Image Credit: Neon
Welcome to the latest edition of Weekend Watch, where I recommend (or occasionally warn against) movies or TV shows I’ve been checking out. This week, Osgood Perkins unleashes Stephen King’s killer simian. Follow James on Twitter: @jamwhite, Threads/Instagram: @jammerwhite and Blue Sky: @jammerwhite.bsky.social
While it seems like every Stephen King story will one day be adapted in one form or another (surely King’s weekly grocery list is destined to be a limited series on Prime Video), it’s always refreshing when the filmmakers involved bring their own stamp to the material.
And with Osgood Perkins, the singularly twisted brain behind last year’s oddball Longlegs getting a hold of a King short story, you know to expect chaos. And so it is with The Monkey.
First published as a booklet included in Gallery magazine in 1980, the short tale was significantly revised and published in King’s collection Skeleton Crew in 1985. The original narrative follows Hal Shelburn, a man unlucky enough to encounter a cursed toy cymbal-banging monkey which brings death and destruction with every clash of its metal instrument.
If the short story was a take on WW Jacobs’ classic The Monkey’s Paw, Perkins’ film feels more like his riff on a Final Destination entry as re-imagined by a young Peter Jackson. He expands the story out to include Hal’s twin brother Bill (both boys are played by Christian Convery), a cruel tyrant who thinks he’s cool and endlessly puts his meeker sibling down. Raised by their mother Lois (Tatiana Maslany) after their father Petey (Adam Scott) ditches the family, they one day in 1999 discover a drumming monkey toy among his belongings left behind. And, as with the story’s version, it leads to all sorts of over-the-top death scenes for various characters even as Hal and Bill try to destroy or otherwise dispose of the item.
Fast-forward to today and Hal (now played by Theo James) is still something of a loser, working a schlubby job in a supermarket and barely seeing his own son, Petey (Colin O’Brien). When the monkey re-enters his life, he’ll have to track down Bill (also James) and figure out how to deal with the demonic plaything before it ruins all their lives.
Perkins stages a cartoony, bloody and often inventive series of death, and the film as a whole has a zany comic tone of its own that makes the concept work as entertainment. The big issue with the film is that he’s so focused on that one aspect that everything else is dimmed and underwritten; he’s put more meat on the short story but only barely, and he’s not really interested in what happens to anyone, since everyone is meat for the comedy horror grinder.
Don’t go in expecting the dread and creepiness that Perkins (mostly) brought to his previous outing, though his visual sense remains. This is one to enjoy with a group of friends in a packed cinema for the collective wave of gasps and giggles as the hirsute horror puts its dark magic to work.
The Monkey is in UK and US cinemas now.