Director: Osgood Perkins
Cast: Theo James, Christian Convery, Tatiana Maslany, Colin O’Brien, Sarah Levy, Oz Perkins, Rohan Campbell, Elijah Wood
Plot: Hal and Bill are twin brothers who, their childhood came into possession of a toy wind-up monkey. This cursed item will, when wound up, play his drum and cause a person to die in an inexplicable and highly unlikely accident.
Review: We had high hopes for this movie. Film-maker Osgood Perkins has built a reputation for unusual, slow burn and surreal supernatural psychological thrillers with last years Longlegs being a stand out. Now he’s bringing us something very divergent from his established style, a darkly comedic adaptation of a Stephen King short story about an evil toy monkey. The trailer promised some absurdly set-up death scenes and gore aplenty with a well respected cast of comedy actors to bring it to life. Just the image of the wide-eyed titular gadget with his little drum is weird enough to intrigue us.
Happily, we are here to report that The Monkey absolutely delivered on the promise of weirdly humorous madcap violence. It had us and the audience we saw it with rolling with laughter and covering our mouths in shock in equal measure. Every time that silly monkey raised his arm and spun his little drumstick around before pausing, ready to begin his death drum, we held our breath in anticipation of what we would witness next.
The Monkey has been compared to the Final Destination movies, or which we’ve always been fans, but those movies have set rules and logic to them. This isn’t entirely accurate…it’s more in line with classic Looney Tunes cartoons. Every time we got used to it zigging, it would zag. A prime example would the woman jumping into an electrified pool. We saw it in the trailer and thought we knew what was going to happen…but we weren’t expecting THAT.
Hal and Bill (both played by Convery) are polar opposites despite being identical twins. Hal is quiet and nervous while Bill is cruel and controlling. They’re being raised by their on-each mother Lois (Maslany) after their father ran out on them, and its in his abandoned possessions they find the Monkey. Before long they realise the power of the Monkey – wind it up, and someone dies in an inexplicable manner. Every attempt to destroy it or get rid of it fails, with it appearing intact in their home again. As an adult, Hal (James) has tried to isolate himself from family and friends, even his estranged young son Petey (Campbell) for fear of the curse that follows him. When people in his hometown begin dying in unusual ways, he knows that the Monkey is being operated once again and he must seek it down.
With a film that relies of doing the unexpected, we don’t want to provide any more plot details. With the lead character torn between protecting himself and his son and putting an end to the chaos and death, we have an ongoing conflict to motivate the leads every step of the way. The narrative twists didn’t exactly take us by surprise, but that wasn’t what kept us on the edge of our seats. There must be something sick deep down in us all as we hotly anticipate what the next Rube-Goldberg splattering of innards will entail.
As expected, not every gag manages to land. There’s a bit with cheerleaders that left us scratching our heads at its inclusion. For every joke that didn’t work there was another dozen that did. Every minor and supporting character is a quirky oddball and some are downright distasteful, and there’s a couple we were really hoping to see get turned inside out but were left wanting (maybe a sequel?). As we approach the end of the third act, the madness starts to spread quite wide but it feels like much of it happens off-screen. The character stories do wrap up nicely, however, complete with a moment of surrealism that we quite enjoyed.
We don’t normally recommend such brutal and blood-soaked horror to people, but this one is so absurdly funny that we believe that there’s a wider audience waiting for The Monkey. An excellent journey into lunacy from Perkins.
Rating: EIGHT out of TEN
