The Monkey

Such intricate genre mechanisms are fundamental to The Monkey’s construction, but the film also has a heart that beats with authentic human emotion.

A sick and twisted work of comic genius where the punchlines punch so hard you’ll explode.

Putting the film’s thesis statement in the mouth of its maternal figure feels intentional; so does the laissez-faire tone. As a result, we laugh so that we may not cry.

It’s a good time, but not a great time – though within the canon of Stephen King adaptations, it’s definitely among the more fruitful offerings to make it to screen.

Theo James plays twin brothers on the run from a toy monkey with blood-splattering murder on its mind. Director Oz Perkins doesn’t disappoint with his ferociously funny take on Stephen King’s short story even if he never reaches the horror heights.

Given its overabundance of empty shock humor, the movie seems afraid to be about much of anything except its toy monkey’s prankish body count.

All this could work, but Perkins never finds the proper tone in what is almost a spoof of the horror genre.

[SPOILER ALERT: This review contains spoilers.]

Some films show you exactly what they want to be within ten minutes, and this is one of them. A creepy toy monkey, a chain of absurd and grotesque deaths, black humor, gallons of blood and the constant feeling that death can arrive in the most ridiculous way possible. The idea works. In fact, I had a good time for quite a while. Osgood Perkins takes Stephen King's story and pushes it into territory that is far more mischievous than frightening, almost as if Final Destination had decided to laugh at itself. There is something liberating about that lack of solemnity: here death arrives, does something outrageous and moves on. The problem is that a good idea does not always sustain an entire **** monkey itself, though, works wonderfully as a presence. There is something deeply unpleasant about it even when it is doing nothing. It does not need to move much or perform elaborate tricks: just seeing it there, waiting with that frozen expression, is enough to make a scene feel wrong. Perkins understands that visual power very well and plays with it, just as he plays with framing, sudden cuts and the anticipation of deaths that almost never happen the way you expect. Some are so exaggerated that they stop being frightening and become outright comic. That is a large part of the fun: the film does not want us to mourn every corpse, but to wonder how far the next atrocity will go. At times that mixture works brilliantly and you almost laugh with a guilty conscience.That is why the comparison with Final Destination feels unavoidable to me. Not because the stories are the same, but because of that logic of fatality in which you know something horrible is going to happen and the real game is discovering how. Some deaths are clever, others completely deranged, and a few made me laugh precisely because of how excessive they are. That mixture of gore and black comedy is, by far, the best part of the film. Theo James also handles the dual role well and finds a tone serious enough to let all that madness explode around him without turning everything into a complete parody. I also like that Perkins does not try to repeat the horror of Longlegs: here he seems more interested in having fun, making a mess and turning death into a **** eventually the formula starts showing itself too clearly. Monkey, threat, extravagant death, reaction, next. The setting changes, the victim changes, the mechanism changes, but the feeling starts becoming the same. That is where I began to disconnect. What initially surprised me eventually became a waiting game: fine, so how are they going to kill the next one? The problem is not that the film is excessive; that excess is part of its personality. The problem is that it becomes repetitive. When the impact depends on surprising you, repeating the mechanism too many times gradually weakens the effect. At first I waited for the next death with curiosity; near the end I was waiting for it simply because it brought me a little closer to the credits.Underneath all that bloody spectacle, the film also tries to build a story about brothers, fathers, sons, guilt and the inevitability of death. It is good that this exists, because it keeps the film from becoming nothing more than a succession of macabre accidents, and I understand the underlying idea: death is absurd, inevitable and negotiates with no one. But that emotional side never interested me as much as the film seemed to expect it to. Every time it returns to the monkey and the black humor, it comes alive again; when it wants me to care deeply about the personal conflicts, it drops several levels. Not because the performances are bad, but because the human side lacks the same force and originality as the macabre one. That imbalance eventually weighs on the **** the end, my feeling was pretty clear: it is fine, but that is about it. It has personality, some excellent images, the monkey is genuinely creepy and several deaths are as imaginative as they are ridiculous. I completely understand why some people have a great time with this kind of gore comedy and turn it into a party; in fact, I enjoyed a substantial part of it too. But eventually it started to feel like I was watching variations on the same joke, and I ended up wanting it to finish. Perkins shows that he knows how to film absurdity, violence and unease, and there is visual talent behind all that carnage. But this time the joke lasts longer than it works for me. Fun at times, nasty when it wants to be, and featuring a toy I would never want to find in my house. Once the show was over, though, it did not leave me with much else.

I didn't know what to expect with this one. The short story was fine but nothing to write home about. They decided to go full blown insane with this and it worked, I was expecting some sort of shlocky gorefest and was suprised by just how funny it got.

Elijah Wood is fun, and so are a few of the monkey's antics. Otherwise, nothing in "The Monkey" quite fits together, which led to frustration and boredom for me after half an hour. The story would be perfect for a "Tales from the Crypt" episode, but what Perkins made of it is unsuitable and irritating as a horror comedy. Theo James and his younger self, however, played their dual roles quite well.

Acting was good, but the script was poorly written. There were a ton of set ups that were never paid off. Elijah Wood was barely in it. Critics keep saying the film is funny, but it isn't. And the CGI is very, very bad, especially for a modern film. Some of the deaths were ok, while others made zero sense logically. All in all it's not worth seeing in theaters.