It’s only been seven months since Osgood Perkins managed to score a bonafide viral marketing horror hit with the excellent Longlegs, but he’s already back to try the same trick again now with The Monkey. Sadly, Perkins has not been able to get lightning to strike twice – this is a drastic step down from his previous effort. Baggy and CG-heavy where Longlegs was taut and stylish, it ups both the comedy and gore considerably but even that isn’t enough to make up for a poorly-paced and miscast story of a magic killer toy monkey that is actually a lot less wacky than that sounds.
Based on a short story by Stephen King, The Monkey follows two identical twins (played as kids by Christian Convery and as adults by Theo James) – the nebbish Hal and the confident but probably sociopathic Bill – who stumble upon a secret of their long-departed dad’s; a stuffed monkey. A deeply creepy wind-up toy that plays a drum, whenever its drumroll ends, someone dies in an absurd and savagely violent manner. After witnessing its power as kids in a painfully overlong prologue sequence, the brothers dispose of the awful relic down a well, before it emerges to terrorise them again about 20 years later.
These monkey kills are what you’re here for and, at their best, they deliver. As the drum starts beating, Perkins sets in motion a sort of Rube Goldberg machine of slaughter using whatever’s in the vicinity to set up a gleefully over the top kill. All of the successful tension and comedy to be found in The Monkey comes exclusively in these sequences (and even they are hampered by an overreliance on CG splatter which makes their punchlines a little weightless), and I would have like a few more sprinkled in.
Between the deaths, everything is on much shakier ground. At a fundamental level, the script here is just bad. The kills might be funny, but the actual in-dialogue jokes are far from it and you’d need a far more nimble comic actor than James to sell any of this, his earnest dual performance feeling out of place in a story so devoted to mindless cruelty. The editing is shonky too – scenes that need to really snap are instead allowed to go loose, way too many sequences ending either a few beats too early or a few too late. Both horror and comedy are all about timing, and The Monkey just doesn’t have a solid enough grasp on that.
There’s also none of the formal control that Perkins demonstrated in Longlegs here. That was atmospheric and chillingly composed, some scenes able to hang together on just the strength of the production design. Everything in The Monkey seems far more half-hearted and, despite its inherently silly and memorable premise, generic. Admittedly, Perkins is clearly seeking to find horror in the mundane with The Monkey (after all, as the movie’s tagline goes, ‘everybody dies, and that’s fucked up’) but it turns out that making the mundane interesting actually takes a bit more than a disconcerting toy and CG brain matter.
Jack Blackwell – Film Reviews 