The Monkey

I'll say one thing for Osgood Perkins: he is inconsistent. That can be a good thing when you crank movies out with the speed of this writer/director, who released two features this year. While Perkins's oovra has been limited to horror movies so far (with no sign that that's gonna change), the tone of these pictures has varied significantly—from the gothic horror of I am the Pretty Thing in the House, to fantasy horror of Gretel & Hansel: A Grim Fairy Tale, to the crime mystery horror/serial killer wackery of Longlegs. With this adaptation of a Steven King short story, Perkins goes full Sami Rami-slapstick-gore-comedy-horror, which feels perhaps what he's most suited to.

The Monkey tells the tale of two twin brothers (played by fifteen-year-old Christian Convery) who find a mysterious wind-up monkey toy left by their father (Adam Scott in an amusing pre-credit cameo), who abandoned them. Once they wind up the monkey, a series of unfortunate and wild accidental deaths begins to tear apart the already threadbare bonds of their family. We then jump twenty-five years later, with the now Theo James twins played by Theo James, to when the monkey begins a new killing spree, forcing the more sensitive brother to step up and try to put an end to this family curse before passing it on to his own son.

Perkins's nihilism is on full display in this picture and, for more than half of its short running time, he scores some pretty big laughs with all the inventive ways this freaky little wind-up monkey can cause people to ring down the curtain and join the choir invisible. And considering this is a goofy comedy-horror splatter picture, the story has a good deal more forward momentum and narrative cohesion than the interminable, unforgivably inept Longlegs. Unfortunately, movies like this invariably run out of gas well before the third act. A filmmaker really needs to create a climax that both surprises us and outdoes everything he's put on screen up until that point, and Perkins doesn't really do either. The laughs pretty much stop for good once we get to Elijah Wood's ill-conceived cameo. The last twenty-five minutes of this 98-minute feature feel pretty interminable.