The film is based on the novel The Dream of the Mad Monkey by Christopher Frank. The movie is known as The Mad Monkey and Twisted Obsession. WARNING SPOILERS BELOW! Daniel Gillis & Julien Legrand were both played by Malcolm Greene and his sister Jenny. Jenny used sex to get to the men and she's only 16 years old. The reason for this is so Malcom and Jenny's movie will be made - to get a foothold into and maybe become big time in the (porno) film industry and all with the help of Marilyn (Daniel's agent and also the agent of the two kids). Basically, the 16 year old girl can and will yell "rape" if the men backed out of doing the film - while shelling out money to the two youthful (porno) film makers.

At beginning of the film, Malcolm tells Daniel of a book called The Mad Monkey that his sister found and that is what they want to base their film on it. Malcolm clearly states that movies are like bad dreams.

It seems it's one of those endings that leaves you guessing "did all this really happen OR was it all something that Daniel just wrote and Marilyn just read it as we watched it?" It's an okay film. A sexploration, incest, manipulation film based of the novel.

5/10

This movie holds your interest for quite a while, with its eccentric and enigmatic characters, atmospheric direction and first-rate acting by Jeff Goldblum and Miranda Richardson (Lisa Walker is kind of weak though, as the nymphet). But eventually it becomes clear that the story leads nowhere. Its "title history" is a giveaway: you can find it listed under either "The Mad Monkey" (unattractive and meaningless - it's only the title of a fictional movie we learn nothing about) or "Twisted Obsession" (more "suggestive" and commercial)....but actually it doesn't matter what it's called, because it ultimately isn't ABOUT anything in particular. (**)

Originally titled El Sueño del Mono Loco (The Dream of the Mad Monkey), this is based on the Christopher Frank book. While it has the 90's genre of erotic thriller attached to it, this is very much in the world of the giallo.

To wit: Jeff Goldblum's Dan Gillis is a stranger in a strange land, one of the key tropes of the yellow-tinged thriller, a writer in Paris who has been left behind by his wife and suddenly a single father to his son Danny. A writer by trade, he's brought in by a producer to work with an enfant terrible young director named Malcolm Greene on a script.

Ironically, the actor playing that young director - Dexter Fletcher - would grow up and move on from acting (he was Baby Face in the absurd and wonderful child gangster musical Bugsy Malone) to directing some of today's biggest films, such as Bohemian Rhapsody and Rocketman.

What draws us closer to the psychosexual domain of the giallo is that Gillis soon becomes obsessed by Malcolm's sister Jenny (Liza Walker from Hackers in her first film). While presented as somewhere in her teens, she's also a lolita who possesses the sexual attention of every man she meets, from our protagonist to her brother.

Miranda Richardson also figures in as Dan's disabled agent who, like everyone in this movie, just wants to get horizontal with one of West Homestead's favorite sons.

I'm not saying this is a good movie. I'm just saying that it's interesting that somehow Goldblum made two movies one after the other - this and Mister Frost - that are borderline bonkers horror experimentations that no one really talks about. This is after he was a star from The Fly and yet here he is, making really strange movies in foreign lands. Leave it to a Mill Creek box set to bring this to my attention.