🎞️ Link Review: Elisabeth Shue Versus a Cigar-Smoking Killer Ape
My Rating: ⭐ ⭐ ⭐ ⭐ ☆ 4.3/5
This Link review heads back to 1986. A young Elisabeth Shue moves into a lonely house on the English coast with a scientist and three apes. One of those apes wears a butler’s jacket, smokes cigars, and has some very bad ideas. Richard Franklin, the director of Psycho II, turned that setup into a strange, suspenseful thriller that deserves far more fans than it has.
Link Review: The Strangest Killer Animal Movie of the 1980s
The 1980s had killer sharks.
Killer dogs.
Killer rats.
Killer just about everything.
But only one movie gave us a killer ape who dresses for dinner.
His name is Link.
And he’s been waiting for you.
Richard Franklin directed and produced Link for Thorn EMI. It premiered in January 1986 at France’s Avoriaz Fantasy Film Festival, where it won a special jury prize. The Cannon Group released it in the United States on October 31, 1986. It runs 103 minutes in its standard cut.
This Link review stays spoiler free.
Welcome to the House on the Cliffs
Jane Chase is an American zoology student in London.
She takes a summer job with her professor, Dr. Steven Phillip.
He lives in a huge, isolated house on the coast.
No neighbors.
Just Jane, the professor, and three apes he uses in his research.
There’s Voodoo, a female chimp.
There’s Imp, her clever young son.
And there’s Link.
Link is a retired circus performer who now works as the professor’s butler.
He answers the door.
He carries things around the house.
He enjoys a good cigar.
What could possibly go wrong?
Meet Link
Link is the reason you’ll remember this movie.
He’s polite when he wants to be.
He’s helpful when it suits him.
And he watches everything.
There’s something unsettling about the way Link studies the people around him.
He’s not a monster.
He’s not a cartoon.
He’s an intelligent animal who understands far more than anyone in the house wants to admit.
That’s what makes him scary.
Here’s the Twist: Link Isn’t a Chimp
The movie tells you Link is a chimpanzee.
He isn’t.
Link was played by an orangutan named Locke.
The filmmakers darkened his reddish fur and gave him prosthetic ears so he would pass as a chimp.
Look closely and you can see the difference.
Once you notice, you can’t stop noticing.
Voodoo, on the other hand, was a real full-grown chimpanzee named Carrie.
That was rare. Full-grown chimps are powerful and unpredictable, so movies seldom used them.
Imp was played by a young chimp named Jed.
The Man Who Trained the Birds
The apes were trained by Ray Berwick.
That name should ring a bell for Hitchcock fans.
Berwick trained the birds for The Birds in 1963.
He also worked with animals on films like Jonathan Livingston Seagull.
Locke was Berwick’s own orangutan.
Getting an ape to carry a tray, open doors, and stare down a co-star is serious work.
Berwick made it look easy.
Franklin later said the shoot with the animals went more smoothly than he expected.
The real trouble came after filming.
Elisabeth Shue Carries the Movie
Elisabeth Shue plays Jane Chase.
She was 21 when she made Link, and it was her first lead role in a feature film.
Most audiences knew her as Ali from The Karate Kid.
The very next year she starred in Adventures in Babysitting.
Years later, she earned an Oscar nomination for Leaving Las Vegas.
Here she’s smart, curious, and believable as a student who slowly realizes she’s in over her head.
She spends much of the movie acting opposite animals.
That’s a tough job for any actor.
She makes it work.
Shue picked up a Saturn Award nomination for the role.
She hasn’t always been kind to the movie. In a 2021 interview, she called it “a not-great horror movie called Link.”
Kilroy respectfully disagrees.
Terence Stamp Is the Cold Professor
Terence Stamp plays Dr. Steven Phillip.
Stamp was already famous for playing General Zod in Superman and Superman II.
He had also earned an Oscar nomination early in his career for Billy Budd in 1962.
He brings that same icy authority here.
Phillip is brilliant.
He’s also arrogant, distant, and not exactly warm toward his animals.
He treats the apes like experiments.
That attitude matters.
Stamp wasn’t the first choice, by the way.
The role was written for Richard Burton, who died in 1984.
Albert Finney, Anthony Perkins, Christopher Plummer, and Anthony Hopkins were all offered the part and passed.
That’s quite a list of almost-professors.
Stamp passed away in August 2025 at age 87, which makes this chilly performance worth revisiting.
The Rest of the Cast
Steven Pinner plays David, Jane’s boyfriend.
Richard Garnett and David O’Hara play his friends Dennis and Tom.
Kevin Lloyd plays Bailey, a friend of the professor’s who has his own business with the apes.
Watch for a young Linus Roache in an uncredited appearance.
But let’s be honest.
The humans are the supporting cast.
The apes are the stars.
Richard Franklin Loved Hitchcock
Director Richard Franklin grew up in Australia.
He saw Psycho in 1960 when he was 12 years old, and it changed his life.
In 1983, Franklin directed Psycho II.
That Hitchcock influence is all over Link.
The big lonely house on the hill.
The slow build of suspense.
A bath scene that will remind you of a certain famous shower.
Franklin even compared the mood of Link to Psycho II.
This isn’t a cheap monster movie.
It’s a suspense film with an ape in the lead.
Jaws With Chimps
The idea goes back to 1979.
That’s when Franklin optioned a short story outline by Lee David Zlotoff and Tom Ackermann.
Franklin described it as “a sort of Jaws with chimps.”
Australian writer Everett De Roche turned it into a screenplay.
De Roche had already written Patrick and Road Games for Franklin.
He was inspired by a National Geographic article by Jane Goodall about violence among chimpanzees.
That’s not a coincidence, either.
The heroine is named Jane.
Franklin first tried to make the movie in Australia in 1981.
Then Hollywood came calling with Psycho II and Cloak and Dagger.
Link had to wait its turn.
Why Chimps Make Great Movie Villains
A lot of people think of chimpanzees as cute.
Birthday party chimps.
TV commercial chimps.
Chimps in little suits.
Scientists know better.
In the 1970s, Jane Goodall’s team in Tanzania watched one group of chimpanzees wage a years-long war on another.
That research shocked people.
Chimps can be smart, social, and loving.
They can also be brutal.
An adult chimp is far stronger than a grown man.
Link takes that real-world fact and builds a horror movie around it.
That’s why it works better than most killer animal movies.
The danger isn’t made up.
Real Apes, No Costumes
Franklin faced pressure to use actors in ape suits.
He refused.
He wanted real animals and clever editing.
That decision is the secret weapon of this movie.
No suit, no matter how good, moves like a real ape.
When Link turns his head or sizes up a person, you’re watching a real animal.
That makes every quiet moment feel a little dangerous.
You never forget that the stars of this movie are stronger than the people around them.
England, Played by Scotland
The story is set on the English coast.
The movie was actually filmed in St Abbs, Scotland.
Franklin said, “The English setting to me was essential.”
The cliffs, the sea, and the wind give the house a cut-off feeling.
You can scream all you want out there.
Nobody is coming.
Filming wrapped in July 1985.
It was one of the last films made at EMI under producer Verity Lambert, who was running the studio at the time.
Jerry Goldsmith Scores a Hit
The music comes from the great Jerry Goldsmith.
Goldsmith gave us Planet of the Apes, Alien, Poltergeist, and Gremlins.
Think about that first title for a second.
Goldsmith had already scored the most famous ape movie ever made.
Now he was scoring a much smaller, much stranger one.
His Link score is playful and circus-like.
It’s bouncy, a little mischievous, and just slightly off.
Some cues even recall his work on Gremlins.
That fun score makes the scary moments land even harder.
Goldsmith also earned a Saturn Award nomination for this one.
And keep your ears open for The Kinks’ song “Apeman” during a helicopter shot.
Somebody in the editing room had a sense of humor.
A Hitchcock Fan’s Earlier Thrillers
If you like Link, check out Franklin’s earlier Australian films.
Patrick from 1978 is about a coma patient with deadly mental powers.
Road Games from 1981 stars Stacy Keach and Jamie Lee Curtis in a highway thriller.
Both were written by Everett De Roche.
Both carry that same Hitchcock influence.
Watch all three together and you can see a director building his own style.
Franklin passed away in 2007.
His small group of thrillers has only gained fans since then.
Little Touches Movie Fans Will Love
There are a few fun details hidden in Link.
At one point, the movie shows a clip from the 1932 film Blonde Venus.
In it, Marlene Dietrich pulls off a gorilla costume.
An ape movie watching an ape movie.
Link also has a strange relationship with fire.
And his cigar habit is not just a joke.
Pay attention to the little things.
Franklin did.
Cannon Got Out the Scissors
Here’s where the story turns sad.
Cannon cut eight minutes out of the movie for its American release.
Franklin objected.
Then Cannon took over Thorn EMI, and five more minutes disappeared.
Franklin said every cut chipped away at the film.
He later called Link an unsatisfying experience on almost every level.
That’s a shame, because the movie he made still shows through.
In 2021, a composite extended cut of about 125 minutes was released in France.
For collectors, that’s the version worth hunting.
The older French cut is its own oddity.
It runs about three minutes shorter and skips the opening sequence.
But it also includes scenes that were trimmed from the international version.
Different countries, different movies.
The Box Office Wasn’t Kind
Link cost about $6 million.
It made about $1.7 million in American theaters.
Reviews were mixed.
Today it sits at 44 percent on Rotten Tomatoes from 18 reviews.
That failure also killed Franklin’s sequel idea.
He had pictured a story about an anthropologist caught in a chimpanzee war in Africa.
We never got to see it.
But over the years, Link found its audience on cable, VHS, and late-night TV.
Now it’s a genuine cult favorite.
Not every critic missed it, either. The jury at Avoriaz saw something special right from the start.
Collecting Link
Good news for collectors.
Kino Lorber released Link on Blu-ray on May 14, 2019.
That disc includes an audio commentary, an interview with Richard Franklin, Goldsmith’s demo of the main theme, and deleted workprint scenes.
Those deleted scenes give you a glimpse of what Cannon trimmed.
The Franklin interview is a rare chance to hear the director discuss his own film.
StudioCanal released a restored version in the UK on February 1, 2021.
And the French extended cut gives completists one more version to chase.
Original VHS copies with the creepy cover art still show up at shows and sales.
Does Link Still Work Today?
It does.
The pacing is slower than modern horror.
Some of the human characters are thin.
The cuts leave a few bumps.
But the atmosphere is excellent.
The animal performances are remarkable.
And Link himself is one of the most memorable movie villains of the decade.
That’s the real takeaway from this Link review. It’s a smart, unusual thriller that was never as bad as its reputation.
Who Should Watch Link?
Watch it if you enjoy 1980s horror, killer animal movies, Hitchcock-style suspense, and Elisabeth Shue.
It’s also a treat for Jerry Goldsmith fans and anyone who loves movies made with real animals instead of computers.
Collectors of Cannon and Thorn EMI titles will want it on the shelf, too.
It’s a perfect pick for a Halloween double feature with another killer animal classic.
Just don’t watch it right before a trip to the zoo.
Final Thoughts 4.3/5
This one earns a 4.3 out of 5 from Kilroy. Wrapping up this Link review, the film stands as a stylish, creepy, and wonderfully odd thriller. A remarkable animal performance and a young Elisabeth Shue make it a cult gem worth rediscovering.
“A brilliantly creepy, Hitchcock-inspired thriller with one of cinema’s most unforgettable animal villains.”
ML Lamp, Kilroy Was Here Shop
Link was cut, shuffled, and dumped into theaters on Halloween.
It still survived.
Richard Franklin’s love for Hitchcock shows in every slow, quiet scene.
Elisabeth Shue gives the movie its heart.
Terence Stamp gives it a chill.
Jerry Goldsmith gives it a wink.
And Locke the orangutan gives one of the strangest, most memorable performances of the 1980s.
Not bad for an ape pretending to be a chimp.
If a summer job comes with a remote house, no neighbors, and a butler who smokes cigars, keep looking for work.
