Theo James in The Monkey.Elevation Pictures/NEON/Supplied
- The Monkey
- Directed by Osgood Perkins
- Written by Osgood Perkins, based on the short story by Stephen King
- Starring Theo James, Tatiana Maslany and Elijah Wood
- Classification N/A; 98 minutes
- Opens in theatres Feb. 21
Especially jaded coroners and seen-it-all morticians might get a sick kick out of The Monkey, a new splatter comedy that reveals new and semi-inventive ways of destroying the human body. But it is difficult to imagine almost anyone else walking away from the movie alive and well.
On one (severed) hand, such a let-down is to be expected when approaching any Stephen King adaptation. For every film that has nailed the author’s gleefully intense morbidity (Carrie, The Shining, The Dead Zone) there are two-dozen more spectacularly sloppy mis-readings that prioritized guts over glory, carnage over character.
Yet going into The Monkey, which is based on a short story from King’s 1985 anthology Skeleton Crew, there was good reason to expect better. After all, this isn’t some straight-to-Tubi knockoff a la Children of the Corn XIX or however high producers are up to now, but director Osgood Perkins’s follow-up to Longlegs, the funniest and most impressively scaled horror film in recent memory. If Perkins and his talented team can wring enough freakish fun from a bewigged Nicolas Cage to inspire a year’s worth of memes, then the filmmakers are surely up to injecting some violent verve into a long-forgotten King tale about a murderous toy monkey.
Regrettably, though, Perkins’s version of The Monkey is an annoying, snarky and slight endeavour that just about kills itself in its bid to satisfy all the many cinema-starved sickos out there. Like the film’s central supernatural plaything – a wind-up toy simian who brings about death and destruction to anyone foolish enough to toy around with it – there isn’t much to The Monkey other than a rictus smile. As Perkins stages scene after scene of gruesome death – heads are blown off, legs and arms are tossed around like pool toys – the film slips into a desperate state of shock-for-shock’s sake. Wow, all this intricately staged carnage, isn’t it such a blast? But even the most dedicated gore-hound will find themselves simply grinning and bearing through it all, desperately searching for a vision within all the viscera – or, more likely, a ticket for the next Final Destination movie, whose Rube Goldberg-esque killings The Monkey so obviously apes.
Told partially in flashbacks, Perkins’s script deviates slightly from King’s original text by focusing not on one main character but two twin brothers, Hal and Bill, who encounter the demonic toy as children. (An opening sequence, featuring a cameo from Adam Scott as the boys’ father, sets up the monkey’s unexplained powers at the same time as it dispatches the film’s most interesting character.) After Hal and Bill lose their beloved mother (Tatiana Maslany), the constantly warring siblings become fully estranged, each convinced that their toy monkey is to blame for so much of the misfortune they’ve encountered.
Fast-forward a few decades and Hal (Theo James) is a put-upon nobody working as a grocery-store cashier who keeps his distance from the world, going so far as to only see his own son once a year for fear of somehow passing along the monkey’s murderous legacy. (How this could happen – or why Hal would even try to start a family of his own if such a concern was genuine – is never detailed or even lightly touched upon.) Meanwhile, Bill (James again, but with a worse haircut) has become obsessed with getting ahold of the monkey, for reasons that are also shoddily examined. Once the monkey mysteriously reappears in the home of the brothers’ aunt, the two siblings find themselves on a collision course toward one another, and whatever violent fate the monkey has in store for them.
And that is pretty much it. While King’s story touched on the inescapable shadow of death that looms over us all – and how no supposed short-cut akin to W.W. Jacobs’s The Monkey’s Paw, might help us circumvent the inevitable – there isn’t any deeper meaning to Perkins’s film other than “check out this cool kill.” And even then, the death sequences are mostly rote affairs that are rendered especially lifeless thanks to an over-reliance on CGI. There is something depressingly ephemeral and impact-less about digital gore – a spurt of computer-generated crimson simply has no weight compared to the sick, sticky feeling you get from watching latex skin shred or rubber guts explode. Get your hands dirty, or don’t bother.
Not helping, either, are the performances from a miscast James – no glasses are thick enough nor wardrobe so ill-fitting to convince audiences that such a ridiculously handsome man might be a Hal-sized loser – and an underused Maslany. Quick appearances from Scott, Elijah Wood and even Perkins himself (fairly funny as Hal and Bill’s uncle) help enliven the film on a minute-to-minute basis, but cannot compensate for how slapped-together it all feels. Best of luck to Perkins and his team on the postmortem, though.
