Osgood Perkins doesn’t have a particularly long filmography, but last year’s Longlegs got him a lot of notice from horror and movie fans. I’ve seen a couple of his other movies, and what he really seems to excel at is this dark atmosphere where creepy and disturbing things happen. So, really, it seems a little odd that the first of the two movies he has coming out this year is The Monkey, an adaptation of a Stephen King short story that, in this case, Perkins is playing as a dark comedy. If Perkins wanted to make a Final Destination movie without actually making a Final Destination, the trailers suggest that The Monkey would be that.
Besides, this one had an odd post-credits scene: a teaser trailer for Perkins’s next movie, Keeper. It has nothing to do with The Monkey, but there it is all the same.
In 1999, airline pilot Petey Shelburn (Adam Scott) is trying to get rid of a wind-up monkey that he bought on an overseas trip for his kids. The monkey seems to have weird powers in that, when it pounds its drum, random people seem to die violent deaths. However, Petey never seemed to come home one day, leaving behind his wife Lois (Tatiana Maslany) and twin sons Bill and Hal (Christian Convery). Bill, three minutes older, acts very much like the jerk older brother while the bespectacled Hal, also the movie’s narrator, is the target for his brother’s jerkass ways. Yeah, it isn’t a Stephen King story without some bullies who take things way too far, and Bill is that type. The boys find the monkey in their father’s closet, and they quickly find the monkey has its power to kill. A tragedy involving the monkey leads the boys to dispose of the ape down a well. Hal, as narrator, explains that he knows the monkey will return sooner or later.
That would be 25 years later when a now-adult Hal (Theo James), estranged from Bill (also James), is mostly making sure he has no loved ones who can get hurt by the monkey, leading to another estrangement from his own son Petey (Colin O’Brien, looking like a teenage Jesse Eisenberg). But during his annual week with his son, Hal learns the monkey is back when people start dying in bizarre and violent ways. Did Bill, who is still very much a bully to his twin brother, get the monkey back? Can the monkey even be stopped? What does this mean for Hal and his son?
Now, I figure comedy is subjective, so I’ll just say it here: I didn’t find this movie all that funny. I could see where the punchlines were, and I don’t necessarily object to lethal humor done right. I just don’t think these worked for me, but I think this is the type of movie that will work for a lot of other people. So, let’s just say the movie probably will work based on how funny you find Perkins’s sense of humor. It’s a gory comedy, and Perkins (cameoing here as the boys’ uncle) does have a good sense of timing.
But the movie also has his somewhat dark and creepy style. It’s just that this is the sort of movie where the creepiness isn’t around, say, an insane Nicholas Cage or a witch in a gingerbread house or something. It’s a somewhat grotesque wind-up monkey that just seems to appear where it needs or wants to. It doesn’t talk or anything. It just shows up. James is good in his duel roles, and there are no weak performances, with the only real jumpscare being more silly than anything else. I don’t know that this movie is all that scary, and the comedy is subjective. All I know is, as a comedy, it didn’t work for me, and the comedy was a big part of what made this movie what it is.
Grade: C
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