Osgood Perkins’s “The Monkey” offers up a carnival of mutilation and tumbling gags, a film so wanton in its pleasures you almost suspect the projectionist of lacing the celluloid with laughing gas. The miracle, if there is one, is that its freshness lies not in reinventing the wheel (or the wind-up monkey) but in letting the wheel wobble, careen, and spin out in a delirious, bloody gymkhana. Stephen King’s reputation hovers somewhere over this project, but for those of us spared the original short story, the movie arrives naked: it must enchant, or revolt, on its own. Whether the King DNA matters is a parlor game for fanatics. What matters is how Perkins handles his inheritance, a prop-shop horror premise that could have been creaky as an attic toy chest.
Let’s be honest: the evil object movie is already a junkyard genre. We’ve danced with cursed dolls, clowns, mannequins, the entire inventory of supermarket nightmares, they tend to blur into one sallow, porcelain-eyed legion. The fact that “The Monkey” is, on paper, just another cursed-thing vehicle is both a trap and a dare. Here is where Perkins earns his stripes. He recognizes the inherent comedy in these contraptions, the nervous giggles that bubble up not in spite of the violence, but because of it, and cranks the machine until the genre’s pennywhistle starts to wheeze with both terror and delight. The premise is played safe enough (no cosmic revelations, no grand subversions; it’s just a toy monkey that kills people in ever more cartoonish ways), but the manner, the flavor, is personal, playful, and full of surprise.
Perkins directs like a vaudevillian, he courts the anticipation of disaster, then delivers it with a flourish. The film walks (or pratfalls) its tightrope between mirror-still dread, our ancient, childlike fear of a malevolent toy, and the high-wire slapstick of death by bowling ball, stampede, or harpoon. It’s a machine for giggling at gore, but also for marveling at how expertly dread and idiocy can harmonize. There is scarcely a moment where the movie winks so hard it strains; instead, it winks just enough to keep you off guard, never lapsing into parody, never too knowing to spoil its fun. The self-awareness is baked into the surface, but the performances skip the vanity of the genre “send-up.”
Theo James, as the twin brothers Hal and Bill (and how often do movies with twins make you wish for single-child policies?), throws himself into the schism of sibling melodrama with an energy that is both mocking and heartfelt, it’s as if he’s letting us in on the joke while refusing to sour the pathos entirely. Child performer Christian Convery sparkles with a misplaced innocence, as if bewildered that his story isn’t one of Nickelodeon hijinks but Grand Guignol catastrophe. Tatiana Maslany and the blink-and-you’ll-miss-him Adam Scott populate the margins with color and nervous flair, but the main players are the monkey, the blood sprays, and the giggling pall of mayhem that settles over everything. One senses that Perkins gave his cast the space to be amusingly alive in a movie that, plot-wise, treats life as a mere prelude to cinematic mutilation.
And isn’t it almost a relief that the film has so little patience for “theme”? The weakest leg on this rickety tripod is the family backstory, which serves, dutifully, if half-heartedly, as mortar between the murder scenes. There is some muttering about guilt and redemption, a brushstroke of rivalry, but we never really believe these characters are animated by anything but the need to survive to the next kill gag. The result is liberation: the film refuses depth, and in so doing, achieves a kind of buoyancy. We are spared the burden of feeling too much for these fools while we root, instead, for invention in their undoing.
If “The Monkey” resembles anything, it’s those trickster comedies that let horror run amok at a party, toy chest cousins of “Tucker and Dale vs. Evil” or “Shaun of the Dead.” But it’s all its own: a machine built to delight in its own overkill, a celebration of what happens when directors and actors conspire not to subvert genre but to fill it, gleefully, to bursting. Perkins is an efficient ringleader, conducting his cast and crew through tableaux of terror and giggles with no embarrassing feints toward gravitas, no self-serious “King” dread to weigh things down. Everything is at stake, and nothing is, which is the definition of great throwaway entertainment.
There will be those who demand more from such a concoction, who want their horror darker, their comedy less irreverent, who see the “evil monkey” as one haunted figurine too many. But in the hands of men and women who understand that laughter and gore make fast friends, and that a horror movie’s best service to us is liberation from dignity, “The Monkey” goes bananas in all the best ways. It’s not a masterpiece, but it’s a fine mess, good, substantial, giddy fun for the audience willing to accept a bowl of violence with their comedy.
So if you were waiting for the King adaptation that took itself with grave seriousness, head elsewhere. If you’re content to watch a movie wind itself up, clang its cymbals madly, and explode in a riot of silly violence, “The Monkey” will see you grinning all the way to the credits. Sometimes the best films are the ones that know how to play, how to slip on a banana peel and enjoy the fall.
