Perkins’ disappointing adaptation of a Stephen King story is about twin brothers who hate each other, but mostly it’s about senseless mayhem.
In a film landscape where horror never stops, “Longlegs,” released last summer, managed to have more impact than the usual boo-and-forget-in-a-week. It was a serial killer mystery with a gently creepy atmosphere and a brilliant performance by Nicolas Cage, who settled under long hair and pounds of makeup as a sick, androgynous ringmaster who reminded me of no one so much as the Witchiepoo character from “H.R. Pufnstuf.”
“Longlegs” established its writer-director, Osgood Perkins (the 50-year-old son of Anthony Perkins), as a force in the horror genre. I wasn’t as thrilled with the movie as a lot of people, though. It was most effective when the fear built up around Cage’s performance. But as the mystery unfolded, it turned out we were watching an over-the-top supernatural movie about an evil, occult-doll. It was clear that Osgood Perkins had talent, and that he was influenced by select sources (like “Manhunter”), but “Longlegs,” as much as I liked it for a while, was a teaser for a humor piece covered in tricks and gimmicks.
So I was eager to see Perkins’ follow-up film, hoping it would deliver on what worked in “Longlegs.” But “The Monkey,” which Perkins adapted from a 1980 Stephen King short story, doesn’t build on the promise of the earlier film. Instead, it’s a clumsy, blatantly obvious mess, lacking the glimmer of human interest that even a sensational horror movie needs. The tone Perkins strikes this time isn’t creepy or subtle; it’s downright sarcastic, misanthropic, and blunt. There’s not enough action in the movie to sustain that, though. “The Monkey” is a murder circus on display built around a too-cartoonish-to-be-convincing story of twin brothers who hate each other. I’m not sure which aspect of the film I liked least.
In the tone-setting opening scene (sweeping, extravagant, grotesque, poorly lit), an airline pilot (Adam Scott), his cap and uniform stained with blood, walks into a pawnshop with a wind-up monkey he wants to sell. In King’s original story, the monkey was one of those eight-inch-tall 1960s novelty toys that were spun with a key on the back, causing it to jerk and clap its cymbals. In the film, the monkey is a two-foot-tall sculpted plastic model whose arms beat up and down on a drum, while its mouth opens to show its teeth in a violent grimace. This monkey looks like a monster, which makes what’s going on all the more obvious.
The moment the monkey's right paw hits the ground with its drumstick, it means someone is about to die in the most extravagant way. (There's only one rule: whoever turns the monkey's key will not be the victim.) At the pawnshop, it turns out to be the clerk. A rat running along the rack knocks off an object that releases a spear that shoots straight into the clerk's abdomen. The spear then flies backward, trailing the twenty feet of his small intestine like a taut, bloody clothesline. Boo!
I have no problem with movies that present horribly imaginative, tasteless deaths as a form of operatic horror movie spectacle. The first movie I remember doing like that was "The Omen," in 1976. At the time it was considered a "serious" horror movie about the devil walking among us, but it was really just Grand Guignol-style deaths. With Sam Raimi’s “The Evil Dead,” in 1981, this sort of thing became luxuriously ironic, a spirit that Peter Jackson picked up when he made “Dead Alive,” which was an orgy of slapstick body horror. The “Final Destination” movies were ritualized disaster attractions, and the “Terrifier” movies, with that harlequin from hell Art the Clown (the latest figure to ascend to the Jason/Freddy/Leatherface level of iconic killer mascot), are deranged dioramas of surgical mayhem.
I’m a fan of all that. “The Monkey,” though, doesn’t have the weird “what the hell” spirit of either of those movies. It tries, in its own crude way, to tell a story, so that every time the movie stops dead to offer up another macabre, freaky accident, you can feel the filmmaker gratuitously nudging you, as if to say, “Look! Wasn’t that the best?” However, the deaths are actually not that shocking, at least considering what we have seen in the horror genre in the last 4 years.
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