‘The Monkey’ Review: A Splatterfest Full of Monkey Business

Osgood Perkins’ follow-up to last year’s smash hit, Longlegs, is finally being released to horror fans worldwide. The question is: Will audiences respond as strongly as they did last year to Oz’s monkey business? Read our The Monkey review.

This review of The Monkey was made possible by an early screening from Bloody Disgusting and the historic Music Box Theatre in Chicago, Illinois.

The Monkey is based on a short story from Stephen King’s 1985 compilation novel, Skeleton Crew, but uses a much more humorous tone than the melancholy source material. Perkins’ approach to the concept of a toy monkey facilitating the absurd deaths of random people it chooses, is wholly comedic and incredibly entertaining. While Neon is trying to capture the same success as Longlegs, their abundant marketing has become utterly annoying this time. Every advertisement for the film boasts hyperbolic pull quotes about how it’s one of the most disgusting films ever made, yet last year’s Terrifier 3 makes this look like a children’s film. However, that’s not to say this film isn’t gory at all, it features some jaw-dropping kills, but just as many were disappointed last year due to Longlegs’s marketing, I fear the same result will happen again. 

The Monkey follows twin brothers, Hal and Bill, (Christian Convery in Act 1 then Theo James for the rest of the film) as they discover a wind-up toy monkey in their absent father’s closet, soon after, a bunch of random deaths start occurring around them that follow the twins long into their adult lives. Among the supporting cast are the twins’ mother, Lois (Tatiana Maslany), their Aunt, Ida (Sarah Levy), Uncle Chip (Osgood Perkins), Hal’s son, Petey (Colin O’Brien), a grifter named Ricky (Rohan Campbell), and finally, a hilarious Pastor, played by Elijah Wood. This cast of absurd characters quickly establishes the film’s comedic tone in its opening moments as the titular monkey is introduced in a shockingly hilarious scene involving a harpoon gun and a flamethrower. It doesn’t hold back on the number of inanimate objects used to destroy somebody’s body; a bowling ball, a powerwasher, a lawnmower, a pool, an AC unit, and katanas to name a few are among the film’s vast artillery it uses to brutalize its characters.

The best sequences are the kill setups, which culminate in almost always hilarious results. However, in the film’s second half, it sometimes feels like the focus is lost on the kills due to the amount of time spent on the lackluster father-son relationship between Hal and Petey. It does feel like Perkins added on some unnecessary elements like the aforementioned family drama to pad out the runtime of the film since it is based on a short story. The Monkey is a 98-minute long film, yet it feels longer than last year’s 200-minute epic, The Brutalist. Perkins’ films tend to have a slow-burn approach to the stories, and while it works in something like 2019’s Gretel & Hansel, the opposite can be said here, for a film about a killer toy monkey, you would assume it would be nonstop fast-paced fun, and while that’s the case in the first act, the film carves out a decent chunk of its runtime to show Hal be a lackluster father to Petey after all the death he’s witnessed from the primate toy, and during all of these scenes, I just wanted to get back to the monkey business. 

The Monkey is an incredibly fun film, while there are some pacing and narrative issues, it will surely become a cult classic with dark comedy fans. However, those expecting Longlegs Part II, will have to wait until October, for Perkins’ new film, Keeper, as he said during the Q&A at my screening, will be more in line with his previous horror outings. 

The Monkey was written and directed by Osgood Perkins based on a short story by Stephen King. The film is produced by James Wan and stars Theo James, Christian Convery, Tatiana Maslany, Rohan Campbell, Sarah Levy, Colin O’Brien, Elijah Wood, and Osgood Perkins.  

The Monkey will be in theaters nationwide on February 21st, distributed by NEON.

Thanks for reading this review of Osgood Perkins’ The Monkey. For more news, stay tuned here at Feature First.