The Monkey
Theo James plays twin brothers in the possession of a cursed toy monkey in this gory horror comedy that's rarely scary nor funny
Writer-director Osgood Perkins broke through in a huge way last year with Longlegs, an atmospheric serial killer movie that was satisfyingly strange and thrilling until dropping the ball at the final hurdle. This follow-up, an adaptation of a Stephen King short story from 1980, collapses into silliness much earlier.
The malevolence at the heart of this darkly comic tale is a mechanical toy monkey that plays a drumroll when its key is wound. By the final beat of the snare, someone will have died horribly. The object falls into the hands of teenage twins Hal and Bill – one a sweetheart, the other a bully – who discover the toy while going through their missing father's belongings (a cartoonish opening featuring a fun cameo explains why their dad did a runner). The boys quickly realise there’s something deeply evil in their possession and dispose of it, but not before the monkey has turned their lives upside down. 25 years later, the cursed toy makes its way back into the orbit of the twins (both played by Theo James as adults) who are now completely broken people, and mayhem once again ensues.
Perkins throws plenty of gore at the screen during the film's copious death scenes, but you long for a bit of the wit of the Final Destination franchise. The pleasure of those films is the agonisingly slow buildup, where Death turns everyday objects into murderous Rube Goldberg machines. The Monkey could do with some of that patience: its death sequences are all short, sharp shocks, which you’ll be numb to by the third or fourth decapitation.
The Monkey is not without its pleasures. Theo James and his younger counterpart Christian Convery do good work as the chalk and cheese siblings and as in Longlegs, there’s much filmmaking artistry here. Beautifully shot and designed, with its period details intentionally anachronistic, The Monkey seems to take place in a sharply conceived universe a few degrees off from our own reality. But it fails in the most basic requirements of a horror-comedy. A few of the deaths are wince-inducing, but they’re never scary; the timing seems off, the CGI is often shoddy, and we don’t care about any of the characters who perish (bar one poignant exception). And beyond a few nihilistic chuckles, The Monkey just isn't as funny as it thinks it is.