The Monkey’s pause: Violent, darkly cartoony humor trumps terror in tonally dissonant horror tale
“The Monkey” — 2.5 stars
In a 1984 lunch interview with Stephen King, I asked the prolific horror novelist about his approach to storytelling.
“Ideally, I will terrify you,” King said. “If I can’t terrify you, I will simply scare you. And if I can’t scare you, at least I will gross you out.”
Writer/director Osgood Perkins apparently shares this approach. His latest horror film “The Monkey,” based on King’s 1980 short story of the same title, fails to terrify us.
It barely scares us.
But man, oh man, does it ever gross us out.
Perkins adds one more element to the mix: a sadistic, blackly comical cartoon sense of humor similar to the gleeful eviscerations in Stuart Gordon’s “Re-Animator” or the scatter of splatter matter in Peter Jackson’s “Braindead.”
“Everybody dies!” Lois Shelburn (Tatiana Maslany) bluntly tells her twin sons, Hal and Bill (both played by Christian Convery), at the dinner table in Perkins’ tight and trippy tale “The Monkey.”
Hal, a squirrelly teen nerd with glasses, and Bill, an obnoxiously self-centered bully, confirm this after they find an old box left by their long-ago-disappeared daddy (Adam Scott).
It contains a windup monkey figure with an evil grin, a drum and apparently an invisible calliope. The moment the monkey’s right paw smacks the drum with its stick, someone dies in a shocking, gross and hilariously horrific manner.
And it could be anyone — except the person who winds up the monkey.
Take the poor woman who falls down a collapsing basement staircase and slams her face into a box of fish hooks. This happens just before she catches her hair on fire, then blindly runs into a jagged mailbox post that penetrates her skull.
See? This could be a Roadrunner cartoon for sadists.
Some of these abrupt and gruesome killings evoke nervous laughs, as intended, especially the ones we don’t see coming.
But in others, where we witness the setup (like a segment from another “Final Destination” sequel), the experience feels a little lazy and contrived. (What? Another Rube Goldberg contraption as in the inspired opening to “Pee-wee’s Big Adventure”? Really?)
In between the gross-outs, “The Monkey” sputters along on humorless, vintage King elements of failed, disappointing parents, fractured family relationships, bad dreams and malevolent, supernatural entities.
It doesn’t take long for Bill and Hal to see what happens when somebody winds up the monkey. They lock it in a box and dump it down a deep well.
Twenty-five years later, Bill and Hal (now played by “Divergent” star Theo James) have parted ways and haven’t spoken to each other during most of that time.
That changes when random people around them begin to die in horrible, mysterious and crudely comic ways. They suspect the obvious: The monkey’s on their back again!
Meanwhile, Hal, a fleshed-out character with range and an arc, has a teen son named Petey (Colin O’Brien) whom he sees only once a year to minimize the chances he’ll wind up on the monkey’s hit list. His ex-wife Ida (Sarah Levy) is now with another man named Ted, perhaps to provide Elijah Wood with an unnecessary character to play.
Bill, a thin, one-dimensional guy given to scowling and emanating waves of sibling hatred, has tried to weaponize the drumming primate, but discovers that “it doesn’t take requests.”
Perkins, who delivered the creepiest and Cagey-est Nicolas Cage movie ever made in “Longlegs,” suffers narrative transmission problems attempting to shift gears between the duller, oh-so-serious domestic drama and the freakishly humorous mutilations that often feel as if they’ve been piped in from some different, more fun films.
Perkins, the son of celebrated “Psycho” star Anthony Perkins, gets in on the action by playing Chip, a relative turned into Herschell Gordon Lewis-grade goop when a herd of stampeding horses tramples him inside a sleeping bag, now resembling a Ziploc bag stuffed with sushi.
At least “The Monkey” saves its most audacious gag for the closing, a clever bit of timing that makes us think something massively bad will happen, but it doesn’t.
Until it does.
One thing’s for sure: You’ll never look at a Japanese steakhouse the same way again.
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Starring: Theo James, Tatiana Maslany, Elijah Wood, Colin O’Brien
Directed by: Osgood Perkins
Other: A Neon theatrical release. Rated R for language, violence and gore. 98 minutes.