If a horror movie scares you, swell. If not, no sale. And last year, Osgood Perkins’ Longlegs, about a heartland satanist spree killer, was an A24 marketing success (“Scariest Movie Ever!”) and a shivery chiller courtesy of an all-in Nicolas Cage as its titular destroyer. High on atmosphere over logic, it undeniably managed to raise its share of goosebumps and box office.
Now comes Perkins’ follow-up—same time, next year as it were—which isn’t likely to repeat its predecessor’s success. The Monkey, based on a 1980 Stephen King short story from his Skeleton Crew anthology, turns out to be a blackly comic gore show that is neither frightening for funny; it’s an identity crisis in search of darkness.
Where austere Longlegs was stepped in menace, The Monkey trades suspense for a parade of gleeful nihilism. No one can blame King’s diabolical tale, clearly primed for a compelling horror movie ride. But Perkins’ adaptation, substantially departing from its source material, fails to engage on a human level and barely attempts scares. What it does have is plentiful carnage.
I suppose those who think seeing the bodies mutilated for laughs—in elaborate, Final Destination set-pieces, where rope-like intestines are ripped from abdomens, electrocutions tear bodies limb-for-limb, bees sting flesh to a pulp and a decapitated head burns to a crisp on a teppanyaki table—may find The Monkey to be their cup of tea, or, um, bucket of blood. But for the rest of us, it’s mostly a bloody bore.
The story concerns an unnerving, animatronic toy monkey and vessel for evil that affixes itself to a pair of adolescent twin boys and their single mother circa 1990s Maine (King’s milieu, natch). How many movies do we need about possessed dolls, totems, mannequins or AI entities wreaking havoc? Apparently one more. In this version, the plot is fairly low concept—turn the crank on the monkey’s back and someone dies, always horribly. The trick is figuring out the next victim as the synthetic simian targets his mark by the strike of his toy drum. Not a voodoo doll or genie at command, his method to madness is a mystery, and, like his filmmaker, when it comes to murder he pulls out all the stops of invention.
The Monkey’s protagonist is quiet adolescent Hal (Christian Convery), harangued by antagonistic twin brother Bill (also Christian Convery). The boys are fatherless (a twisted prologue featuring Adam Scott sets the broad tone) and believe themselves abandoned, and Perkins (who also wrote the screenplay) points his horror at the generational spoils of deadbeat dads—namely scarred and their recessive sons, the movie’s most substantive theme.
The boys’ eccentric mother (Tatiana Maslany, doing something original) isn’t much comfort, dancing after funerals and pulling no punches about notions of life and death (hers is coming shortly), tossing off existential bon mots like “Nothing matters…or else everything matters,” a sobering life lesson on the randomness of fate and death (you can say that again).
The pair eventually find themselves in the care of gauche Aunt Ida (Sarah Levy) and sideburned Uncle Chip (director Perkins), who look resolutely trapped in the 70s and as their uncle predicts, “probably won’t be good guardians.” Since everyone keeps dropping dead, this turns out to be a massive understatement. Hoping to vanquish the macabre toy’s horrific tether to his family, frightened Hal first mutilates and then discards his creepy companion down a very deep well.
Flash forward twenty-five years and Hal, now a withdrawn supermarket checkout clerk, is played by handsome Theo James, a sight for the eyes and moderate compensation for the lackluster movie around him. James, who like Convery gives a dual performance as haunted adult Hal and loose cannon Bill, looks great and performs with conviction. Hal also has his own son, Petey (Colin O’Brien), and hasn’t seen brother Bill in ages. He also assumes the monkey is ancient history. Not quite.
Father and son hit the road for their once-a-year bonding trip, to the chagrin of his ex (Laura Mennell) and her preening self-help author husband (Elijah Wood), who announces his plans to replace Hal as Petey’s legal dad. The road trip section of the film, which waylays the estranged father and his distant son in roadside motels and long car rides, bides time for a big third act where James plays both Petey and Hal to the limit, Halloween Ends star Rohan Campbell turns up in an unrecognizable cameo and the dreaded monkey returns for more mayhem.
Perkins’ screenplay flirts with notions of dark family histories, parental regrets and the sins of the fathers visited on the children. While such themes can make for solid drama, Perkins is most interested in shocks every ten minutes or so, which are never scary and feature a cavalcade of shallow caricatures placed in the picture only to be dismembered for laughs. Consequently, the sincerity in the growing father-son connection is awkwardly at odds with the smirking horror effects; neither truly land. Perkins also sidesteps the origins and logic of his demonic central villain, making no attempt to explain the monkey’s malevolence—it just is.
Unlike another recent and very gory movie, Coralie Farget’s Oscar-nominated The Substance, The Monkey isn’t concerned with linking its visceral effects to a substantial theme; it’s merely working toward gags, such as when a squad of cheerleaders have their heads shorn off in a road accident. But beyond self-satisfied cleverness, what purpose does all this serve if the movie manages zero suspense? If only Perkins had invested as fully in his central story between fathers, brothers and sons. Following this month’s Heart Eyes, The Monkey is yet another film that trades suspense for cheap thrills. And that’s too bad, because its villain, in unsettling close-ups, is as eerie as Longlegs’ elaborately life-sized devil dolls. In a better movie, this villain could have been a real scream.
2 stars
