If you're part of the Toy Story generation the way that I am, you probably already have a negative association with instrument-playing monkeys. Whereas the simian in Woody and the gang's third adventure wore a yellow vest and clapped cymbals together as part of Lotso's security detail, the one in Osgood Perkins' newest horror outing, aptly named The Monkey, wears a red vest and plays a snare drum.
Each one has the same soulless eyes, but there's a much bigger difference between them than just their outfit and choice of instrument. In Toy Story 3, the furry surveillant crashes his cymbals together to alert the higher-ups that toys are trying to escape. He's essentially an alarm with a prehensile tail. In The Monkey, let's just say that he gets things done all by himself.
It's a simple premise for a movie — turn the key on the monkey's back and someone dies. We're not going to get into spoilers in this review, but suffice it to say, that the key is turned many times, and the deaths become increasingly over-the-top.
If you go to horror movies to see blood splatter, you're in for a treat. Our own Abby Moser ranked every kill from the movie (wait until you've seen the film to read it!), and it is not a short list. Perkins seemed to enjoy inventing new and increasingly creative ways to kill off the unfortunate souls in the monkey's path, reveling in the gory absurdity of each execution.
I won't give any details away, but my favorite of the bunch was like a cross between William H. Macy's wife's death in Fargo and the scene in The Naked Gun when O.J. Simpson tries to bust a crime ring aboard a boat. It was like a Rube Goldberg contraption of death that trades the precision of the Saw movies' Jigsaw traps for a random but deadly combination of everyday objects.
It will surprise nobody that this movie is adapted from a Stephen King short story. If you didn't already know that going in, you would by the time you see the carnage wrought upon a small Maine town. For veteran King-heads, there are other nods to his work, such as a character with the same name as a certain Paul Sheldon super-fan and a scene eerily reminiscent of "The Crate" from Creepshow. There's a voiceover that evokes another King adaptation, Stand By Me, except instead of asking, "Wanna see a dead body," this movie asks if we want to see a couple dozen. There's even a King-like cameo from Perkins himself that ends so abruptly and disgustingly that you have no choice but to laugh.
The Monkey doesn't take itself seriously, and you shouldn't either
The Monkey isn't much like Longlegs, Perkins' last movie. That film relied on long, lingering shots and a slow, creeping sense of unease for most of its runtime. This one delights in being loud and in your face, with the monkey and his incessant drumming sometimes being treated like a teeth-rattling jump scare that then tries to bore itself into your brain before giving way to the sounds of shotguns blasting, intestines stretching, and bodies exploding.
This isn't a movie with many deep ideas, but there are as many big laughs as there are kills, and that's saying something. I worried early on that Theo James, who I mostly knew for being the a-hole alpha bro from season 2 of The White Lotus, was going to be underutilized as the grown-up version of a kid who got bananas smushed into his hair and his pants taken away by a group of bullying middle school girls.
Thankfully, that wasn't the case, as he was given a much wider palette to work with in the back half. I could have done without the subplot involving Rohan Campbell's character (ditto for Halloween Ends, but I digress), but pretty much everyone else in the movie, including Adam Scott and Elijah Wood, both of whom were delightful as always, was in on the joke.
Part of the fun of The Monkey lies in trying to figure out how each person is going to die. Nearly everyone we meet in this movie gets offed somehow, but as Lois, Tatiana Maslany's character (is that name a nod to the Evil Monkey from Family Guy? I'm choosing to believe it is), tells her sons early in the film, "Everybody dies. Some of us peacefully and in our sleep, and some of us... horribly. And that's life." It doesn't give too much away to say that only one character dies in his sleep, and it is not what I would call peaceful.
Since it's all out of our control anyway, Lois' reaction to death is to dance, which is why it felt so perfect to hear Sam Cooke's "Twistin' the Night Away" come on after we witnessed another dozen or so deaths at the end of the movie and the credits rolled. Just like the young priest who presided over the first of several funerals in this film, we the audience have no choice but to shake our heads and laugh.
If you like a dose of comedy with your horror, this movie is for you. Just as Final Destination made us anticipate the next kill and Tucker and Dale vs. Evil made us laugh at how ludicrously short life could be, The Monkey drums to the same beat.
The Monkey is now playing in theaters.