The Monkey is the latest Stephen King adaption.
For those of you who only know King as a cantankerous old man who quit X because too many people clapped back on his fist-shaking tweets at clouds (only to now return, apparently), King was once an entertaining and highly-successful writer of horror and other genres. Some classics that came from his typewriter include The Shining, Salem’s Lot, It and The Shawshank Redemption.
What happened? Well, boys and girls, age happened. Oversaturation happened. A glut of substandard films happened. Now a new Stephen King film arrives every few months with the tedious inevitability of an unloved season…
Yet, The Monkey brings hope. For you see, it is directed by Ozgood Perkins. Perkins, the son of famous actor Anthony Perkins, has a unique style. His last film, Longlegs (which featured Nicolas Cage going Full Cage), may have been really bad…or it may have been really good. No one is exactly sure.
What can Perkins do with a short story from peak King, filtered through his own unique vision? Let’s find out. We will see no spoilers, hear no spoilers and speak no spoilers…
The Monkey
The premise of The Monkey breaks down like this:
After finding their father’s toy monkey in the attic, twin brothers Hal and Bill witness a string of deaths. Attempting to leave the horror behind, they discard the monkey and pursue separate lives. Years later, inexplicable deaths resurface. Thus, a quest to destroy the cursed toy begins.
English actor Theo James (Underworld: Awakening, Underworld: Blood Wars) plays both sides of the twins equation. James is a poor man’s Chris Evans. He has the same looks and mannerisms. James plays one brother as a loner with a martyr complex. He plays the other brother as a man child who likely has a manifesto in his desk drawer.
Not much to say about James’s performance. It is strictly in the pipe, five-by-five
The rest of the cast is filled out with performers wrangled to keep the budget in the $10 million range. Folks like Tatiana Maslany (She-Hulk), Colin O’Brien (Wonka), Rohan Campbell (Halloween Ends) and Sarah Levy (Schitt’s Creek) appear in The Monkey. None of them have much to do.
Adam Scott (Severance) and Elijah Wood (Back to the Future Part II) also appear in the film, but their scenes are singular and measured in minutes. Basically cameos.
The Monkey Business
The Monkey is one of those horror movies that tries to bridge the gap between humor and horror.
Perkins said:
They had a very serious script. I felt it was too serious. 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 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 tone of The Monkey is easy to describe to an Outposter. You know that scene in Hot Fuzz where that broken spire falls off the church and lands on that guy? Imagine that scene directed by Barry Sonnefeld through a David Fincher filter. That’s The Monkey in a nutshell.
Perkins certainly has a unique voice, and he gives The Monkey his trademark look. Its aesthetic matches Longlegs. Everything appears to have sprang from a Polaroid photo. Perkins’s habit of favoring the bottom of the frame when focusing on things gives the film a worm-eye view of life.
Unfortunately, since Perkins didn’t create the story, he is on rails to a degree when it comes to inserting his own little oddities that one can pick apart to try to figure out what he is saying. The Monkey is pretty straight forward at the end of the day.
The Golden Monkey
The Monkey is one of the more interesting King adaptions to come down the pike in recent years. It’s not as lazy as yet another Children of the Corn. It’s not as slickly commercial as It.
But is it any good? Let’s break down the elements one-by-one…
Is it quirky? Yes. Is it scary? No. Is it funny? Not really. Does it have something to say beyond, it is what it is? No. Is it better than Longlegs? Alas, also, no.
Horror has quietly done all right in recent years. We’ve gotten some decent entries that run the gamut from artistic to more broad subject matter: The Witch, Hereditary, Midsommar, Malignant, Late Night with the Devil, Heretic, Abigail and the aforementioned Longlegs, to name a few.
Does The Monkey belong on that list? Maybe…just barely…and only for its quirkiness. For a movie fan looking for something a bit different, they may find something to enjoy in The Monkey. For a horror fan looking for a more traditional horror, Perkins made a monkey out of them…
