The Monkey review – Quirky horror that dances to its own beat

By now (after 50 years in fact) you know what to expect when it comes to the work of writer Stephen King, as well as its adaptation for the screen. If you’re a horror movie fan, that same feeling probably applies to filmmakers Osgood Perkins and James Wan, who, in more recent times, have given the world the likes of last year’s disturbing, slow-burn Longlegs, and the more mainstream, edge-of-your-seat terror of SAW and The Conjuring franchises.

Bring these artists together for new film The Monkey – based on a short story by King, produced by Wan, and written and directed by Perkins – and that’s a lot of preconceptions to mentally organise before the opening credits have even flashed. Except, The Monkey takes all those beliefs, binds them in chains, and drops them down a well as it delivers a non-stop exercise in subversion.

That rebellion against reputation is for better or worse. On the plus side, audiences really don’t know what to expect. On the negative, if the work of its high-profile creators is what drew you to the cinema in the first place, particularly if you want skin-crawling scares, you’ll likely feel let down. The Monkey is gruesome, but it’s never scary, running instead on gleefully unhinged energy for its 98-minute duration.

In The Monkey, adolescent twin brothers Hal and Bill Shelburn (both played by Sweet Tooth’s Christian Convery) stumble on a vintage toy monkey as they rifle through the belongings of their AWOL pilot father. Naturally, the boys wind up the monkey, only to realise its disturbing power: when it beats its drum, someone dies in a horrific way. The siblings attempt to dispose of the toy, and for twenty five years their efforts seem to have worked, until fluke deaths start piling up around them once more. Now an aloof father, Hal (Theo James) will do anything to prevent the curse being passed onto his son Petey (Colin O’Brien).

Before delving into the guts of the movie, it’s worth noting that The Monkey’s subversion extends to its cast too. Peppered with familiar faces in supporting roles, including Elijah Wood, Tatiana Maslany, Adam Scott and Perkins himself, The Monkey disguises its performers or has them playing against type, so that viewers are continually asking, “Wait, is that – ?”

There’s a high percentage of comically talented actors in The Monkey, and James gets to join their ranks playing both an anxious, introverted everyman and his emotionally stunted weirdo twin. This skewing to comedic performers and performances reinforces the fact that The Monkey deviates tonally from its sub-genre kin. From Child’s Play to Annabelle and Imaginary, demonic children’s toys have a long cinema tradition, but they tend to be treated with seriousness, at least before the sequels start piling up.

The Monkey embraces the ridiculousness of its core premise, going out of its way to stage elaborate Rube Goldberg style deaths. However, it does this with a jokiness missing from the Final Destination films, for example, which have run with the similar idea that death is wholly unpredictable, and comes for everyone. The Monkey plays more in the realm of wild fever-dream revenge fantasies – those “May the fleas of a thousand camels infest your armpits” moments when cut off in traffic – except the retaliation is fired off haphazardly, rarely impacting the desired target.

All this said, The Monkey isn’t quite the slapstick horror of, say Sam Raimi, but it’s absurdist and outrageous, and captured with the visual flair that Perkins’s films are known for. Paired with garish titling and other throwback aesthetic choices, it feels more like the rows of grisly horror films you’d find in a video store in the late Eighties. Or an extended episode of old anthology series Tales from the Crypt.

The Monkey will be too graphic for some viewers, but in its defence, the film is deliberately detached from reality, skewing to the cartoonish. Characters are caricatures and the film itself exists outside of recognisable time. While its flashback scenes are dated 1999, there is little to nothing that convinces audiences of this setting. The same goes for the present day. This detachment means that you can laugh guilt-free at the macabre deaths between mouthfuls of popcorn.

The trade-off, though, is that The Monkey has next to no emotional impact and, by extension, memorability. There are a few flashes of relatability, largely thanks to Maslany’s frank mom figure, but this isn’t a movie that will haunt you on any level. It’s a good gory time in the moment but its dark, naughty pleasures are fleeting.

The Monkey comes to South African cinemas on 28 February, having released in North America one week earlier.