MONKEYBONE

In this underworldly farce, Brendan Fraser plays a comic-book artist who after a freak accident is left in a coma and stuck in the cartoonish limbo between the living and the dead. The grotesque-sappy mélange smacks of Tim Burton, and why not? This movie is helmed by Henry Selick, the director of Burton’s claymation extravaganza, The Nightmare Before Christmas, and the plot is Beetlejuice minus the juice.

Fraser’s Stu faces his biggest near-after-life dilemma when the gment of his comic strip, a wisecracking monkey named Monkeybone (John Turturro), pops out of his cranium, humiliates him at the netherworld minibar, and then usurps the animator’s body when it snaps out of its three-month hibernation. Stu, concerned about the fate of his loyal ancée (Bridget Fonda), persuades Death (Whoopi Goldberg) to give him a lender corpse and send him back up. For all its grandiose animation, the morbid freak show across the river Styx doesn’t enthrall — it’s the action in the here and now that titillates, especially Chris Kattan as a newly dead gymnast with a broken neck and a few organs missing. The head- opping, gut-squirting high jinks as he races from an army of ninja doctors is the lm’s liveliest moment.

— Tom Meek