Stream It Or Skip It: ‘The Monkey’ on VOD, Osgood Perkins’ Bleakly Comic Stephen King Adaptation

If you know anything about Osgood Perkins, then The Monkey (now streaming on VOD platforms like Amazon Prime Video) is obviously a product of his mind. For his follow-up to his thoroughly deranged hit serial killer thriller Longlegs, the director delivers a decidedly personal adaptation of a Stephen King short story from 1980 about a cursed toy monkey, Perkins twisting the Monkey’s Paw-style creeper into a morbidly comic dissertation on the burdens of parenthood and the random cruelty of death. Makes sense: Perkins’ father, Psycho screen star Anthony Perkins, died of AIDS after keeping his homosexuality closeted for most of his life, and his mother, Berry Berenson, died on one of the airplanes that crashed into the World Trade Center on 9/11. Psychoanalyze from your armchair as you may, but whether all this gives the gory, bleakly comic The Monkey the extra oomph it needs is the question.

THE MONKEY: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?

The Gist: Twin brothers Hal and Bill Shelburn (Christian Convery, pulling double duty) believe their father went out for cigarettes and never came back, but we know the truth: In the opening sequence, Petey Shelburn (Adam Scott) tries to ditch a cursed toy monkey first by selling it to a doomed pawn shop broker, then by torching it with a flamethrower, and then R-U-N-N-O-F-Ts. That leaves the boys and their mom Lois (Tatiana Maslany) all screwed up and wondering why, although the adult Hal (Theo James) narrates in retrospect, “I don’t know if every father passes some secret horror on to their kids, but mine sure did,” words that sure as hell sound like they were written by the son of Anthony Perkins. 

So Lois and the boys get on the best they can. Hal’s the put-upon brother, three minutes younger than Bill, who bullies his sibling with every opportunity, e.g., “Say it, or I’ll eat the rest of your placenta, bitch!” It’s 1999, and Hal fantasizes about dropping a bowling ball on his brother’s face in gruesome detail. One fateful day, they find in their father’s closet the toy monkey in a box reading “It’s like life.” It’s a hideous plastic thing with sinister wide eyes and a toothy grin; wind it, and it plays its little drum, bang bang bang bang bang bang bang, then it rather suspensefully holds its drumstick up for a moment and brings it down with one final fateful bang, and it’s time to say so long to the babysitter. That’s how it works. Wind the key, someone dies, although it adheres to two rules: the winder will not die, and only mysterious forces determine who will die. Hal learns the latter rule the hard way when he winds it hoping to kill his asshole brother, and then their poor mother dies in horrific fashion. So it goes.

Oh, right, there’s one more rule: “It can teleport, and you know it!”, Bill exclaims. After Hal chops the monkey to bits with a meat cleaver, the boys move to Maine to live with their aunt and uncle who are aesthetically chained to 1974 – and then the monkey suddenly appears again. They chuck it down a well and then grow up to become estranged siblings played by James in the present day. Hal is a pathetic loner with a teen son, Petey (Colin O’Brien), who he sees only once a year, for fear that the kid will be subject to the monkey’s curse. As Petey tries to pry some family history out of his dad for a school project, Hal hedges and fidgets and fibs to him. This is as good a time as any for the monkey to assert its presence again, and their 1974 aunt falls face-first into a box of fishing lures, and that’s just the beginning of her miserably protracted and complicated demise. Other folk in town are biting it in spectacular fashion too, so someone out there must be winding the damn monkey. Sure seems like the rival twin bros aren’t going to be estranged much longer – or possibly alive much longer?

What Movies Will It Remind You Of?: Definitely not Monkey Trouble. The Monkey is what might happen if the Coen Bros. and Sam Raimi co-directed a Final Destination movie.

Performance Worth Watching: Maslany has the most fun here, with her fatalistic line-readings, and she doesn’t get enough screen time. But what the film lacks is a true scene-stealer, someone who can give a colorful boost to Perkins’ tendency to write caricatures instead of characters. (Rohan Campbell doesn’t quite cut it, playing a burnout who only deserves mention because he’s garbed up to look like he just rolled out of the tour bus of a Ramones tribute band.)

Memorable Dialogue: Young Petey asks Hal what that monkey thing is: “Stuff I got from my dad that I don’t want to give to you.”

Sex and Skin: None.

Our Take: For some, the variety of nasty kills Perkins devised for The Monkey will be plenty entertaining – it’s hard not to admire the Rube Goldbergian creativity of some of these slaughterrific incidents, and the straight-to-the-point bluntness of the rest of them. The movie is a horror sicko’s Big Boy salad bar smorgasbord of death, amped up for maximum pitch-black comedy. It’s admittedly quite fun, in a glib, appalling way. (And notably, the film’s biggest laugh is an inside joke, a throwaway background gag: A movie theater marquee advertising a horror movie titled The Streaming. Eeek!)

The rest of the movie, though? Cold, flat and empty. The screenplay functions like Perkins structured the film around nutty set pieces he devised, then worked in the plot and characters after the fact. The narrative lacks suspense, meandering from one sequence to the next without much urgency, mirroring the lead character’s lack of enthusiasm and direction for life. Hal is an uncharismatic, dispassionate man, surely by design, considering what he’s been through. But he’s also a lousy protagonist, played as an empty shell by a miscast James, who’s frankly just too damn handsome to play a sad-sack loser, and his deadpan is just plain dead; this is a role better suited for someone with a sharper edge and who can convey deeper angst, like a Paul Dano or David Dastmalchian. 

So if we’re supposed to be invested in this put-upon blecch of a character, it doesn’t work. Then again, that may not be Perkins’ intent, but in that case, his flippant depiction of the random cruelties life doles out keeps us at arm’s length. There’s a distinct clash of tones between the audience’s need for an emotional hook and Perkins’ quest to inspire laughter. We can read all we want into the daddy-issues text and subtext here, but it never jibes with The Monkey’s unapologetically pervasive sense of style and snark. 

Our Call: Unlike Longlegs, The Monkey can’t overcome its messy storytelling to deliver on its potent themes. Disappointing. SKIP IT.

John Serba is a freelance writer and film critic based in Grand Rapids, Michigan.