Honorable Mention
(Well…It might be Science Fiction…
Depends on How You Look at it…)
Imagine what would have happened if Alfred Hitchcock had made a horror film about a murderous ape.
It doesn’t take too much imagination to picture it a lot like Richard Franklin’s Link. After all, the Australian director was a great admirer of Hitchcock and he certainly brought a lot of Hitch’s approach into this film. Like a lot of great suspense and horror films, the basic setup is very simple — an isolated house, a scientist carrying out his experiments with his collection of apes, a young woman who just took a job as house keeper.
But don’t be fooled: Franklin not only knows how to build the suspense like a master, but there’s a lot going on beneath the surface, a lot more than we are ever explicitly told.
Which is how it should be.
And, like any great Hitchcockian suspense film, it does, after a long, slow buildup of strange events and sinister hints, finally explode into a something far more violent — and far more frightening.
I do find this one interesting for its scientific aspects: clearly someone did his research into primatology (and I particularly liked the rejoinder Professor Phillips — a marvelous Terence Stamp — gives to a student who suggests that the difference between man and ape is that only human beings go to war).
Now, I have to admit that I tend to come down on the skeptical side of some of these claims. Critics of many of these studies in ape intelligence have claimed that these studies tend towards a certain degree of selection bias as they leave out a lot of the hand signs made by these apes — particularly when it comes to the “jokes” we are told that apes have made to their trainers. Supposedly, these often come surrounded by lots of random hand signals, as if the ape is just trying to find a combination that will get it rewarded.
However, whatever the case, this is still more attention to the science than most of these movies can be bothered to take.
I also like the subtle little detail in one of Dr. Phillips recordings, where he discusses how he has used diet and drugs to increase the intelligence of his subjects. It echoes all those classic Forties Mad Scientist films — but does so without destroying the illusion of grounded realism that makes the increasingly threatening behavior of Link so much more terrifying. Which is one of the more bravado aspects of Franklin’s film: we believe that a real ape would be capable of all the things we see Link do — and we believe it without an appeal to injections of human brain tissue as in films like George Romero’s Monkey Shines (1988).
Franklin made a number of interesting thrillers, including the original version of Patrick (1978). Unfortunately, like many other once notable directors, he eventually fell out of favor and ended up working on television. It seems a shame.
We also need to note animal trailer Ray Berwick’s absolutely amazing work on this film. It all seems so natural that we forget that someone had to get the apes in this film to do all these incredible things. One does have to wonder, though, whether he got RSPCA approval for teaching an Orangutan to smoke cigars…
Certainly it gives new meaning to the phrase “no animals were harmed in the making of this picture.”
One of the best parts of this film is its sprightly, blackly comic score. It’s absolutely perfect, particularly for an often playful film which is quite funny in a blackly comic way — and yet ends with one of the most terrifying murder sprees ever filmed.
It’s not the easiest film to find, but it is more than worth the effort. It’s funny, scary, extremely smart, deftly made…
And it might even be science fiction.
rivets on the poster 
2 thoughts on “Link (1986)”