31 Days of Halloween: The Monkey

2024, Osgood Perkins (Longlegs) -- download/Amazon

I guess we are fans of Osgood, despite never having finished  I Am the Pretty Thing That Lives in the House?

Interestingly enough, despite having similar covers, this movie is not a remake of the 1988 George A Romero movie, Monkey Shines, which despite that movie riffing on the cover of the Stephen King short-story collection, "Skeleton Crew" (which contains the originally published in Playboy short-story "The Monkey") has absolutely nothing to do with a cymbals playing wind-up monkey toy. This movie is based on the short-story but had to replace the cymbals-playing with drum-playing because Disney made the monkey less threatening in Toy Story; kind of. Either way, this monkey really outshines his originating "Jolly Chimp" cymbals-playing toy via the hands-raised, spinning drum stick having most malevolent hesitation.

Enough with the meta, already!

I read it, but I have zero recollection of the short story, but the ten-second research says this clings close to the core of the story, in that Hal Shelburn ends up with a murderous wind-up monkey in his childhood, and later, in adulthood, attempts to finally rid himself of it.

So yeah, Hal and his twin brother Bill, raised by their mother Lois (Tatiana Maslany, She-Hulk: Attorney at Law) after their father Petey (Adam Scott, Little Evil) disappears. We get a brief moment with Petey in the preamble after he unsuccessfully tries to sell the monkey toy ("don't call it a toy! it doesn't like that!") to a pawn shop. The boys find it in their father's curio collection (he was a pilot) and it doesn't take long for the thing to start killing people, starting with the babysitter Annie Wilkes (no relation), and in the most horrific yet comical ways it can. Osgood always has a weird way with his horror. Their childhood ends when Hal tries to convince the monkey to kill his brother Bill, because Bill is a horrible troll of a bully to him. It kills their mother instead. They go to live with an aunt and uncle; the monkey kills Uncle Chip (Osgood Perkins, Star Trek) -- 67 horses trampled him = cherry pie filling. The boys toss the monkey down a well.

Twenty-five years later. Hal (Theo James, The Gentlemen) works retail, has cut off all contact with ... well, everyone, including his own son. But he has one last chance to connect with the boy before his ex marries a weirdo (Elijah Wood, Come to Daddy) who will Hal's son. Road trip! Exceeeept the monkey has found its way back to Aunt Ida and ... well, bye-bye Aunt Ida (Sarah Levy, SurrealEstate). It is at this point that Hal knows he has to end the monkey's reign of terror.

The Shelburn boys are not quite right. Sure, let's blame the monkey, but I am pretty sure they were broken long before that. And no, mom was not to blame. She was quite lovely in fact. But Hal seems quite... inured to the deaths the monkey causes. Once he hears from brother Bill (Theo James, Divergent), who has come completely undone, and realizes the monkey is going to get going again, he's more annoyed than anything. It is a bit of the farcical tone Perkins has on the movie. The deaths are always to the extreme. Annie Wilkes had her head cut off at a hibachi restaurant, Aunt Ida got her head set on fire, and fell face first into a wooden spike, the random bikini swimmer who happens to be in the vicinity of Hal when his brother calls, well she dives headlong into a pool with an electrical problem and explodes, and same for the real estate agent who is taking care of Aunt Ida's house. Lots of gore here.

The movie is more about the brothers dealing with their own shit than dealing with the monkey. Do they really ever get rid of him? No, Hal, and now his son Petey, accepts the responsibility of the monstrous curse, hoping that at least it does not fall into the wrong hands, evil hands that would use its murderous intent for ill. I mean, they just watched more than half their home town destroyed by Bill during his twisted bid for revenge on his own brother -- its a literal apocalypse with planes falling from the sky.

The Monkey was a darkly comedic movie, weird and twisted but "light hearted" by Perkins usual standards. I liked its weirdness and James really embraced the role.

Note about the Jolly Chimp himself -- he's so incredibly lovingly built and depicted! He's much larger than most of those actual "toys" but also much more maniacal looking than they usually are, and their usual image is pretty fucking creepy. Golf clap to the designers!