilities for this feature, the biggest challenge has been defining an if possible limiting the scope of it. So far, my rule of thumb has been to stay outside the 1970s-‘80s timeframe I chose for my Space 1979 feature. However, I have definitely planned to cover some of the 1980s films I never got to elsewhere. With this review, I’m starting with a case and point, an egregiously representative ‘80s movie that I still never found to fit in with the runnerups and knockoffs of my previous feature. As we will see, this is first and foremost because of its unquestionable and audacious originality. Here is Link, possibly cinema’s only full-fledged anthropology horror film.

Our story begins with a roving POV shot of a nighttime city street, as the unseen stalker chases a cat and peers into a second-floor apartment. We then meet a college student named Jane and her professor Philip, a very British primatologist who doesn’t so much express sexism and colonialism as leave them an unspoken given. Jane is soon invited to come to the professor’s country estate, where he keeps a trio of primates as something between pets, servants and adopted children. The professor introduces her to his oldest and dominant charge, a former circus ape named Link who has willingly adopted wearing clothes and also learned to use matches. Tensions start to rise as Jane questions Philip’s harsh treatment of the apes and his critical assessment of their intelligence. Things take a strange and uncomfortable turn when the professor suddenly disappears, leaving Jane to manage the apes. As Link grows more unruly, she soon realizes that he is a danger both to the other animals and to humans. When her boyfriend and his buddies show up, Link goes on the warpath. Can Jane escape, or has the ape finally bested mankind?

Link was a British horror film made by EMI Films, a media conglomerate that had associated with MGM and Columbia. The production was directed by Australian filmmaker Richard Franklin, who optioned a story outline for the film in 1979 but did not obtain funding until after his success with the 1983 film Psycho II. The film starred American Elizabeth Shue as Jane following a breakthrough appearance in Karate Kid, with British veteran Terence Stamp as the professor. The title character/ creature Link was written as a chimp but portrayed by an orangutan known as Locke, with significant makeup and prosthetics used to change the appearance of the non-African ape. Jerry Goldsmith provided a score for the movie, noted for its similarities to his earlier score for Gremlins. The finished film was released in the US by (I hate my life) the Cannon Group, with significant cuts. The movie was reviewed by Cinemassacre in 2018, while the film was difficult to obtain except on VHS. In 2019, the film was released on DVD and Blu Ray by Kino Lorber, featuring a 103-minute cut apparently used for earlier VHS releases with additional “deleted” scenes as bonus features.

For my experiences, this is one of a fair number of films I first heard of from Cinemassacre (see Tourist Trap). I bought and viewed it in early 2020, after I had started this blog but before I got things in gear. It stood out in my memory as an odd movie that “should” have connected with me a lot more than it did, and a viewing for this review only emphasized how odd and uncomfortable it is. It’s classified as “horror”, but if anything, it’s a bit too “mainstream” for that, and the same applies even more so for science fiction. The “feel” I pick up from it is a Victorian murder mystery where several of the suspects happen to be non-human. It’s this pool of influence that best accounts for its surprisingly effective satirical tone, and also its curiously mild content, which is well within PG-13 or even “70s PG” levels, uncomfortable nudity and all. The sledgehammer blow that comes out of the cloud of fluff is a post-modern tone that rivals The Thing. Several key plot point, including the fate of the professor and one of the apes, only get murkier with analysis and repeat viewings. It’s all the more disconcerting that this is achieved with none of the supposedly “hallucinogenic” tricks of more routine genre films. As traditionalists like George Romero demonstrated all along, linear narration and camerawork show terror and madness better than trendy jump cuts and  random shock imagery ever did.

That still leaves the apes themselves. The elephant in the room here is that the movie clearly draws on dated and overoptimistic appraisals of primate intelligence. Here, as in many things, there is at least ambiguity. The apes at times seem a little too good at communicating their thoughts in human terms, but then the human characters, including the Homo-supremacist professor, consistently speak to them in normal English. There’s a further sense of a malign positive feedback loop with the professor, who treats them with contempt that he hides in his lectures to the students, but never quite descends into sadism for its own sake. What gets most intriguing is Link’s evident ability to hide his handiwork or play dumb. His appearance and mannerisms are disarming, almost certainly more so than a “real” adult chimp would be. That is enough to get away with several apparent mishaps that look ominous in hindsight, like the comical destruction of one of the manor’s only phones, but again, we never get a clear answer. The most unnerving development, albeit dictated the mystery conceit, is that he quickly learns to hide the bodies of humans and animals that he has killed, suggesting that he has some notion of human law and government. Things get even more darkly amusing when a surviving ape named Imp urges Jane to kill him, ultimately raising a little doubt how many of the deaths and misdeeds are committed by Link alone. 

At this point, I feel I must go a bit longer to discuss the finale and the buildup to it. The big plot twist is the disappearance of the professor, early and abrupt enough that it’s counterintuitively difficult to pinpoint when it actually happens. That is followed by the appearance of an animal trader and exterminator, worth further note as the one character who is clearly free from an anthropomorphic and romantic view of the apes. It’s at this point that the tone becomes disjointed, in no small part because of Jane’s irritating naivete. We get comical moments that still fit the discomforting mood as she locks Link outside like a disobedient pet. Things outwardly go into high gear once the college students/ creature fodder arrive (for once all male!), but to me, what follows mostly undermines what has so far been an intriguing and subtle movie. Part of the problem is certainly that the filmmakers still don’t step up to the level of action and outright carnage that would “earn” the R rating they got anyway. But there’s also a deeper sense that the movie never catches up with itself, and it shows especially in the Goldsmith score (see the Deep Rising soundtrack review). It’s good, as it should be, but what was lively and fittingly mischievous at the start never adjusts to the quite dark events that unfold (including what is surely an homage to King Kong). At a certain point, it starts to feel like the composer was given a pitch for a different movie than was actually made, which judging from the track record of novelizations might well be what happened.

That still leaves the “one scene”, and this time, I’m going with a “deleted” scene. I have to say be way of introduction that the DVD includes a startling 24 minutes of footage, of which I find only two or three that would definitely have improved the film as a whole. The last and most impressive finds the professor and Jane arguing more forcefully than usual about primate intelligence and how the researchers treat them. (I suspect this is “out of order”, since an immediately preceding scene already has the professor absent.) The professor, who previously told his students that apes can perform at a human level on intelligence tests, now asserts that even the best performance of an ape can still be equaled or bettered by a human child. Jane retorts that an ape might not “like” exercises on human terms. At this point, the professor starts pulling plastic fruit out of what will be a fateful cabinet. He finally fumes, “We tried with real fruit, and let him eat what he got right”, obviously with no improvement. It’s one of the more thoughtful and (unfortunately) accurate reflections on the problems of non-human intelligence to come out of the minor wave of ‘80s ape movies, and one doesn’t have to agree with the professor to understand the pure frustration.

In conclusion, I feel like I need to explain why I have spent this much time on a movie with a mixed review. It should already be clear that this is a film with enough flaws and good points for a much longer analysis than this. In the proverbial light of day, the strongest indication of its quality and relevance is that its flaws remain as insightful as its strengths. It is worth further note as a film that changing social attitudes alone have ensured could never be made again. It is a good film, certainly worth the time and effort to watch, but perhaps just as well to rent or borrow rather than buy. With that, I am calling it a day.