BloodMonkey starts as five young promising students arrive at an isolated jungle location in the middle of nowhere, they are there at the request of scientist Conrad Hamilton (F. Murray Abraham) who has been exploring an untouched region of the forest, a large valley he has named 'Hamilton's Crater'. Despite a less than friendly atmosphere Hamilton convinces the teenage students to follow him into the uncharted jungle & valley where they are attacked by large Ape like creatures that have evolved independently by themselves isolated from the rest of the world in the valley. They are vicious predator's who don't seem to like human beings that much & like to kill us but Hamilton is determined to take a specimen back to civilisation & become famous & rich & all that sort of stuff, however the Apes have different ideas...

This straight-to-video/DVD Thai production was directed by Robert Young & as far as Sci-Fi Channel 'Creature Features' go it's just as crap as most of the other's they see fit to subject the world to. The script takes ages to get going, in fact the first hour of BloodMonkey is total boredom as we follow these annoying American teenage students about & then there's the less than subtle ways in which Hamilton acts which just screams 'I'm the bad guy' (all he needed was a moustache to twirl) & the way that these dumb students still keep following him & trusting him. I thought these kids were meant to be clever? Eventually after what seems like an eternity the film kicks into gear & instead of seeing these annoying American teenagers walk around the jungle we get to see these annoying American teenagers run around the jungle! Wow, thanks guy's. The plot sucks too, it's dull, predictable & boring & if these killer Apes have never ventured beyond the valley why does that Chenne bird have to scare one away when the students first arrive? Also how does Hamilton expect to get one of those Ape things back to civilisation exactly? Why does Hamilton think he can capture one when these Ape things have killed everyone else who has gone anywhere near them? The character's are really annoying & it's a relief when they all get killed, you really will be rooting for the Monkey's here. To be fair I have no problem with feeding annoying teenagers to mutant Monkey's but this film proves it doesn't make for particularly good entertainment, sorry but it's true.

The entire film is set in the jungle & it gets a bit repetitive by the end. Unusually the monster in this 'Creature Feature' isn't shown until the very last scene in the film & to me just looked like a smaller King Kong than anything else, the rest of the time the makers hide it & it is not seen at all which either show's restraint on the makers part or the budget was so low they couldn't afford special effects. You decide. The film isn't scary or tense & there's not much of an atmosphere either, one could class BloodMonkey as much a thriller as horror I suppose. There's not much gore, there's some dead bodies, a bit of blood splatter, a bloody face, an impaling & a severed hand.

I am guessing the budget was pretty low & as such it looks unremarkable at best, shot in Krabi in Thailand probably at the same time as various other 'Creature Feature' films like The Hive (2008) about alien controlled killer Ant's. The acting isn't that good & I suspect Oscar winning actor F. Murray Abraham took the part for the free holiday in Thailand & why not?

BloodMonkey is yet another awful Sci-Fi Channel 'Creature Feature' that's just as bad as the rest of them, I have seen so many of these things they really are starting to get on my nerves. Don't waste your time or money on this, there is much better out there if you look.

Crazy Professor Hamilton (a lively performance by F. Murray Abraham) leads a group of young American college students deep into the jungle in search of a tribe of primates that are rumored to be the missing link.

Sound good and exciting? Well, it just ain't. For starters, director Robert Young relates the by-the-numbers predictable story at a plodding pace as well as crucially fails to generate any essential tension or creepy atmosphere. Worse yet, the blah script gets bogged down in a numbing surplus of tedious talk, the red-tinted blood monkey POV shots are super cheesy, there's a shopworn found footage hook (yawn!),the briefly glimpsed titular monkeys are rendered with extremely cruddy CGI effects, and we even get an unintentionally hilarious scene with the monkeys urinating all over tents (don't ask). Only Abraham brings some much-appreciated energy to this inert lump of a movie. Despite some decent gore and beautiful Thailand jungle locations, this clunker overall rates as a steaming pile of what the proverbial monkey does behind a tree.

To be honest I wasn't expecting much from the production values or the story, but was expecting an actor of F Murray Abraham's calibre to maintain some interest. And actually, while the character and writing is beneath him( we are here talking about someone who in Amadeus gave one of the finest male performances I have seen on film),Abraham is by far the best thing about Blood Monkey, he does deserve credit for bringing some dignity to his performance. The other actors don't match him however, pretty-looking of course but they don't do anything beyond that, even being genuinely concerned about what was happening. They are not helped by their characters, which are not just stereotypical but made to do annoying things that you don't care for them one bit. The dialogue is very cheesy, while the story is increasingly dull and repetitive. The gore is minimal and pretty fake in look with the scenes they feature in unscary and suspense-less, while the effects are terrible and further cheapened by some of the most unfocused camera work and editing of any movies of this genre. Overall, other than Abraham Blood Monkey was an ugly, repetitive, annoying and very un-atmospheric mess. 2/10 Bethany Cox