I’m almost disappointed that Kevin Munroe is about to ship off to shoot DEAD OF NIGHT, the adaptation to DYLAN DOG. While I’m more excited for that film than the countless other horror pics in development, Munroe’s second project is what I am really digging on. We caught up with Munroe who goes into deep details on War Monkeys, a film that pits man vs monkey.
In an exclusive interview with the writer-director, Munroe tells us that he’d like to shoot WAR MONKEYS immediately following DEAD OF NIGHT, which has Brandon Routh attached to star.

Munroe explains that WAR MONKEYS came to him as a pitch “Quentin Tarantino’s GREMLINS,’ a unique blend of humor, horror and action.

“That’s the plan. WAR MONKEYS is deceptively complex; you look at it and it’s a very simple setup,” he continues, “I saw this release notice, last year, that [Cleve Nettles] and Dark Horse were going to be doing this project. So I called him up and said, ‘Congratulations, it sounds really great’. So he sent it to me and he described it as “Quentin Tarantino’s GREMLINS”.” He continues, “I read it and fell in love with it, it was just so cool. It’s really scary; there’s a strong ALIENS element, in terms of the scenario. But the comedy was so strong too; it was all character based, it wasn’t gag based. It’s like a really good modern day Abbott and Costello kind of creature movie. It’s funny, it was a thing where I just wanted to read a friend’s work, and it eventually became something I wanted to work on.”

For those of you unfamiliar with the comic, Munroe explains that “it’s an original idea by Chris Patton… Basically it’s two janitors who work in a kind of Area 51 type of secret government facility, and on Christmas Eve after everyone goes home they accidentally get trapped in there for the night. And from there on it’s kind of survival of the fittest, as they accidentally unleash hordes of these military trained monkeys, rhesus monkeys. It’s very simple, a simple setup, but it’s gonna be the biggest monkey movie ever made!” he laughs. “There’s lot of action, but a lot of horror at the same time.”

WAR MONKEYS is going to be very character driven and there’s some good comedy… is this a PG-13 type of film? Hell no!

“Not at all, I wouldn’t be surprised if this was NC-17! It’s very hard R, really inventive kills, and a lot of splatter.” He continues, “It’s more in the same family as SHAUN OF THE DEAD, but much more claustrophobic and focused more on the horror. If the characters are funny, fine, but the stakes have to be real. You have to feel that they’re really trapped in there. So it’s just one of those things where we want to celebrate this kind of movie; it would suck to give it the sort of all ages Amblin treatment. And I’m a big Amblin fan, but that has already been done, it’s called Gremlins, and it’s great. But it’s way beyond GREMLINS in terms of the horror.”

The one thing that GREMLINS does have, that I would like to see in WAR MONKEYS, is sort of different creatures with specific characteristics, like Spike for example. Munroe explains that MONKEYS will have plenty of interesting characters.

“That’s exactly the plan, that’s already in the script. I think that stuff is funny, and I love the idea that, say you’re the government, you have a billion dollars and you want to create a monkey warfare program. How would you do it? The idea that you’re not just teaching these crazy creatures how to hold a gun, you’re gonna teach them the universe. There’s nothing scarier than thinking you have a monster blocked off, that there’s no way he can get by whatever you’ve set up, and he just easily makes his way past it. So it’s not like they are just running around, there’s the idea that they are processing information, and they have the leader and sub generals and wacky ones… all that stuff.”

Anyone who plays a lot of video games knows that whenever the government tampers with things, they take it to the extreme level. Munroe explains that the monkeys might get a little crazy….

“There are a couple of different strands of creatures, and you see a few iterations of the program. You’ll get to see the history of this program specifically, but you’ll also see a few others. It’s not preachy though; not like “Don’t mess with Mother Nature!” But I just like the idea that you have no clue what these guys are doing behind closed doors, so this is sort of your worst fears come true.”

The plot sounds very similar to RESIDENT EVIL in the fact that a group of people need to survive an attack of a group of creatures in an enclosed area. Munroe explains how this is different.

“A couple of things [differentiate the two], one is that it’s smaller, there’s really only two characters. And also there’s a sense of fun to this that Resident Evil doesn’t necessarily need to have. And I think the characters we have, it’s more concentrated on them. The concepts have similarities, but I think they are completely different movies. These guys are just regular Joes trying to fight their way out; that’s the whole angle. Not like global mutilation and zombies and that kind of stuff. It’s a little more central.”

Blending horror and comedy is something that’s notoriously difficult to do, but they’re also the best horror films I’ve seen. Munroe explains how they’re thinking this through early on.

“We’re just now going over the script, and I think a lot of it comes from performance. The way you approach it as an actor or a director, is to accept it as totally real. And I think a lot of times, the reason it falls short, it just seems like the characters… not that they are winking at the camera, but anytime you’re reminded that it’s a movie or that the characters know they are in this situation, and they say something that they know is funny, that’s when it kind of loses me. That’s the beauty of like, the EVIL DEADs, or SHAUN OF THE DEAD, they are very compelling characters that are very fun to watch, but at the end of the day you never doubt the reality of the story, and you earn that trust with the audience. As long as you maintain the stakes that are real, and the humor comes from the character, you’re good. When people are self-consciously referencing other films of the genre it just ruins it for me.

“I just wish I had more info to share, I think once we start, I really want to bring in a lot of people I worked with before on this, in terms of doing the creature design, the art direction, the pre-vis… I want to really get inside the monkeys’ world, and I think you can do things now that you couldn’t do when they did GREMLINS. And I want to have this cool mix of actual monkeys (which should be a trip), puppets, and then just a couple of CGI inserts whenever it’s absolutely needed. All in keeping with the goal of making it realistic.“