‘The Monkey’ Is One Long, Sick Joke Without a Punch Line
“Don’t call it a toy!” This sentiment is alternately groaned and shrieked more than a few times in relation to the title character of director Osgood Perkins’ horror movie, and with good reason: Unless you count the short-lived Fisher-Price’s My First Anthrax kit, most toys do not cause mass death and destruction. Still, you can see why people would be tempted to to write off a drumming mechanical chimp as a throwback plaything. You put the key in the slot in its furry back, wind him up, and watch this grinning simian go full Gene Krupa on his snare. Cue hours of amusement for the kiddos!
This particular monkey is slightly different from your typical plaything, however. For reasons unknown — maybe the lil’ guy was cursed by a Roma traveler, or became possessed by malevolent spirits previously loitering in a fancy Colorado hotel, or simply hung out too long with an evil clown who lives in the sewer — the automaton’s musical chops causes mayhem and carnage. Once he starts playing, a feeling of unspeakable dread permeates the room. Once he stops playing, shit gets crazy. People get impaled, electrocuted, blown up real good. Guns have a way of going off at inconvenient moments. You’re reminded that human beings are extremely flammable. Heads will roll, usually right off the bodies they were attached to only seconds ago.
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Based on a Stephen King short story from his 1985 collection Skeleton Crew, Perkins’ follow-up to his serial-killer-movie–mixtape Longlegs (2024) is, like that film, highly dependent on a vibe. In this case, the mood is way more gonzo, straddling the line between gross-out comedy and Grand Guignol gore-mongering. A preamble in a pawnshop immediately sets the pace: An airline pilot splattered in blood — you’ll recognize the actor who plays him right away — tries to get rid of the telltale object. The shop’s owner isn’t sure why this customer is so keen on unloading it. The monkey springs into action. Someone is then shot with a harpoon, only to have their guts pulled like taffy from the wound. A flamethrower gets trotted out. Whoosh. This monkey’s gone to heaven, or maybe that other, warmer place. But like a bad penny, it will keep showing up again and again, in a different location yet sporting the same rictus grin, the same dead eyes, the same rat-a-tat-tat followed by over-the-top chaos.
Eventually, the percussive embodiment of evil ends up in the pilot’s closet, which is where his twin sons Hal and Bill (both played by Christian Convery) find it. Dad has been M.I.A. for ages; they’ve both been raised by their mom (Orphan Black‘s Tatiana Maslany), who toggles between bitterness over being abandoned by her husband and a sort of sunny maternal disposition. So they scour his stuff for clues as to who this man really was. They come across a hat box labeled “Organ Grinder Monkey: Like Life.” Shouldn’t that be lifelike?, they wonder. Then, after they take this vintage item out and observe what happens when the drum solos conclude — and loved ones begin to perish and Benihana chefs get sloppy with their Ginsu knives and innocents meets gruesome ends — they realize that all of this murder is completely arbitrary. The monkey, Bill notes, doesn’t take requests. The random cruelty is the point. Deserve’s got nothing to do with it, just like life. The box got it right the first time.
The Monkey‘s first half may take place in 1999, in the dying days of a century characterized by so much pockets of short, sharp shocks of brutality, but the movie itself is straight outta the genre playbook of the early 2000s — what film writer Joshua Rothkopf called the “death-from-above horror movies” that sprung up in response to 9/11. (The fact that there’s a personal connection to that terrorist act embedded within the film’s creation adds an extra element of meta-trauma to the whole endeavor.) Final Destination feels like it’s as much an inspiration as King’s source material, yet Perkins deserves credit for how deftly he milks his own brand of gallows humor and existential handwringing in the name of poking your gag reflex. “Everyone dies,” Maslany’s kindly mother tells her kids after they witness a particularly gruesome accident. True, though everyone usually doesn’t shuffle off this mortal coil in such a baroque manner as the unlucky characters in this horror film, and after so many grisly, monkey-soundtracked murders that resemble variations of the old Mousetrap board game, you start to wonder if the whole thing is simply an excuse to showcase outrageous kills to wow jaded fans.
That sensation multiplies a hundredfold once The Monkey fast-forwards 25 years, and the now-grown Hal and Bill (The White Lotus‘ Theo James, also doing double duty) find that The Thing You Never Call a Toy has returned to wreak more havoc in their lives. One of the brothers still holds a decades-long grudge against the other, and Hal’s estranged teenage son Petey (Colin O’Brien) also finds himself in the middle of a family legacy colored by carnage, but the narrative starts to feel like its beside the point. Any notions of generational traumas being unavoidable, or the sins of the father being hidden from sons in the name of protectiveness, plays second fiddle to, say, what Perkins can do to a bus full of cheerleaders at the wrong place at the wrong time. Which is why most folks will flock en masse to this cavalcade of decapitations and bloody messes in the first place, so: Here’s your money’s worth! Wind it up and have fun!
Listen closely — very, very closely — and you can hear the faint sound of someone intoning, “Eat, drink, and make merry today, for tomorrow you may die” beneath the din of a tin drum being smacked and bodies exploding. But The Monkey is not trying to pass on life lessons. Not really. It’s content to be just one long, sick joke without a punchline, designed to occasionally punctuate a stylishly nihilistic P.O.V. with a lot of OMG moments. You may love it or hate it. Either way, you’ll leave fully aware of the concept that no one is guaranteed a dignified exit from this world being, quite frankly, bananas.
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