‘The Monkey’ Review

The film opens with a harried, blood soaked Adam Scott rushing into an antiques shop. He slams a creepy looking toy monkey on to the counter and rings the bell desperately. Finally, an unconcerned clerk arrives from the back office, uninterested or uncaring about how terrified Adam Scott appears. The monkey’s arm is in the air, and as he insists to the clerk, the last thing you want to see or hear is this monkey playing its drum.

Of course, the arm comes down, the monkey plays its song, and chaos ensues. Within the first five minutes of the film, there’s a comical, gruesome death and the image of an exuberant Adam Scott spraying the toy monkey with a flamethrower. That’s the type of movie we get with ‘The Monkey’, the latest horror comedy from Osgood Perkins.

We then jump ahead in time to see twin brothers, Hal and Bill (played by Christian Convery as kids and Theo James as adults) who, abandoned by their father, discover this creepy toy monkey in a closet filled with all of his old things. They soon discover this toy’s dark magic themselves, and spend the rest of the film trying to avoid its pain and suffering, while trying to maintain their own sanity. Hal is our main protagonist, grown up to have a son of his own, who he intentionally avoids seeing so as not to hand down the curse of the toy monkey. I’m sure there’s more that can be read here about generational trauma, the anxieties handed down from parents to their children, but that’s not really the point of this film. The point here, and its strength, is how to cram in as many shocking, imaginative, hysterical deaths as possible.

‘The Monkey’ is a pure horror comedy, in which the horror is the comedy. The deaths come fast and gruesome, each time the monkey starts to play its song, my eyes wandered the scene to try to predict just how each character would meet their end. There’s a joy here reminiscent of the ‘Final Destination’ franchise, wherein every door, every person, every item could be the cause of a hilarious, inventive death, and trying to predict just how it will go down is its own twisted pleasure.

Theo James plays two characters: Theo James, and Theo James with a bad haircut. He is by far the actor with the most screen time, and he is fully committed to this ludicrous story. His Hal is a recluse, hanging on by the thinnest of threads to his sanity in a wonderful blend of comedy and terror. At one point, his veneer of calm is broken after witnessing a woman literally explode at a hotel, and he screams at his son “WE NEED TO MAKE LIKE EGGS AND SCRAMBLE”, his voice on the verge of breaking in its hysteria. It’s the perfect line reading that underlines just how absurd this world is.

Based off a Stephen King short story, this movie stretches the material to its breaking point at 98 minutes. There really isn’t a lot of depth here, but I found myself laughing out loud repeatedly. The deaths are so over the top, so relentless, that I couldn’t help myself from appreciating the grotesque silliness of it all. Note that this movie is not for the squeamish, with the deaths coming in all manners imaginable. But if you can stomach some over the top blood and gore, and are willing to shut your brain off, ‘The Monkey’ offers a fun and creative world filled with death so ridiculous that you can’t help but laugh.

The Monkey
Rated R for strong bloody violent content, gore, language throughout and some sexual references.
Running Time: 1 hour and 38 minutes

Director Osgood Perkins
Writers Osgood Perkins
Stars Theo James, Tatiana Maslany, Christian Convery, Colin O’Brien, Rohan Campbell, Sarah Levy, Adam Scott, Elijah Wood
Rating R
Running Time 98 Minutes
Genres Comedy, Horror