Ty Burr, The Washington Post
Osgood Perkins has become one of the leading lights of the Gen Z horror renaissance, and I guess he comes by it honestly: He did play an adolescent version of Norman Bates, the character his father Anthony Perkins made famous, in 1983’s “Psycho II.” Those bloodlines, if you will, have shown up in Perkins’s work as a writer-director, starting with “The Blackcoat’s Daughter” in 2015 and leading up through last year’s critical and commercial hit “Longlegs,” a fever dream of nagging dread that featured a nightmarish Nicolas Cage and more than a little filmmaking self-seriousness.
Thankfully – and your opinion may vary on this – Perkins has recovered his sense of humor for “The Monkey,” a splattery horror comedy that balances yucks with yuks. It’s a gonzo gross-out tale based on a Stephen King short story and starring Theo James (“The White Lotus,” “Sanditon”) in a double role as twin brothers Hal and Billy Shelburn. They’ve inherited a toy organ grinder’s monkey from their airline pilot father (Adam Scott of “Severance”), who appears in a brief opening scene that nicely establishes the movie’s gut-busting air of mischief.
Once Dad is out of the picture, young Hal and Billy (Christian Convery) do their best to support their disillusioned single mother (Tatiana Maslany of TV’s “Orphan Black”), even though the boys couldn’t be more different, with Hal a sensitive sort and Billy a bully. This is one of those King stories where everyone is an awful human being except the put-upon hero, which means they deserve what’s coming to them. The difference here is that Perkins thinks that’s funny. And maybe it is.
Cue the monkey, discovered in a box Dad has left among his things: It’s a supremely creepy wind-up creature that, once wound, causes a fatal and ungodly messy accident somewhere in the windee’s vicinity. There’s no predicting exactly who will die – as young Hal finds to his distress, the monkey doesn’t take requests. It also proves impossible to dispose of, not that the brothers don’t give it a good go.
Twenty-five years later in the modern day, Hal (James) is a shell-shocked loner who avoids human relationships, terrified the monkey will come back and work its dark magic. That means he’s abandoned his teenage son, Petey (Colin O’Brien), to the boy’s mother (Laura Mennell) and her preening second husband (a cameo by Elijah Wood, who seems to have stopped by with nothing better to do). Father and embittered son do have one final week together before the boy is adopted by his stepdad, during which the toy comes back, and all hell breaks loose.
So, yes, it’s a little like the classic story “The Monkey’s Paw,” except here you get the entire monkey. James does a good job as both the adult Hal and, eventually, his twin brother – although I spent the entire movie convinced I was looking at James Franco, my bad – and there’s a nice gallery of character actors who parade through before getting butchered in novel ways, among them Danica Dreyer as a babysitter with an unfortunate taste for Benihana-style steak houses, Corin Clark as a woman diving into the wrong swimming pool, Tess Degenstein as a real estate agent so annoying you pray for the movie to get on with it, and Perkins himself as the boy’s Uncle Chip, whose demise I will not share other than to note that he ends up looking like 200 pounds of spaghetti Bolognese in a sleeping bag.
The macabre cynicism of “The Monkey” works with its gnawing sense of horror but sometimes against it. The laughs are there, especially in the well-timed gusto with which Perkins unleashes the movie’s gore, and the monkey itself is an eerie creation imaginatively and unsettlingly filmed. If you’re looking for upbeat bulletins about the human condition, you’ve come to the wrong movie, but the callousness can still get wearing, and the director’s haphazard way with narrative coherence (what are those cheerleaders doing there? who’s the dude in the Army uniform?) betrays his lack of interest in anything but the money shots. It’s a fun movie to see with a rip-roaring midnight crowd; watched on its own, it’s a little depressing. You can only shock the monkey so many times before the shock wears off.
RATING: **1/2 OUT OF FOUR