This is a surprisingly entertaining animal attack thriller! I mean, for a film with such a bad rap...it's really not that terrible.Basically, a bunch of med students are LARP'ing in a tower on campus.However, unbeknownst to them, an angry baboon (driven mad by medical experiments) is on the loose, and out to kill.Shakma (the baboon) hunts down the college students, and takes them out one by one...going completely insane in the process.And I mean, this baboon goes nuts. It seriously made me wonder what the hell they did to the poor thing to get it so damn angry. Cause it is straight f*cking terrifying in this film! Simplicity aside, this film is effectively scary...albeit a little frustrating.Because...why they don't just go to the ground floor and exit through the front door, is beyond me? Or smash a window, if worse comes to worse...you know? Cause really, what could be worse than getting your throat torn out by a psychotic baboon?! With that being said, however, if you can suspend disbelief for an hour and a half...I'm quite certain you will thoroughly enjoy being genuinely terrorized by this baboon.I will never ever f*ck with a baboon after watching this film.And you shouldn't either.6 out of 10.

Who doesn't like a psychotic monkey film? Fresh from playing a monkey himself in several thousand Planet of the Apes films, Roddy McDowall plays a cold, heartless college professor whom endears himself to the audience by performing some sort of operation on a baboon called Shakma. This doesn't go well and he asks Shakma's mate, Hero Guy, to put the monkey to sleep. Which he doesn't. Or something. I was too busy trying to figure all the crap they were talking about this game they were going on about. This game they were going on about seems to be some sort of live action dungeons and dragons type deal, but not much is explained to be honest. Some jock manages to wangle his way into the game for reason, and to cut a long story short, everyone ends up trapped in the college building while Shakma gets up and starts tearing people's throats out. Some people think its all part of the game, while Hero Guy and his girlfriend run about in circles and barricade doors as Shakman goes nuts.Although this kind of film can get tedious, this one wasn't too bad as Shakma as a real life monkey does come across as rather insane, and no wonder, if you read in the trivia bit on IMDb how they made him go mental. Even though there's not much in way of gore or nudity, Shakma certainly munched his way through a lot of the cast, so, if you see it for thirty pence at a car boot sale in Glasgow like I did, pick it up.Is it even a monkey, or an ape? We'll never know.

Saw this movie on a rented VHS in the early 90s. Revisited it recently. Shakma was a good b horror fun for its time. The film is about an enraged primate who goes on the killing spree. The primate was actually frightening n fast paced but the storyline, acting n editing was lame. Found it to b dull now.

The students in the med school of a university play a "Dungeons & Dragons" type of role playing game in their tower after hours. They're supervised by their head professor, Sorenson (Roddy McDowall). Unfortunately, one of their primate charges is a baboon named Shakma (played by "Typhoon"), who has been genetically altered - big surprise there - and who has now gone absolutely crazy, slaughtering any stupid human unlucky enough to be close to it. As the humans dwindle in number, they find that getting help from the outside world is next to impossible."Shakma" is pretty laughable, all right, not that it's *completely* worthless. The action is passable, the suspense passable. The most entertaining aspect is the animal action. Typhoon is a real force of nature and was obviously trained as well as a baboon could possibly be trained. Things get pretty gory, too. The movie is generally amusing for putting an "animal attack" spin on the standard slasher formula. Everything about it is no more than adequate on a technical level; it suffers the most from its silly script and inane characterizations. The actors treat the material with the best poker faces that they can muster: former teen idol Christopher Atkins, Amanda Wyss of the original "A Nightmare on Elm Street", Ari Meyers of 'Kate & Allie'. The casting of McDowall is certainly appropriate given his iconic role(s) in the "Planet of the Apes" franchise.This is a junk movie, to be sure, but it's still reasonably entertaining. One big problem is that it's overextended, going on too long at approximately an hour and 42 minutes.Five out of 10.