Shout! Scream Factory has released a 4K UHD upgrade of George A. Romero’s 1988 film, Monkey Shines with an accompanying Blu-ray that includes vintage making-of documentaries of the film.

Oddly, Amazon is selling the 4K package for $28.99, the old Blu-ray for $35.01, and the original DVD for $74.69, a bizarre reverse pricing strategy.

Presented in Dolby Vision, the film has two separate commentary tracks, the original with writer-director Romero, and one by film critic Eric Vespe and author Daniel Kraus.

The film, which is more of a psychological horror film than a straight horror flick received strong critical support but was not a box-office success in its original release. It has since become a cult favorite.

Romero’s inspiration for the film was an episode of TV’s 60 Minutes about monkeys being trained to help handicapped patients, in this case a young man whose back is broken in a freak accident. He is put together with Ella, who unbeknownst to him, has been chemically altered, making her more astute than similarly trained monkeys.

Jason Beghe, now known for his long-running role on TV’s Chicago P.D. (2014-present), had a rare lead in a film as the law student whose life completely changes due to the freak accident. The film’s strong supporting cast includes John Pankow (To Live and Die in L.A.) as the duplicitous friend who gifts him the monkey, Janine Turner (TV’s Northern Exposure) as his two-timing girlfriend, Stanley Tucci (Conclave) as the surgeon who operates on him, and the now 91-year-old still working Joyce Van Patten, whose career began as a child actress in the 1940s, as his overbearing mother. The mother of Talia Balsam with Martin Balsam, she became George Clooney’s mother-in-law, albeit not for long, shortly after the film’s release.

Despite its strong reviews from the critics, the film suffered at the box-office having been released around the same time as the more popular Child’s Play which was a runaway success. The film did not receive the level of support it deserved from Orion which focused their support on other 1988 films such as Bull Durham and Mississippi Burning. The studio later released back-to-back Oscar winners Dances with Wolves and The Silence of the Lambs before going out of business in the early 1990s.

There are no films I can think of that approach the goings-on in Monkey Shines. The closest comparison is probably Robert Altman’s 1970 comedy thriller, Brewster McCloud in which bird droppings kill the enemies of the titled character played by Bud Cort between his breakthrough in Altman’s earlier 1970 film, M*A*S*H and Hal Ashby’s 1971 comedy, Harold and Maude in which he has a May-December relationship with Ruth Gordon.

Cort plays an owlish, intellectual boy living in a fallout room of the Houston Astrodome who with the help of a mysterious woman played Sally Kellerman, builds wings with which he hopes to fly away. Shelley Duvall, in her film debut, becomes his true love, but she will not leave her comfortable home to fly away with him. In the meantime, bird droppings are killing Cort’s enemies from Margaret Hamilton as a “Star-Spangled Banner”-singing old witch to Stacy Keach as Brewster’s Howard Hughes-type money hungry eccentric employer in much the same way as Ella is killing anyone who comes between her and Jason Beghe in Monkey Shines.

Sandpiper Pictures has released a Blu-ray of the long out-of-print 1993 film, Malice. Originally released by Columbia, rights for the film are now controlled by MGM.

This was director Harold Becker’s first film since the highly acclaimed Sea of Love four years earlier. Aaron Sorkin (A Few Good Men) co-wrote the story with Jonas McCord (Havoc) and the screenplay with Scott Frank (Logan) and what a story it is!

The film begins as a murder mystery in which college girls are being strangled by a serial killer but soon develops into an even more sinister thriller involving merciless grifters and the medical profession.

Alec Baldwin heads the cast as a new chief surgeon at a hospital in a Massachusetts college town. Bill Pullman is a dean at the college who went to school with Baldwin, and Nicole Kidman is his wife. Bebe Neuwirth is the detective investigating the murders. Peter Gallagher is a lawyer suing Baldwin and the hospital on behalf of his client, and screen legends George C. Scott and Anne Bancroft lend their considerable expertise to the film in too-brief scenes.

The solving of the murders is accomplished well before the end of the film but the main story involving Baldwin, Kidman, and Pullman has a way to go. Keep your eye on the boy next door to Kidman and Pullman. What he sees and what he doesn’t see are clues.

Searching for something new to stream on TV, I came across a CW series now streaming on Max that I didn’t expect too much from but was pleasantly surprised by.

The series which is called Sherlock & Daughter is the umpteenth iteration of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes, played through the years by such varied actors as Basil Rathbone, Jeremy Brett, Benedict Cumberbatch, and Robert Downey, Jr. This time around, it’s David Thewlis who arguably has his best role since 1993’s Naked for which he won the 1993 Best Actor award from the New York Film Critics Circle over Anthony Hopkins in The Remains of the Day and Shadowlands and Daniel Day-Lewis in In the Name of the Father and The Age of Innocence.

Starring opposite Thewlis is Blu Hunt (TV’s The Originals) as an American girl who may or may not be his illegitimate daughter. The supporting cast includes Orén Kinlan as a young man who may or may not be Professor Moriarty’s kidnapped son and Séan Duggan as Dr. Watson.

Happy viewing.