To be fair, ever since Brian De Palma adapted Carrie into a smash hit film, movies based upon the scribbled works of Stephen King have been a dime a dozen, so you best believe that if you’re going to wrestle one of his stories onto the big screen, you better come up with a totally fresh approach. Of course anyone who has seen last year’s horror talking point, Longlegs, and still can’t get the image of a ghastly looking Nic Cage screeching a song like a ghoulish Marc Bolan is aware that Osgood Perkins knows a few things about ploughing an original furrow.
With that in mind, Perkins’ latest offering is The Monkey, an impressively strange horror/comedy that approaches the notion of a gurning, wind-up chimp that has the ability of obliterating random victims in a way that invokes a slapstick The Omen, or an absurdist Final Destination. Perkins has already nailed the unnerving, satanic, serial killer movie, but can he do the same, for an off beat gore comedy? Time to turn the key and find out.
Hal and Bill Shelburn are twins whose father ran out on them when they were only boys, but while Hal is the perpetual doormat, constantly having to weather the bullying and jibes from a sibling who thinks that holding his hand out for a shake, only to put it back to run it through his hair is the height of hilarity, both have something in common more than just their genes. You see, after their father left, the brothers Shelburn found a creepy-ass toy monkey among his possessions that bears its teeth and bangs on a drum once you turn the key in its back. While this all sounds innocent enough, it soon opens up a world of death and insanity because whenever that clockwork chimp brings down its drumsticks for the last time, it means that someone close to the key turner dies in some gruesome and outlandish accident that usually feels one hell of a mess.
When simian delivered disaster strikes too close to home, however, the brothers vow to dispose of the anarchy spreading ape once and for all to stop the random killing and that’s that.
However, after twenty five years have passed, it seems that the monkey is somehow back to it’s old tricks and Hal realises that the nightmare is about to begin again. Of course, his life is far more different now than when it was as a boy and because of his ordeal, he’s tried to lead an empty life with as little attachments as possible despite having a son that he only sees for one week a year in an effort to minimise monkey induced collateral damage. However, a mysterious call from his brother informs him that somehow the the monkey has returned and a new rash of bizarre deaths are taking out the citizens of the town they grew up in. So with his son, Petey, in tow, Hal once again tries to track down this toy of terror before an extra squelchy demise befalls someone else he loves – however, blood is thicker than water and a whole lot of it will be spilt before this is over…
Kudos have to go to Perkins, who not only has chosen to do something entirely different with his next film, but has somehow managed to take King’s short story about a murderous inanimate object and turn it into one of the strangest comedies you’re likely to see all year. Now, that’s not to say that the director of Longlegs has flipped on a dime to suddenly flip on a dime and turn into Mel Brooks, because The Monkey isn’t that sort of comedy, but I have to say, with the dry, sardonic, gallows humour on show here and a penchant for matter of fact slapstick (or should that be splatstick), there are times where the movie feels very much like something the Coen brothers might produce. With the jet black humour of Blood Simple and the resigned sarcasm of The Big Lebowski, Perkins’ work really does feel at times to draw from the more off-beat works of Joel and Ethan, delivering madcap thrills with a strangely straight face and letting every character underact to the visceral horrors unfolding in front of them.
The core of the story – aside from that leering chimp of course – is family and the counter intuitive notion that we should separate ourselves from those closest to us for various forms of protection. Be it a brother staying away from his abusive twin or a dead beat dad putting his son at arms length in order to avoid letting his own turgid family history fuck up his kid, Perkins sets this all up in order to make a very simple, secondary point: everybody dies – and that’s life. It’s this resigned attitude to mortality that generates The Monkey’s tense but ultimately subuded tone – yes, there’s a supernatural toy monkey with a drum set that can cause you to violently expire in some sort of bizarre, Rube Goldberg inspired accident – but we all die in the end anyway, so what’s the use?
Obviously, this won’t be a thigh slapper for everyone, but I found myself locking into the morbidly absurd feel of the flick and while a lot of the humour is of the internalised nature, some of those hyper-exagerated deaths did have me braying like a donkey. In fact, the more exagerated the death, combined with the more subdued, underplayed response by Theo James’ passive twin usually results in some crackers with a tipping shotgun and an electrified swimming pool providing amused shocks all round. But death by hornets, hooves and harpoons aside, I have a distinct feeling it’s the smaller, subtler and weirder details that will truly grow on an audience over time, such as deliberately strange cameos by the likes of Elijah Wood, Adam Scott and Tatiana Maslany and one character letting out his childhood funeral suit in order to still wearing it as an adult in some whacked-out version of ceremonial garb.
While it might not have the frenzied pace of a Final Destination or the choking dread of an Omen, The Monkey counters by just reveling in its oddness much in the same way Longlegs did. The Monkey itself is truly an unnerving object than not only stirs up traumatic memories of the bug eyed monkey toy from Toy Story 3, but feels very Stephen King in the way it’s presented – in fact, the deeply strange sight of it beating its drum while playing “Oh I Do Like To Be Beside The Seaside” invokes the similarly ludicrous/unsettling sight of Bill Skarsgård’s Pennywise doing his frantic jig with a deadly blank expression: both these things are deeply silly – but they still want to fucking kill you.
To say that The Monkey won’t be to everyone’s tastes is fairly obvious, seeing as Longlegs also prided itself on being deliriously cut from different cloth; and anyone expecting big scares or conventional laughs may wonder what the hell they’re supposed to be feeling at any given moment – but for those who enjoy weird movies that just don’t stick to the norm and uses a supernatural wind up toy and ridiculous deaths to tackle themes of generational trauma and the cruelty of mortality, The Monkey bangs it’s drum with malevolent pride.
Everybody dies. And that’s frickin’ awesome.
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