By Osgood Perkins adaptation of the Stephen King short ‘The Monkey’ is a bloodthirsty and macabre display that essentially lacks a direction and offers no clear path or narrative.
Director-writer Osgood Perkins adaptation of THE MONKEY takes a whimsical stab at Stephen King’s short story with inventive gruesome freak accidents comparable to Final Destination, and zany cartoonish violent set pieces that are more comical than terrorizing. From harpoons to the gut, to accidental shotgun wounds and outrageously gory deaths from a lawnmower and a stampede of wild horses, each death is thoroughly gratuitous and shocking.
Boasting a film “chock-full of bloody violence and death” the NEON rated film comes from writer/director Osgood Perkins, based on the short story by Stephen King and is produced by James Wan through his Atomic Monster banner. The film comes from a short story by the “King of Horror” novel writer Stephen King. The story was originally published in 1980 in Gallery magazine and was later included in King’s 1985 collection Skeleton Crew.
It definitely takes creative liberties from the source material and while exciting and humorous the bloodthirsty-horror comedy relies too much on its quick thrills and grisly blood splatter over fundamental storytelling. While the comedic ingredients certainly spice up the film and most of the jokes land, the movie is so random and creative in its kills that it is still at least a very entertaining experience.
“The hard truth is that everybody dies and no one is safe from The Monkey.” The plot follows twin brothers Hal and Bill Shelburn, whose lives are turned upside down after stumbling upon their father’s vintage toy monkey in the attic that causes a string of random violent deaths unfolding around them. Twenty-five years later, the monkey begins a new killing spree forcing the estranged brothers to confront the cursed toy. The movie stars Theo James as the current twins, Hal and Bill, and Christian Convery as the younger counterparts. Other cast members include Elijah Wood, Tatiana Maslany, Colin O’Brien, Rohan Campbell, and Sarah Levy.
The indie thriller “Longlegs” established its writer-director, Osgood Perkins, the son of beloved screen legend Psycho star Anthony Perkins as an in-demand horror director. Both of his parents died tragically, with his father from aids and mother in the 9-11 terror attacks. Perkins has said that his parents’ deaths have given him a “perspective and humor that is evident in his films.”
However, viewers should not expect The Monkey to be overly scary, sinister or unsettling like Longlegs or they will be extremely disappointed. His latest film is more reliant on spontaneous gratuitous deaths like a satire of the Final Destination franchise with how outlandishly ridiculous it can get. Ironically the freakish disaster deaths, while inventive, aren’t even all that frantically outrageous, such as the woman blowing up after an electrical accident at a pool, or kitchen and lawnmower mishaps.
Perkins stated to Empire Magazine in his approach to the material:
“I took liberties like a motherfucker. They [Atomic Monster] had a very serious script. Very serious. I felt it was too serious, and I told them: ‘This doesn’t work for me. The thing with this toy monkey is that the people around it all die in insane ways. So, I thought: Well, I’m an expert on that.’ Both my parents died in insane, headline-making ways. I spent a lot of my life recovering from tragedy, feeling quite bad. It all seemed inherently unfair. You personalize the grief: ‘Why is this happening to me?’ But I’m older now and you realize this shit happens to everyone. Everyone dies. Sometimes in their sleep, sometimes in truly insane ways, like I experienced. But everyone dies. And I thought maybe the best way to approach that insane notion is with a smile.”
The original story by Stephen King features a cymbal-banging monkey, but the adaptation replaces and updates the cymbals with a drum. According to Perkins, this change was made because the film’s producer believed that Disney owned the rights to the cymbal-banging version of the toy on the basis of its appearance in Toy Story 3.
Perkins wanted the film to set itself apart from other ‘killer toy films’ by centering more on the randomness of death and a case of wrong place, wrong time. In writing the film, Perkins chose to give the film comedic elements because he thought it was more fitting for a film about a toy, and he wanted to distinguish The Monkey from more serious horror films about possessed toys. Perkins further stated that the comedy in the film intentionally avoids subtlety and makes use of extreme gore to joke about the absurdity, pointlessness, and randomness of death.
This is relatively where the film went amiss, it lacks the sinister unsettling horror elements that made Longlegs so eerily unnerving and engaging. The Monkey subjects itself to falling into parody territory instead of shaking things up narratively and is somewhat deceptive to audiences. Instead of focusing on the character’s horrifying predicament or their overall reactions or demonstrating any actual mourning to personal loss, it displays a cynical and often nihilistic arrogance.
The Monkey tries too hard to be funny and cartoonish but it just isn’t enough. On top of its lack of story progression, it should’ve been either twice as campy or much more sinister in tone instead of straggling between both while too scared to go past dipping its toes into either genre.
While it cinematically offers an array of gorgeous violent set pieces thanks to The Monkey production designer Danny Vermette, the pacing and overall direction of the film is underwhelming, especially towards its absence of any real raw or solid sentimental value with its irreverent sense of humor. There isn’t any real sense of story progression or narrative aside from Hal fearing for his son and unwillingly abandoning him or Bill’s obsession with the toy merchant of death.
Outside of that it’s all fluff and spontaneous gore accompanied by additional baseless characters that are all half-baked morons. Essentially no-one acts like an adult, there are also no authoritative figures, no investigations, no real mourning or any feelings of grief evoked. The priest is especially amongst the facetious and asinine that wasn’t even remotely funny. The only character that had any concrete substance aside from twin Hal was Tatiana Maslany’s Lois, the boy’s mother who does her best taking care of them even as she spirals after the unexplained disappearance of their father.
The film follows polar-opposite identical twins Hal and Bill Shelburn after their pilot father disappears. Most of the film is narrated by Hal (James) and told from his perspective years after finding the cursed “Organ Grinder Monkey” among his father’s belongings and discovering the monkey is connected to the tragic accidents.
The movie opens with a vibrant color-graded cartoonesque scene rolling back to 1999, when pilot Petey Shelburn (Adam Scott) unsuccessfully attempts to return and destroy a drum-playing toy monkey at an antiques shop. He is desperately trying to pawn it off as it seems to have the power to bring great calamity. We realize later on that this scene is told from Hal’s perspective, which is kind of brilliant cinematically, as it reflects a vivid childlike imagination.
Cinematographer Nico Aguilar, who did not want the world of The Monkey to feel ordinary but to feel like “the monkey’s world,” built an impressive and clever color palette for the film with colorist Bryan Smaller based on emotions. This creative element could’ve worked better tonally and been much more effective in the long-run if the film had arranged a more intriguing scenario in the third act which we’ll circle back to.
As Peter Shelburn tries to convince the unfazed shopkeeper, even as the monkey begins beating its drum – the forewarning of destruction to come – an unfortunate mishap with a harpoon gun leaves the shopkeeper disemboweled. This is the last time we see Scott’s character and we don’t really get much of an explanation of the father’s whereabouts aside from him leaving his wife Lois and twins behind. This foreshadows why adult Hal is estranged from his own son Petey in fear of everyone dying around him. What doesn’t make sense is senior Peter keeping the toy around in the first place, unless he knew the rule and kept it out of reach of other hands. (There’s just one rule: Whoever turns the monkey’s key won’t be the victim.)
The boys discover the monkey in a closet filled with their father’s things and turn its key, unleashing its evil ‘accidents.’ Later, while the boys are at dinner, the monkey beats its drum causing the accidental decapitation of their babysitter. This is the first of many disastrous gory mishaps as the evil toy continues to build a body-count.
Christian Convery gives a pretty solid performance as both of the younger contrasting counterparts: sensitive and timid Hal – the nerdy looking boy with glasses and Bill – the assertive and cocky bully. As Bill’s bullying of Hal increases, Hal decides to turn the monkey’s key once again in hopes that it will kill Bill. In unforeseen circumstances it instead causes Lois to suffer a brutal spontaneous aneurysm and die tragically in front of Bill. This sets the path for the twins as they lead very different lives into adulthood.
After numerous attempts to rid of the toy, such as Hal destroying it with a cleaver, or throwing it down a well it continues to reappear even following it to the twins aunts house in Maine. It resurfaces again somehow decades later to haunt Hal again and fatally tramples their uncle and impales their aunt.
A recurring theme is the randomness of death. The monkey represents the unexpectedness of life and that we essentially have no control over most of what occurs in our lives. That we only have the ability to choose how we react when something happens, which is the kind of bleak conversations Lois had with her sons before her own demise.
Twenty-five years after the boys moved to Maine, we meet Theo James’ older version of Hal. He is not only estranged from his brother but also his son Petey by choice in order to protect his son from his bad luck.Theo essentially does a decent job of playing two different roles although Bill is essentially one-dimensional and a whining snappier emo-Barry Allen (CW). Viewers easily predicted the evil brother scenario but the events played out rather underwhelming.
The writers could have upped the ante by giving us a more developed freakish twist as viewers were essentially waiting for a Fight Club-esque or Se7en unforeseen twist of events. Just waiting for the ball to drop in the third act with predictions such as Hal imagined most of it, there was only one kid all along, or if Bill was the one actually committing the murders all would’ve made for much more exciting narrative twists.
In regards to King’s short story critics debated on whether the toy represented an external evil or Hal Shelburn’s inner guilt and subconscious desires. Douglas Winter viewed ‘the monkey as an external force of chance,’ while Tony Magistrale ‘connects it to Hal’s unresolved guilt and subconscious mind.’ Sanders says ‘Hal’s memories of the monkey highlight his unreliability as a narrator, blending childhood delight with instinctive disgust.’
Instead we get a grumpy future Bill living in some strange obsessive solitude fortress of TVs and make-shift booby traps. He blamed Hal for their mother’s death and sought revenge, spending years alone worshiping the monkey in hopes it would return to him. Bill also learned that whoever turns the key is immune to the monkey’s power, and that it will kill whoever it pleases, resulting in the townspeople dying horrific deaths all caused by him repeatedly trying to cause Hal’s death. As Petey learns about Bill’s existence and Hal learns that numerous people in town have died in apparent strange accidents in the past week following Ida’s death. Hal also learns that Bill himself now owns the monkey, having hired another pointless one-dimensional character Ricky to collect it from him.
Bill wants his nephew to turn the key instead of just going after his brother himself. We briefly get a strange introduction to Ricky, the son of a local police officer who looks unfashionably stuck in the early 90s. Ricky buys the monkey at the subsequent estate sale of their deceased aunt, growing attached to it as it reminds him of his absent father. Generational trauma also appears to be a recurring theme but it once again never gets taken seriously and takes a backseat to the ridiculousness and glorified murders.
As Petey successfully avoids Bills traps he meets his uncle for the first time and is tricked into turning the key offsetting a wasp nest, shutting up Ricky permanently. Bill aggressively tries to force the monkey to drum resulting in it causing more widespread death at a much quicker rate, but once again Hal is still alive! They suddenly reconcile with a forced “Martha moment” realizing that duh they both lost Lois. The scene plays out in such a detached, dull and emotionless way it felt bland, uninspiring and a bypass to giving viewers an impactful conclusion.
While the series of events played out rather lackluster, Bill’s lair did make for a really interesting set piece with its makeshift boobytraps. Perkins and his creative production team did an impressive job of giving the film a feel of an amusement park and an over-the-top world with zany characters. The filmmakers wanted to convey the feelings for the film using identifiable tropes from the 80s and 90s which did work effectively on screen with the mood of every landscape and interior. They successfully conveyed the sky was always gray. And the homes did feel like prisons where only bad things happened. The music also does not play a significant role as it steers from sinister to jokingly annoying.
Sadly, we never get any lore, any backstory into the monkey or its origins. Hal and Petey drive off, with Hal keeping the monkey close and passing it onto the next generation of Shelburn. At an intersection, the father and son randomly see Death, a pale rider on a horse, pass them by. At least Hal finally had an actual impactful memory shared with Petey. As they depart, a cheer squad sticking their heads out of the windows of their school bus are all finally decapitated by a passing truck. We never get the concept of the ludicrous cheering kids, theatergoers excitedly cheered when the entire bus got taken out.
Overall, while not overly scary or sinister, The Monkey is still entertainingly gruesome and twisted, trippy and funny enough. The jokes that hit hit, but there’s generally no real sense of story, the pacing is off and there’s no clear path or narrative. It’s a fun watch for sure, but don’t expect a horror classic or anything progressive or avant-garde.
Neon will release The Monkey in theaters in the United States on February 21, 2025.
Comments