Dying is easy but comedy is hard in The Monkey, Osgood Perkins’ morbid, but not particularly mordant, follow-up to last year’s outstanding serial killer thriller Longlegs. That film had such an icy solemness to it that even morsels of humor felt like a filling meal but the balance is simply off in the recipe Perkins serves up this time. Liberally adapted from the Stephen King short story of the same name, The Monkey hammers home a monotonous drum beat of gallows humor absent from the source material. The movie certainly doesn’t skimp on any of the gory details — rather, it revels in them — but it barely maintains an air of suspense in between the string of over-the-top death sequences. It’s a horror movie devoid of true scares and a comedy whose best gags were already given away in the superb red-band trailer.
The Monkey centers around the Shelburn family circa 1999, with pilot Petey (Adam Scott) deserting his wife Lois (Tatiana Maslany) and twin sons Hal & Bill (both played by Christian Convery) one day. When rifling through their dad’s left-behinds, the boys find a wind-up toy monkey that seems to cause a random person to die horribly every time its key is turned. After several ill-advised turns and subsequent drum rolls, Hal & Bill attempt to destroy, and eventually bury, the simian souvenir before it can do any more damage. 25 years later, Hal & Bill (both played as adults by Theo James) are estranged from one another but when their aunt Ida (Sarah Levy) dies near where they trapped the monkey, they must reckon with the malevolent force for good.
Much of The Monkey delights in what kind of violent scenarios this evil device can supernaturally conjure from seemingly innocuous circumstances, similarly to how Death works in the Final Destination series. While not all the killings are fashioned with Rube Goldberg-like synergy, some involve multiple elements conspiring together for sudden carnage, like the one in the gut-spinning prologue set in a pawn shop. Others are such comic overkill, as when 67 horses trample on top of a camper in a sleeping bag, that we’re not meant to be terrified by the circumstances as much as amused that such random tragedy could even take place. To this end, Osgood Perkins does come up with creative enough demises to make The Monkey almost work as a tongue-in-cheek splatter film.
But Perkins wants to have his blood-battered cake and eat it too and there’s not enough else here to keep one’s stomach full. Much of the drama hinges on the fraught relationship between Hal and his son Petey (played by Colin O’Brien) but their story isn’t nearly interesting enough to hold as the centerpiece of the plot. The acting between Theo James and O’Brien is stilted and unconvincing, even given that they’re playing two characters who aren’t on good terms with one another. There are well-known actors who only pop up for one scene each, while there are others lesser known who stick around for much longer but aren’t exactly a welcome addition. Heading up the movie’s best running joke, Nicco Del Rio hits the sweet spot as a beleaguered young priest tasked with leading increasingly bizarre funerals on behalf of the small town.
The inevitability of death is certainly a weighty central theme for a horror film to tackle but the issue is that The Monkey really doesn’t bother exploring it in an especially nuanced manner. “Everybody dies and that’s life,” Lois laments — the phrasing in the film’s official tagline is decidedly more colorful — but the sentiment isn’t really unpacked beyond that in the text. It’s more intriguing to infer what Osgood Perkins, whose parents both had tragically notable ends to their lives, feels about the chaotic cruelty of the universe assigning each person an inescapable demise. Now that Oz got The Monkey off his back, here’s hoping he can return to the staid supernatural scares that seem to better speak to his sensibilities as a storyteller.
Score – 2.5/5
New movies coming this weekend:
Playing in theaters is Last Breath, a survival thriller starring Woody Harrelson and Simu Liu, which tells the true story of seasoned deep-sea divers as they battle the raging elements to rescue their crew mate trapped hundreds of feet below the ocean’s surface.
Also coming to theaters is My Dead Friend Zoe, a dramedy starring Sonequa Martin-Green and Natalie Morales, about a female Afghanistan Army vet who comes head to head with her Vietnam vet grandfather at the family’s ancestral lake house.
Premiering on Netflix is Demon City, an action movie starring Tomu Ikuta and Masahiro Higashide, telling the story of an ex-hitman out for revenge after he’s framed for his family’s murder and left for dead by masked “demons” who have taken over the city.