The Monkey gets right down to business. A man attempts to return a drum-playing simian toy to an antique shop. He warns the salesman not to let the drum stick drop. Of course, he does just that and is disembowelled.
Anyone familiar with Stephen King’s early work will know that there will be horror and people will die in the most inventively cruel ways. Give this material to a director like Osgood Perkins (Longlegs), and dark humour can be expected too.
In the nightmarish The Monkey, shocked chuckles accompany gross-out chills. The only concession made for the faint-hearted is that warnings are given of impending deaths.
But how that death will occur is always appalling. And how scary can the big, black eyes and macabre wide grin of a children’s toy get? The film counts the ways.
Twin brothers Hal and Bill (Christian Convery as children, Theo James as adults), discover the wind-up toy among the possessions of their father, who had abandoned the family. The box says “Like Life” and not “lifelike”, but at that age, they don’t know the difference.
After tinkering with the toy leads to the death of their mother (Tatiana Maslany) – who had morbidly said a few scenes ago, “Everybody dies, and that’s life” – the twins are taken in by their aunt and uncle. Their attempts to destroy the monkey fail, so they throw it away.
The adult Hal is estranged from his nasty twin. Hal also stays away from his wife and son Petey (Colin O’ Brien) for fear of inadvertently harming them. Then 25 years later, the monkey reappears.
The gallows humour, which plays unabashedly to the gallery, is interspersed with milder scenes, such as a young priest who addressed mourners in a flippant manner, or the uncle who warns Hal that he and his wife will probably do a lousy job of raising the boys. (Osgood Perkins is the son of Psycho star Anthony Perkins),
Unfortunately, when so much violence has been unleashed on innocent people (the worst of it aimed at women), the shocks tend to get tedious. Even at a 98-minute runtime, exhaustion sets in.
The glee with which Nico Aguilar’s camera captures the malevolent set-up seems desensitising. A man literally flattened by a stampede of horses (nothing is left to the imagination) may be perversely funny. But a woman being blown up to bits is just tragic and tasteless too.
Theo James between the meek Hal and the vicious Bill with his mannerisms and expressions. But it’s the evil monkey that sucks up all the attention.
There is some kind of moral payoff, even if it is covered in gore. But The Monkey isn’t the kind of film that encourages rumination on coping with trauma, holding on to grudges or the self-defeating nature of violence. As a collection of Halloween gags, with good support from the VFX teams, the film works as well as any horror-comedy that has nothing more to offer except tried-and-tested genre conventions.
