The Monkey Review

“Everybody dies. Some of us peacefully and in our sleep, and some of us... horribly. And that's life.” – Lois

Or… as the uncensored movie poster shown above puts it, “Everybody dies and that’s f*cked up”.

As a long-time reader and fan, if there’s a new Stephen King adaptation playing at the multiplex, the world stops as far as I’m concerned. I’m in. Some are truly great milestones of quality cinema, like The Shawshank Redemption and The Green Mile, and to a degree, The Shining (though I prefer the TV miniseries for its greater accuracy to the novel) Pet Sematary (original, not the remake, same with Carrie) It, Misery, The Dark Half. I love Christine, though I feel it would’ve worked better as a three- hour made-for-TV two parter, as the original Salem’s Lot was. Then, of course, we have the truly dire stuff like The Lawnmower Man, and The Mangler which really didn’t work and I try to forget.

Back in 1985, I was gifted my first Stephen King hardback at Christmas by a close friend. It was Skeleton Crew a collection of his short stories, kicking off with The Mist. I devoured it. As I recall, it was the first King work I had read. My standout story was The Monkey. That one really caught my imagination, featuring a cymbal playing wind-up toy monkey whose beating cymbals were a portent of death, and a child’s attempts to dispose of it – but it keeps coming back. I haven’t read it since then, but intend to. In fact, I need to revisit all those old friends from forty years ago, they saw me safely through some tough times over the next several decades. Times may change, but a new Stephen King novel was and is a constant source of comfort. (And thankfully, he’s prolific.)

So, with my intention to revisit Skeleton Crew lurking as ever somewhere in the back of my mind, I took my seat at the multiplex late last autumn to watch I think it was Terrifier 3, when a trailer for The Monkey hit the screen – and I knew exactly what it was before the title was shown, despite being completely unaware that the film was in production. I’ve been looking forward to it ever since.

The fact that this is an Osgood Perkins film just fuelled the optimism. The last film of his I saw was last year’s Longlegs which was a perfect showcase for Nicolas Cage’s deranged style of acting. Perkins writing and directing a film based on a favourite King tale is a perfect concoction.

The film opens with a man dressed in a pilot’s uniform trying to drop off a novelty toy wind-up monkey who plays a drum when wound up (there was a supposed copyright issue with a cymbal playing monkey as I understand) at a thrift store. The proprietor is reluctant, the pilot seems desperate. The toy starts to play its drum, which sets off a chain reaction resulting in the proprietor’s messy death. In desperation, the pilot takes a flame thrower to the toy.

We already have a sense of the style Perkins adopts here, as we catch up with the pilot’s twin sons, Hal & Bill (both played by Christian Convery) who are going through their father’s stuff. He’s gone missing a long time ago, presumed still alive but the fact they find the intact monkey without so much as a scratch on him in a box makes me think dad may be long gone to his maker. Curious, the kids wind up the toy and things start to happen. Their babysitter is decapitated in a sushi bar for starters. And that’s just the beginning.

Gruesome deaths happen when the monkey plays his drum, and the boys become desperate to get rid of him, but the damn thing keeps coming back, even into their adulthood (when the twins are played by Theo James) and the death toll grows as does the suspicion that the monkey is being used for revenge for an injustice long ago.

As with a fair few of King’s works, the film differs radically from the story I remember reading, though it’s fair to point out that was forty years ago and some of the details might’ve become a little fuzzy to say the least. But that doesn’t mean it’s not a great movie. The written word has the benefit of the reader’s imagination bringing the words to visual life, and I remember it being memorably un-nerving. I guess a mechanical monkey, sinister as those things can be (I don’t have one in my home any more than I’d have a Ouija board) would be difficult to portray as menacing or malevolent on the big screen, particularly with today’s cynical audiences.

So the horror in the movie doesn’t come from the monkey, it comes from the mayhem the monkey causes and the ingenious gore effects which are more on the side of shocking. This is the current horror trend, I think. Over the top gore splattered across the screen with excessive gruesomeness. And I guess it’s a reflection on today’s audiences that films that wouldn’t have seen the light of day past the censor not that long ago make big money these days – the Terrifier films prove that. This isn’t new – look back to Sam Raimi’s Evil Dead and Evil Dead 2, the sequel in particular is so over the top, it’s in a high orbit – but (and this is the important part, kids) it’s played for laughs – they’re too far out to be taken seriously and audiences, certainly the ones I’ve seen these movies with, treat them as such. In fact, if you DO take them seriously, then you’re not the intended audience and will probably be baying to the Daily Mail for its immediate banning.

As it stands, it’s a great, fun movie. As with Christine, which I can enjoy as an awesome book with only the highlights in the John Carpenter movie, I can enjoy The Monkey as a creepy short story to read before bed, and I can enjoy the outlandish antics of the film on a different level.

Make sure you watch to the very end, there’s a sting, showing a teaser of Osgood Perkins’ next movie, The Keeper.

Rob Rating = 9