The Monkey review - a grisly wind-up

Longlegs’ trapdoor ending snapped tight on its clammy Lynchian mood, reconfiguring its Silence of the Lambs serial-killer yarn into a more slyly awful tale. Osgood Perkins’ hit fourth horror film seemed sure to elevate his career, but follow-up The Monkey is a resolutely minor, down and dirty B-movie, relishing cartoon gore and comic excess.

Stephen King’s 1980 short story “The Monkey” combined his observation of scary streetcorner wind-up toy monkeys with the bad luck charm of W.W. Jacobs’ classic “The Monkey’s Paw” (1902), in a story really about protagonist Hal’s fraught family relationships as man and boy. Frank Darabont once owned the rights, and would likely have adopted the respectful, engrossing approach of his major King adaptations The Shawshank Redemption (1994) and The Mist (2007). Perkins turns the idea of an indestructible toy whose smashing drums signal death into a horror comedy about twins Hal and Bill (Christian Convery as children, pictured below, Theo James as adults) and their mixed reactions to the monkey’s curse.

The siblings’ missing dad is seen trying to shake off the monkey via a flamethrower inferno in a prologue which also demonstrates the toy's power over chance and objects when an arrow harpoons a victim, tautly trailing his stretched intestine. The tone is sardonic and sadistic, relishing hideously painful and perverse demises. Injury pile-ups are compressed into baroquely visceral imagery, building on the Final Destination films’ fated death-traps with a seemingly colder, absurdist heart. Perkins saw Longlegs as self-aware “pop horror”, and the creative blood and guts here is made for a Fangoria magazine set report in gore’s ‘80s heyday.

Sharply comic cameos include Elijah Wood’s gloating guru husband of Hal’s ex-wife, Perkins himself as creepily dissolute Uncle Rick and Tess Degenstein’s manically mannered, monkey-exploded estate agent. Hal sometimes assumes the maturely reflective King voice familiar from Stand By Me, as he recalls Bill’s bullying driving him to attempt murder by monkey, a horribly backfiring, guilty act. Emotions are though purposely blunted at every turn, a seemingly self-defeating ploy.

Perkins scrapped a previous, serious adaptation handed to him by producer James Wan, feeling it wrong for a killer toy story, and his sensibilities as a son left depressed and angry by dad Anthony Perkins’ death from AIDS and mum Berry Berenson’s in the hijacked plane which hit the World Trade Center’s North Tower. He now accepts such chaotic chance as everyone’s essential human fate, a world-view The Monkey takes to the limit, till even a cantering Pale Horseman of the Apocalypse barely registers.

The brothers’ mum Lois (She-Hulk lead Tatiana Maslany, pictured above) embodies the director’s sarcastic detachment, neglecting her sons’ travails, but providing tough love if pushed. Hal’s dream-visit by her, weeping black blood, is the only real horror disturbance. Reflecting on Longlegs, Perkins noted central moments of truth in his screenplays, “about my parents, my upbringing…how they lived and how they died, the family mythology…I don’t know what else I would write about”. Perhaps Lois includes something of Berenson, and maybe here is where Perkins hides his heart.

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