The Monkey, and Talking Smack About Stephen King
Disclaimer time!
- I shall try to refrain from major spoilers, but my definition of “major” may differ from yours. Sorry.
- If you see this in a theater, stay through the end credits. No, there is not a teaser for a sequel to The Monkey, thank Satan, but there is a very compelling teaser for Perkins’ upcoming film Keeper, which is to be released theatrically this October. It’s nice and vague, and I highly recommend watching it even if you have no intention of seeing The Monkey.
- I still love you if you love Stephen King. There will be lots of hyperbolic statements made about Stephen King. They are my opinion. Let’s stay friends.
The Monkey is Oz Perkins’ follow-up to his box office hit and critical darling, Longlegs. When this film was initially announced, I was quite skeptical about whether or not I should give a damn, knowing full well that I’d watch it anyway. This is an adaptation of a Stephen King short story, which was previously adapted just one year ago by a completely different team into a 1-hour short film that I really don’t care to see. On one hand, I worship the ground that Oz Perkins walks upon in a borderline-inappropriate way. On the other hand, while I’ve seen nearly every Stephen King adaptation, many of those experiences have soured me to King’s work. More often than not, a King adaptation is a hate-watch for me unless it’s a notably well-made film that takes enough liberties with its source material that I barely notice it’s a Kingfest. Having read a small handful of King novels, I can safely say the man is talented, but I simply will not participate in the King circle-jerk movement.
However, let’s take a step back.
It almost pains me identify Oz (or Osgood) Perkins as the director of Longlegs, in spite of my admiration for that film. Contrary to popular impressions, Oz is not a director or actor who materialized in 2024. He is one of two sons of Anthony Perkins – that dude who stabbed a really hot criminal in the shower because of his serious mommy issues in the Alfred Hitchcock classic, Psycho. His brother, Elvis Perkins, is a talented indie-folk artist. Anthony died tragically of complications related to AIDS in 1992. His wife and the mother of his children, Berinthia Berenson, was a passenger on American Airlines Flight 11 when it crashed into the north tower of the World Trade Center in 2001. The brothers’ grief over the loss of their parents has frequently been explored in their art, and is a major focus of Elvis’ album Ash Wednesday, which you should all be listening to because I said so.
Young Osgood made his big screen debut in 1983’s criminally underrated sequel, Psycho II, playing a young version of his father. Ten years later, he would be cast in Six Degrees of Separation, that movie where a bunch of vapid fifth avenue socialites inexplicably find Will Smith’s problems with compulsive lying endearing while simultaneously being offended, and most likely sparked America’s obsession with our proximity to Kevin Bacon. He went on to appear in films such as:
Wolf, that one Jack Nicholson werewolf movie we’ve forgotten about by now
Legally Blonde, 2001’s attempt to prove that the color of Reese Witherspoon’s hair has nothing to do with her intelligence quotient despite her best on-screen efforts to demonstrate otherwise
Not Another Teen Movie, which, disappointingly, proved to be just another teen movie in spite of its pretense as a parody
Secretary, in which James Spader discovers that Maggie Gyllenhaal has been a very, very naughty girl and must be punished. And often. By someone who knows how.
Quigley, that Christian anti-Pomeranian propaganda film where Gary Busey is reincarnated as a puppy as punishment for his evil deeds as a crass, uncaring billionaire
Dead & Breakfast, the OTHER zombie musical that was drastically inferior to The Happiness of the Katakuris
La Cucina, an extended infomercial for the merits of cooking while wasted on white wine
Nope, the Jordan Peele film that shares a title with my one-word review of the film itself
Osgood’s directorial offerings have been far more interesting. 2015’s The Blackcoat’s Daughter with Emma Roberts and Kiernan Shipka has become something of a cult classic, his reimaging of Hansel & Gretel, Gretel & Hansel, did more for the story than simply swapping the main character’s names, and of course Longlegs, which shouldn’t need any introduction by now. His films are dripping in atmosphere and are often paced rather slowly. I’m deliberately omitting the pretentious and unwatchable I Am The Pretty Thing That Lives In The House, because that cinematic NyQuil hurts my soul, and I know my boy Oz is capable of better.
The point being, this is not Osgood’s second film. He’s been around since the 80’s, and he deserves some respect.
The source material here, a short story from Stephen King’s “Skeleton Crew” collection, is not something I was very familiar with going in to this film. A quick Wikipedia read and a little extra research seems to be satisfactory enough to get the idea, so that’s what I’m basing my book-to-movie comparisons on. That may come back to bite me, but it means I get to read fewer Stephen King words.
The basic premise involves a toy monkey the main character finds, and whenever it claps its cymbals, something disastrous happens. A kid falls out of a tree house and dies, a cat is run over by a car, and that’s pretty much it. When the monkey resurfaces a decade later, the main character tries to dispose of it by weighing it down and throwing it into a lake. The boat sinks, he safely swims to shore, and a bunch of fish die. Also, the main character has a twin. It’s a pretty low body count, and doesn’t sound like much to write home about. Obviously, as a feature-length film, The Monkey takes some pretty hefty liberties with its source material, and it should, because I nearly fell asleep just writing that plot synopsis.
If you’ve seen a trailer for The Monkey, or any of its promotional material, you might notice one glaring change from the toy monkey design we’re most familiar with – there are no cymbals. The reason for this is utterly asinine and makes me cringe, but while watching the film, I didn’t find it problematic in the slightest. Early in production, Oz was informed that he couldn’t use the traditional toy monkey design because DISNEY. Apparently the evil empire held some legal sway over villainous toy monkeys with cymbals after they included one in Toy Story 3. The cymbals were replaced with drums, and while this monkey is a wonderfully creepy perversion of an iconic children’s toy, the fact that Disney is able to copyright an already-existing toy design it doesn’t plan on using in the future fills my heart with hate. I’m not surprised given Disney’s manifest destiny approach to intellectual property, but it’s still frustrating that they can strong-arm artists in this way.
Osgood Perkin’s The Monkey is not a perfect film, but most aspects that will be polarizing with audiences are precisely why I enjoyed it. Reading through the plot synopsis of the short story, I’m sure “excruciatingly dark comedy” probably didn’t cross your mind, but that’s what this movie is. It’s packed to the brim with the kind of morbid, over-the-top jokes and gags that Stephen King would never touch. Whether or not the comedy resonates with you will probably determine your opinion of the film.
When I say the comedy is excruciatingly dark, I mean it. This shit hurts. The film has a massive body count, and each and every one is played for laughs. A man has his intestines forcefully ripped from his body, a woman explodes spontaneously mid-air as she dives into a pool, and another woman falls face-first into a tackle box, removes the embedded lures and dabs her wounds with alcohol, leans over a stove and sets her head on fire, runs out of the house to quench the fire, trips on a vase, and impales her head on a signpost. It’s very brutal and, depending on who you are, very funny.
The comedic elements aren’t exclusive to these gruesome deaths. Much of the dialog in this film could have been an essay written by the most morbid incarnations of Wednesday Adams. Characters constantly talk about the inevitability of death at very inappropriate times, often making light of the situation or reacting in a muted, complacent way. After a decapitation scene, a young priest steps up to give the eulogy, but not before immaturely gasping and saying, “Oh shit!” after seeing the body. The mother of the two leads gives an amusing monolog to her children after a funeral that amounts to, “Never forget: we’re all going to die, there’s nothing you can do, and nothing matters. So fuck it. Let’s go dancing.”
Unfortunately, the tone is this film’s biggest issue. By the time we’ve reached a climax, the stakes just don’t feel very high. We know more people are going to die brutally, and we know the characters are going to shrug it off and go on with their lives. This severely impairs the impact of the dramatic elements, and makes the characters feel rather hollow and bland. For me, this is a small gripe, because I was having so much fun with just how far this movie goes with its over-the-top violence and depressed characters. Still, I definitely felt disconnected from them. For those who don’t care for the style of comedy, I could easily see this being a boring and trite experience.
Another frustration I have with this film is that it felt nothing like a Stephen King adaptation tonally and stylistically, but it took every opportunity to remind me that it was. I was desperately hoping to forget about King, but the movie is filled to the brim with callbacks, and some of them are incredibly unsubtle. For example, there is a character arbitrarily named Annie Wilkes, after the female lead in Misery. It’s absolutely lazy and distracting.
King has a history of turning on adaptations of his work. The one you may hear the most about is his distaste for Kubrick’s The Shining, which he has since claimed was blown out of proportion. I call BS, because years later he was heavily involved in The Shining’s re-adaptation as a god-awful made-for-television miniseries that was quite faithful to his book. This proves to me that Kubrick’s version is objectively superior.
In a shocking Shyamalan twist, Stephen King actually enjoyed Perkins’ interpretation of his work. He posted this reaction to (the platform formerly known as Twitter):
“You’ve never seen anything like The Monkey. It’s batshit insane. As someone who has indulged in batshittery from time to time, I say that with admiration.”
In my own humble opinion, this is further evidence of the validity of the label I often use to describe Stephen King: a punk-ass bitch. To defend my use of the phrase “punk-ass bitch,” here are some completely unedited definitions pulled directly from the definitive expert on the subject, Urban Dictionary. I have bolded the most applicable information.
Punk Ass Bitch
Useless; good for nothing; of little value, importance. Not worth paying attention to.
“Man, Mark is such a punk ass bitch.”
Someone who has little value, think the world revolves around him, uses others tragedys to gain personally in their own life
P. Diddy is a real punk ass bitch using Biggie they way he did.
That punk ass BITCH Diddy wouldn’t be shit if it weren’t for Biggie
That punk ass bitch P Diddy set up Tupac
One who gained money and/or success through no real work of his own but instead rode on the coattails of other people.
Aaron Carter is a punk ass bitch
Someone who ain’t shit, ain’t never gonna be shit, always on some bullshit, trying to start shit, but nobody gives a shit.
Jessica: Did you see what he said about you in the comments?!
Me: Man, fuck that punk ass bitch!
This would normally be where I pull out my Stephen King trope bingo card and whine about:
- How obnoxious his whiny alcoholic father characters are
- How sick I am of being reminded that his stories arbitrarily take place in Maine
- The absolute fact that The Shining would have been a better novel if the shining itself didn’t appear as a superpower in the Stephen King expanded universe, allowing its very existence to remain ambiguous as Kubrick’s adaptation did
- The sickeningly self-referential practice of including characters who are both writers and alcoholics in far too many of his stories
- His off-putting sex scenes that sometimes involve underage children
- The baseball metaphors. Oh god, the baseball metaphors…
- His use of the word “Gooseflesh” *vomits in mouth*
I could easily do that. However, this is a review for The Monkey, not an article about some punk-ass bitch.
Ultimately, The Monkey is a fine film. It definitely delivers some solid entertainment for the right audience, and while it struggles dramatically, it’s worth a watch if what you’ve read hasn’t turned you off to it. It isn’t likely to scare you, it isn’t Perkins’ greatest work, and it’s not technically impressive enough that I’d recommend seeing it in theaters. I had a wonderful time with it, and I’m glad it exists.
7/10