did they actually gas that rhesus?
Sure looked real.
shareNo, at least not lethally. It's explained in the movie trivia that CO2 was used to knock the monkey out, but then it was immediately revived after the scene. There's also a goof item about it, that if you look closely at the end of the scene, you can see a reflection of the people coming in quickly to revive the monkey.
Meanwhile, as shown in a goof entry that I provided, in the movie Andromeda is shown as only able to survive and multiply within a narrow range of pH, especially blood pH in its victims. Normal human blood pH is within this range, but that of both mice and monkeys - in particular the rhesus monkeys shown in the movie - are outside Andromeda's range. Thus, the laboratory test mice and monkeys shown in the movie would not have been killed by Andromeda.
That is, IF it were real.
Thanks so much. I was slightly shocked and didn't remember that scene from the first time I watched this movie over 25 years ago. Today, that'd be CGI!
I work with an animal rescue (dogs and cats) so I was shocked! I bet they couldn't do that today.
Essentially, they quickly starved the monkey of oxygen until it passed out, then immediately stopped the CO2 and pumped in fresh, pure oxygen to revive it.
To put it into modern, human context, it's not that far removed from the so-called 'non-torture' interrogation method of waterboarding, where water is forced into the subject's mouth and nose to create the sensation of drowning. Only with the rhesus, the film makers used CO2 instead of water.
PETA would probably go bananas over this if they tried it today.
shareFuck off. They did gas it even if it didn't die. It suffered just for a crappy shit movie.
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