Project X (1987 film)

Did You Know?

• Lawrence Lasker began pre-production at Warner Bros. Pictures with John Badham directing, but switched to 20th Century Fox after Warner Bros insisted on using small actors in chimpanzee suits instead of real chimpanzees.
• The film was shot in Los Angeles and at Camarillo Airport and at Van Nuys Airport.

Plot

A graduate student from the University of Wisconsin, Teri MacDonald, taught a chimpanzee named Virgil to communicate using sign language. After her funding from the National Science Foundation was cut off, Virgil was sent to an Air Force base in Lockridge, Florida, for a classified flight simulation experiment. Teri was falsely told he had been relocated to the Houston Zoo. At the base, Airman Jimmy Garrett was assigned to work with the chimpanzees.

He formed a bond with Virgil and learned that Virgil knew sign language. Jimmy soon discovered the project's true purpose: once the chimpanzees became skilled enough at operating the flight simulator, they would be subjected to a lethal dose of radiation. This was meant to measure how long a pilot could survive after a nuclear strike in order to carry out a retaliatory attack. Horrified, Jimmy contacted Teri, who came to the base.

Jimmy confronted Dr. Carroll, arguing that the experiment was flawed because a human pilot, aware of the second-strike scenario, would know he was dying and be affected by that knowledge, while the chimpanzees lacked that awareness. Dr. Carroll angrily told Jimmy his military career was over. Meanwhile, inside the vivarium, several chimpanzees had freed themselves from their cages and piled up crates and boxes to reach a skylight. Jimmy, Teri, Dr. Carroll, and security personnel arrived to find the chimpanzees loose.

Virgil was at the top of the stack, trying to break the skylight with a crowbar, but Teri talked him down. Dr. Carroll attempted to use an electric prod to control the animals, but a chimpanzee named Goliath overpowered him and the guards, forcing everyone to flee. Many chimpanzees escaped the vivarium and caused chaos across the base. Goliath, along with two other chimpanzees named Winston and Spike, reached the flight chamber.

Inside, they destroyed the simulator and shorted the reactor's wall control panel, causing the radiation reactor to rise. Jimmy managed to pull Winston and Spike out, but Goliath refused to leave and was trapped when the reactor's wall panel short-circuited, releasing a radiation blast. A fire extinguisher left by the chimpanzees jammed the reactor as it descended, threatening a meltdown. Jimmy and Virgil persuaded Goliath to pull out the jammed extinguisher, but Goliath later died from radiation exposure.

Reception

Critics were mostly kind to the film. The New York Times’ Walter Goodman called it a sweet-natured boy-and-his-chimp story aimed at young audiences, with an Animal Liberation angle that made it feel current. On February 5, 1989, it became the first movie broadcast on Sky Movies in the UK and Ireland. Later, Bob Barker and the United Activists for Animal Rights accused the producers of animal cruelty. The American Humane Association, which had consulted on set, sued for $10 million in defamation, claiming the cruelty allegations were based on hearsay. In 1994, Barker’s insurance company settled the case for $300,000, over his objections.