The Monkey (2025)

Rated R for a lot of violence.  The movie is one big excuse to do almost a supercut of the most violent deaths imaginable.  As part of the schtick, these deaths happen and before you are given the chance to actually process what horrific thing you've just witness, the movie smash cuts often to a funeral for the person just killed.  I will say that it does take a lot of the sting of said violent action, but you can't deny that you've seen that violent action.  There's also swearing, but it all seems hilarious to think of when you've seen someone get ripped apart in some new way.  R

DIRECTOR:  Osgood Perkins

Of course I decided to watch this on a plane.  My kids weren't around.  My wife wouldn't want to watch this movie.  Every time I am alone, it seems that I binge a bunch of horror movies.  It's not that I'm this guy obsessed with horror.  I just know that my spouse has no interest in watching these movies.  And I thought, violent Stephen King horror story made by the guy who made Longlegs?  Don't mind if I do.

Well, that might not have been the greatest choice because now I have to write about a movie that I'd have a hard time recommending.  While Longlegs was far from perfect for me, I did recognize that Osgood Perkins was probably a genius.  We're starting to see a lot more auteurs coming out and making genre cinema, so I was ready to line up behind Perkins.  And it's not like The Monkey is even remotely bad.  I think the place that I'm in right now is between "not for me" and "trying too hard."  Part of what makes The Monkey a story worth telling is that it is perhaps Stephen King's most obvious trope.  The notion of a killer toy has been done by all of the greats.  One of the subgenres of horror is the intentionally innocuous thing causing fear.  Heck, it's why It works.  I can see the appeal for a director to jump on something like this because, as a short story that's based on a trope, a lot of the heavy lifting has to be done on the visual side.

I will admit that I haven't read the short story that this one is based on.  I may be way off in my assessment of what I saw because I have no evidence to base that on.  (I would like to point out, in case Mr. King is reading, that I'm more than halfway through Bag of Bones, so I'm not exactly a slouch when it comes to reading King's canon.) But this feels like Perkins is looking to have a good time when making a horror movie, which is a nice alternative to Longlegs because --while the film toys with a macabre humor --it seems more serious than not.  Perkins uses The Monkey to indulge the quirkier side of gory horror.  The Monkey feels a little bit like a mix between a Jared Hess film and a David Lynch film, only with a lot more blood.  Perhaps I'm being overly critical because the movie slightly annoyed me, but I wonder if I would be as critical of Sam Raimi because he kind of toys with the same kinds of things.

I mention David Lynch to do a couple of things.  The first, most egregious, thing is that I'm one of the few film fans who never liked David Lynch.  I always wanted to.  I went deep dive into Lynch in hopes that something would click and I could finally understand what all of the hubbub was about.  It never happened.  But the thing that makes The Monkey Lynchian in its approach is that people don't act like people.  That's done for humor in a lot of the cases.  With the first death in the movie, we have this running gag of funerals that I wrote about earlier.  The thing is, these funerals are said by a overtly incompetent, stonery priest.  Now, it's done for laughs.  But it also...doesn't make a lick of sense.  There's no background on this priest.  There's no reason that this guy would be a priest.  Instead, we just get a bunch of lines performed in an absolute bananas kind of way.  That's such a weird decision.  But it's not the priest alone.  Sure, the priest bit is repeated, but there are also town cheerleaders who do a cheer when anyone dies a horrific death.  There's no explanation about why these kids act this way.  Nope.  They just do.

And these are side characters.  While the first act of the movie, told through flashback, have the two main characters as teenagers, this part kind of comes across as more of a cinematic reality.  Perhaps the movie leans a little hard into archetypes and characters are a bit more like caricatures, there's at least some modicum of restraint when it comes to making these boys have somewhat grounded motivations.  But when the boys grow up and we enter the second act, the entire world is bananas.  Hal, for some reason, has given up his son.  It gives a loose indication because the monkey exists?  But he hasn't seen hide nor hair of that monkey since he was a child.  Now, I understand that Hal is a traumatized person.  But his character doesn't really reflect the things that he is saying.  Instead, he's thrown into a world with Elijah Wood as a fatherhood guru without an actual kid?  Wood's Ted just says goofball alpha statements at Hal without much decorum.  It's all of these moments that are written to be funny, but don't make sense why people are acting like that.  It's a bit of the same problem that I had with Friendship.  When people are supposed to act normal, they act normal.  When people act weird, it's usually for a joke and no one really bats an eye at the weird moments.

And it's not like there aren't comedic moments that should continue being in the movie.  The whole opening sequence with Adam Scott as, presumably, Hal's father is larger than life, but follows the rules on how people act.  He's terrified of the doll and playing it cagey.  The thing follows through on its murder and kills the attendant.  (Also, who turned the key in that sequence?) It's funny and dark, but also lets us know that people are horrified by death.  The fact that people have silly reactions to death later on betrays the rules of the world set up for us.

Similarly, the obsession with the weird actually tanks the main plo