In Monkeybone, Brendan Fraser plays Stu Miley, the mild-mannered creator of acartoon nightmare knows as Monkeybone. Taking the form of a small, grinning simian withlanky arms and legs and a mouthful of shiny square teeth, the titular creation is a smalldollop of pure id mixed in with everyone's worst dreams. He was originally invented asStu's creative outlet to escape from a cycle of insomnia and nightmares, and the movie playsout like a cartoon variant of Freud's "return of the repressed."

When the movie opens, Monkeybone the comic strip has just been turned into aTV pilot for a cartoon cable channel, and the big corporations are lining up to get on themerchandising bandwagon. Stu doesn't like the idea of his creation being turned intolunchboxes, stuffed animals, and happy meals, despite the urgings of his manager, Herb(Dave Foley). When Stu attempts to get away from a corporate meeting, he and hisgirlfriend, a sleep doctor named Julie (Bridget Fonda) to whom he is about to proposemarriage, end up in a car wreck that sends him into a coma.

And this is when the movie gets appropriately weird.

Director Henry Selick, who is known for helming the bizarrely enjoyable stop-motionanimation films The Nightmare Before Christmas (1993) and James and theGiant Peach (1996), is right in his element once Stu is hurled into Downtown, acarnivalesque dreamworld where people in comas bide their time while waiting for either anexit pass back into consciousness or a ride further down the tracks to Thanatopolis, which ispresided over by Death herself in the form of Whoopi Goldberg.

Downtown is populated not only by apparently normal people who are in comas, but also arogue's gallery of bizarre creatures, ranging from a cyclops with an oversized head, to astrange crab-like creature with a man's face, to a curvaceous feline waitress played by RoseMcGowan. Mixing digital special effects with Jim Henson-like puppetry, stop-motionanimation, and enormous sets, the scenes in Downtown are like something right out of oneof Tim Burton's early films, especially Beetlejuice (1988), and Selick knows justhow to milk these moments for maximum weirdness.

Unfortunately, the script by Sam Hamm, who also penned Burton's Batman(1989), proceeds to dive headfirst into a convoluted, often confusing plot involving Stu'ssimian cartoon creation taking over his physical body and devising a plan in which plushMonkeybone toys will be filled with a special chemical innocently devised by Julie to givepeople nightmares. This does involve an amusing scene in which Stu finds himself stuck in aprison in Downtown along with other famous men whose imaginary sidekicks took overtheir bodies in reality, including Edgar Allan Poe (it was a raven) and Stephen King(wouldn't you know it was Cujo?).

While Stu tries to devise a plan for escaping Downtown to reclaim his body, the spastic andhorny Monkeybone freely uses Stu's physical body to his own ends back on earth. Thisscenario gives Brendan Fraser free comic reign to essentially act like an idiot, and while hismonkey posturing is at times quite funny, the whole schtick gets old quickly.

Much, much funnier is the scenario in which Stu convinces Death to send him back to earthto stop Monkeybone. Death obliges, and Stu finds himself hurtled into the recently deceasedbody of Saturday Night Live's Chris Kattan, who has not only broken his neck ina freak gymnastics accident, but is literally on the surgeon's table having his organs removedfor donation when Stu takes over his body. Kattan almost steals the movie as he runsthrough the streets in red Spandex, his head lolling from side to side on its broken neck (heeventually tapes it upright with a T-square) while a group of angry surgeons chases him.These scenes are almost shockingly grotesque, but also ludicrously hilarious. It's agloriously fantastic gross-out, especially once Kattan's organs start falling out while he isdangling from a hot-air balloon, as well an ample demonstration of the elasticity of theby-now-meaningless PG-13 rating.

Despite these isolated moments of comic brilliance, as a whole, Monkeybonenever quite comes together as it should. Fraser gives it his all as both the befuddled Stu andthe manic Monkeybone (his entire career has been based on oscillating between completenormalcy and spastic eccentricity), and he and Bridget Fonda make a likable, believablecouple who give some sense of gravity to the haphazard wackiness around them.

Perhaps the problem is Monkeybone himself. Although amusing, he doesn't seem quiteoutrageous or inventive enough to grab our attention. For all the time and effort that wentinto the movie's production (the budget has been reported as being around $80 million), onewould think their central cartoon character would have been given a more unique and lastingpersonality. As is, he doesn't even seem to have been worth the repression.

©2001 James Kendrick