A Hospital Full of Idiots and One Big Bug
If you’ve ever wondered what it would look like if The Andromeda Strain, Aliens, and a bad after-school special had a baby, then dumped that baby in a Canadian tax shelter, you’ve got Blue Monkey. Directed by William Fruet—a man whose name sounds like a rejected Smurf villain—this 1987 insectoid disaster flick traps a bunch of doctors and cops inside a quarantined hospital and asks the audience to care. Spoiler alert: we don’t.
The cast includes Steve Railsback, who once played Charles Manson and has been trapped in typecasting purgatory ever since; Gwynyth Walsh as Dr. Rachel Carson, no relation to the environmentalist, though you wish she’d been assassinated by birds instead of trapped in this screenplay; and John Vernon, forever the corporate sleazeball, who must’ve signed this contract while drunk.
The title alone is misleading. There are no monkeys in this film. Blue or otherwise. Just a giant bug that looks like it escaped from a low-rent amusement park haunted house. Whoever approved the title should be forced to watch the movie on loop until they confess.
The Old Lady and the Plant from Hell
Things kick off in a greenhouse, because of course they do. Eccentric plant hoarder Marwella (Helen Hughes) shows handyman Fred (Sandy Webster) a plant she picked up from some volcanic island off Micronesia. A plant that looks like the set decorator glued yellow carnations to a papier-mâché cactus. Fred pricks his finger—on a plant that allegedly has no thorns—and suddenly he’s collapsing in a fever. This is our “inciting incident,” though it plays more like the beginning of a Benadryl commercial.
Fred’s rushed to the hospital where his infection blossoms faster than the screenplay’s stupidity. Within hours, his finger is gangrenous, his body convulsing, and then—just to top things off—he vomits up a larval insect pupa. Yes, vomits it. Right out of his mouth like a drunken college kid projectile-puking on spring break. You’ve seen scarier things in a frat bathroom.
Doctors Without Brains
Enter Dr. Rachel Carson (Gwynyth Walsh) and Dr. Judith Glass (Susan Anspach), who treat medicine like improv theater: make it up as you go and hope nobody notices. They’re joined by Detective Jim Bishop (Steve Railsback), who comes in with a gunshot partner and ends up battling a mutant bug instead. Because nothing says procedural realism like cops moonlighting as entomologists.
The doctors lock the pupa in a bell jar—a security protocol usually reserved for butterflies in kindergarten classrooms. Naturally, the pupa hatches into a nasty bug, because apparently no one here has ever seen a horror movie before. Attempts to kill it include scalpels, lasers, and, eventually, the kind of bad ideas usually found in congressional hearings.
The film wants us to believe this is cutting-edge science. In reality, it looks like a high school science fair project sponsored by Raid insecticide.
Exploding Chest: The Discount Alien
Fred, meanwhile, becomes Patient Zero for both a mysterious infection and a special effects department that spent all of $50 on gore. He convulses, flatlines, and when doctors attempt resuscitation with paddles, his chest explodes in a wet splatter of bug goo. It’s the kind of scene Ridley Scott did a decade earlier with elegance and terror. Here it just feels like someone stomped on a ketchup packet.
Worse yet, the infection spreads, infecting the old lady and the unlucky paramedic. The hospital becomes a quarantine zone, which mostly means extras running around in lab coats pretending to look concerned while clearly wondering if craft services has Timbits.
Enter the Children, Exit Common Sense
If you thought the medical staff were dumb, wait until you meet the kids from the pediatric ward. These little gremlins sneak into the lab, find the insect, and—because apparently Canadian children in the ‘80s were all future Darwin Award winners—they feed it growth hormone. Yes. Growth hormone. Not a Twinkie. Not a juice box. A bottle of chemicals marked “do not touch.”
The insect promptly grows to the size of a Buick and breaks free. Two staff members are killed, which is less horrifying than the thought that a hospital would let children wander unsupervised near experimental laser labs.
The Bug in the Basement
By now, the creature has taken up residence in the hospital’s utility tunnels, killing janitors and nesting like an overgrown termite. Dr. Elliot Jacobs (Don Lake), an entomologist, finally arrives and delivers exposition with all the gravitas of a man reading cereal box ingredients. He’s shocked—shocked—that children feeding hormones to a mutant bug resulted in disaster.
The military eventually gets involved, because no Canadian horror movie is complete without the American cavalry showing up to clean up the mess. They threaten to destroy the hospital if the infestation isn’t contained, which almost makes you root for them.
The Cast: Wasting Their Time (and Ours)
Steve Railsback grimaces his way through the film like a man realizing he’ll never escape late-night cable hell. Gwynyth Walsh at least keeps a straight face, though you suspect she wanted to laugh every time someone said “Blue Monkey” aloud. Susan Anspach delivers lines as though she’s counting the seconds until her agent calls with something better. John Vernon plays John Vernon: smarmy, oily, and thoroughly checked out.
The real stars are the bug puppeteers, who do their best with rubber limbs, bad lighting, and the occasional burst of slime. They deserve hazard pay, not just for enduring the costume, but for having their work immortalized on VHS forever.
Why It Fails
Blue Monkey fails not because its premise is ridiculous—that’s practically a genre requirement—but because it takes itself so damn seriously. If this had been played for camp, it might have been a midnight classic. Instead, the actors whisper dire warnings about contagion while standing in front of props that look rented from a Halloween store clearance bin.
The pacing is glacial, the dialogue tone-deaf, and the scares nonexistent. Watching this film is like being stuck in a hospital waiting room with no magazines and a dying cell phone battery. You don’t want to be there, you don’t care about anyone else there, and you’re just praying it ends soon.
Final Diagnosis
At 100 minutes, Blue Monkey is a bloated, incoherent slog that confuses volume with terror. Its only legacy is that it occasionally shows up on late-night horror channels under the alternate title Insect, which at least has the virtue of honesty. The monster isn’t scary, the characters aren’t likable, and the hospital setting feels less like a thriller and more like an extended PSA about hand sanitizer.
If you’re in the mood for a giant bug movie, watch The Fly. If you’re in the mood for a hospital horror, watch Coma. If you’re in the mood for both, watch anything but this.
