Writer and director Osgood Perkins had crafted a handful of movies of middling success before his breakout hit, Longlegs. While I enjoyed the movie, I didn’t necessarily catch the same hype bug as everyone else. Still, it put his name on the map and made people excited for whatever his next project might be. That next film was The Monkey, released the following year. While Longlegs stayed on the tip of everyone’s tongue for a few weeks, The Monkey came and went without the same level of fanfare. I wonder why…

Pros

Some special effects look good
Comical deaths made me laugh
Decent acting from younger actors
Less than 2 hours long

Cons

Plot hinges on dumb decisions by illogical characters
Too goofy and ridiculous to take seriously in the serious moments
Certain deaths make no sense
Many effects don’t look great
Irritating characters

Plot & Thoughts

Captain Shelborn (Adam Scott) is trying to pawn off a wind-up monkey toy that he had originally planned to give to his sons. He warns not to call it a toy because terrible things happen when it bangs its drum, but the pawn shop owner (Shafin Karim) is not impressed. He should have heeded the warning, however, as the monkey plays his carnival song briefly before a freak accident occurs. A harpoon gun that had been sitting harmlessly inert is triggered by an object hitting it after a rat chews through a rope. The harpoon is shot through the pawn shop owner’s gut and retracts automatically, pulling a lot of his innards with it, and is shown in gruesome detail. I explain this moment because The Monkey is doing its best to establish the tone you should expect for the rest of the film in its pre-title scene.

After the opening credits end, the real story begins. Twin brothers, Hal and Bill (Christian Convery), somehow come into possession of the cursed monkey. Their father left it behind, but how it still came to be theirs after the opening scene is a mystery. In fact, there are many mysteries about how the monkey and its powers work by the end that go unanswered.

Bill is a little jerk of a kid who picks on his somewhat meek and nerdy twin. He does so to the point that Hal has visions and desires of killing Bill. When their babysitter tragically dies in a freak accident, Hal begins to wonder if the monkey had anything to do with it. Unfortunately for both of them, neither is able to harness its power or prevent it from killing people they care about. Their mother (Tatiana Maslany) is the next victim, followed by other family members who adopt the boys in her wake. When they finally realize it’s the monkey causing these deaths, they cast it into a well. Many years later, Hal (Theo James), having lost contact with his brother, is brought back to their hometown when one of their last living family members dies in an accident, having been the caretaker of their estate. Before you know it, people start dying left and right around Hal, and it’s up to him to find the monkey and stop its murder spree.

The opening scene did a lot to prep me for what I was going to experience in the rest of The Monkey. I figured it was going to be a mix of over-the-top gore with deadpan humor, and I was right. I’ll admit that I laughed a few times at the absurdity taking place. However, I was also rather frustrated by everything surrounding the gory deaths, particularly the characters. Hal is the sympathetic brother, since he’s constantly bullied, but even as an adult, he never really develops a spine. I had thought that was going to be his arc for the story, but when he “stands up” for himself, it’s in a lame scene that doesn’t really make sense. Outside of Hal and his son, Petey (Colin O’Brien), the other characters are just weird simulacrums of people, which might account for why the human body is portrayed as extremely fragile in this movie—for example, a woman dives into a swimming pool that has been electrified, and she just explodes. Bill, as a kid, is a little jerk who doesn’t get what he deserves. As an adult, he’s even worse for several reasons, which brings me to some SPOILERS that I am compelled to discuss.

The first half of The Monkey is focused on Hal and Bill as kids, dealing with the traumatic deaths taking place around them, while the latter half centers around Hal dealing with his family problems while trying to figure out how the monkey has returned and who could be winding it up and causing all the miraculous, gory deaths. As you might assume, based on how I’ve structured this review, it’s Bill. Why would Bill retrieve the thing that killed his mother and other relatives only to use it himself? Well, because he blames Hal for their mother’s death, and he wants to kill Hal. Every time he turns the key to kill Hal, however, the monkey kills someone else.

The second half of the movie is just people dying around Hal as Bill tries to come up with ways to get the monkey to kill his brother. After the first two attempts didn’t work, did you ever think about just killing him yourself? It’s a stupid plot that makes no sense and is made even worse when Hal eventually tries to make peace with his brother and forgive him. It’s a scene that has a bunch of jokes in it, so you’re not supposed to take it seriously, but it just makes Hal seem even dumber than Bill, even though it’s supposed to be the moment where he finally stands up to his bully.

As entertaining as it was to see people die in ridiculous ways in The Monkey, the rest of the experience was pretty hollow. It was similar to a Final Destination film in terms of how the deaths would often be set up, but some of the deaths were much more extreme and gory than even those movies get. Most of the effects didn’t look great, but there were a few short deaths that looked okay for what they were and certainly looked better than some of the effects that were in the most recent Final Destination film. Comparable as they are, The Monkey leans heavily into the comedy side of things while Final Destination plays the horror pretty straight, even though both can make you laugh with the extreme circumstances that occur. I’d argue that, even though The Monkey is clearly not taking itself seriously, the comedy that it had wasn’t enough to make me like it more than any of the better Final Destination movies, and it actually put me off in some ways. At one point, after a nest of hornets flies into a random annoying character’s mouth and kills him from the inside, my spouse turned to me and asked, “Is this just Drag Me to Hell?” I’d say that was the tone they were going for, which means that it might work for some, but it didn’t for us.

TL;DR

The Monkey is a goofy movie with some gory, over-the-top deaths involving creative accidents similar to Final Destination and with a tone that is reminiscent of Drag Me to Hell. Some of the jokes land, and there’s plenty to laugh at in The Monkey. However, its plot is pretty weak—especially in the second half—and its characters range from irrational to just stupid. Even though the actors do a fine job, it’s well directed, and a few of the special effects look good, The Monkey is a difficult film to recommend.

Dagon Dogs Posts