Jason Bailey
Well, Osgood Perkins, you had a good run. The gifted horror filmmaker, who helmed the moody tone poems The Blackcoat’s Daughter, I Am the Pretty Thing That Lives in the House, and Gretel and Hansel and had a sleeper hit with last year’s Silence of the Lambs riff Longlegs, starts his adaptation of Stephen King’s vintage short story The Monkey promisingly, with a crackerjack pre-title sequence in an antique shop. A sweaty, blood-soaked man (Adam Scott, who knows exactly what movie he’s in) is desperately attempting to return a creepy organ grinder monkey, which he says did not go over as well as he’d predicted. In this gory, clever sequence, we learn how the “toy” works; it has a little drum, and when it raises the drumstick look out, because when it hits the skin, someone’s gonna die—which, of course, we watch, in horror.
It’s a smart set-up; we learn the logistics, so for the roughly hour and half that follows, when the drumstick goes up, we’re waiting for the trap to snap. We meet our protagonist, Hal, as a boy, a picked-on and lonely kid whose only company is in the form of his douchey, (barely) older twin brother. They find the monkey, and its instructions (“Turn the key, see what happens”), and “accidents” start happening. “It’s a bad… magic… killer monkey!” Hal explains, and that’s the sum of it.
The Monkey is well-directed at a technical level—the craft is impeccable, Perkins builds his dread with well-practiced skill, he stages some inventive kills (and close calls), and his sound design is playful and unnerving. And the monkey, by now a standby in genre movies (King’s story was originally published in 1980, then expanded for his 1985 collection Skeleton Crew), is appropriately creepy.
But Perkins’s mastery of tone, so flawless in his previous pictures, is absolutely out to lunch here. His screenplay departs sharply from the spirit of King’s story, which he’s turned from a mournful creep-out into a broad, silly horror-comedy. (“It wasn’t going to be dreadfully sombre,” he explained in an interview with SFX magazine. “It was going to be more comedic, and cosy, which I think seemed correct for a movie about a toy.”) But horror-comedy is a tricky hybrid, harder than it looks; laughing and screaming can operate from the same impulse, relieving and releasing tension, but it’s easy for them to work at cross-purposes.
That’s what happens here. Too many of the comic interludes and asides simply aren’t funny— and it’s not that they’re just unfunny, but desperately, direly, annoyingly unfunny, straining and sweaty, like watching a YouTube video by a bunch of improv comics you’ll (hopefully) never see again. Perkins fills these scenes with broad caricatures, witless dialogue, and stranded actors “trying to be funny,” which, as ever, is merely uncomfortable. Some of the bits are so unsuccessful, like the rambling eulogy of a clueless pastor or Elijah Wood’s undercooked cameo as a parenting guru, that they seem to beg for explanations that never appear. By the time the cheerleaders show up at a grisly crime scene, The Monkey feels less like Perkins’s Longlegs follow-up and more like one of those dreadful ‘90s Zucker-Abrams-Zucker rip-offs, like Spy Hard or Repossessed.
As a general rule, laughs work best as temporary relief for scares, and some of the sideways comic material works—the nihilistic rants of the boys’ single mom (a sharp and funny Tatiana Maslany), or the resignation of their eventual caretaker, Uncle Chip (played by Perkins himself), who shrugs, “We’re gonna do our very best with you boys. It’s just that our very best might be… pretty bad.” Theo James does his best with the dual role of the grown twins, but he can’t do much; one is a cypher and the other is a cartoon. Christian Convery, however, is so good in the richer roles of the younger twins that I didn’t realize, while watching, that they were played by the same actor.
Overall, The Monkey is a gross miscalculation, which is a real shame considering the picture’s pedigree. The comedy undercuts the tension, and reduces any of the emotional stakes Perkins attempts with the ostensibly earnest estranged father/son and brother/brother material late in the picture. Perkins is a skilled craftsman of horror and suspense, and while I admire his attempt to expand his toolbox, he simply doesn’t have a flair for comedy. Remember when Aaron Sorkin insisted on writing the wacky, SNL-style sketches for Studio 60, and basically undid the show in the process? I’m not saying this is like that. But it’s not not like that.
C-
“The Monkey” is in theaters this weekend.
