2/23/2025 2:33 PM CST

Dear Reader,

I have all the same blogs brewing on the back burner that I have promised before. But this week we get a review of Osgood Perkins’s The Monkey, a reimagining of the Stephen King short story of the same name.

Enjoy!

The Monkey is a Campy Final Destination with a Family Curse

The Monkey (2025) Written and Directed by Osgood Perkins

My Verdict: Over the top, campy fun, Mixed tone doesn’t always land

The monkey looks almost exactly like I imagined.

After what felt like an hour of studio logos, The Monkey’s opening scene wasted no time setting the tone. Adam Scott is devilish in his cameo as Petey Shelburn, airline pilot and the deadbeat dad extraordinaire, who is trying to get rid of the titular monkey at a pawn shop. Scott’s character explains the premise, what the monkey is, and what it does. The pawn shop owner does not believe him, and then we get an immediate payoff to prove said premise. It was extremely gruesome. To the point that I would have been surprised to see it in a movie based on a story (by Stephen King) that has little to no gore, had it not been for the advertising campaign promising that there was going to be chaotic deaths. This same ad campaign was the reason I went to go see the film in the first place, so maybe I am splitting hairs. (Splitting hares? Imagine that. Gross, why did you do that?)

The tone of this opening pawn shop scene is so campy as to be cartoonish. When the blood finally spilled and Scott’s character reached for a blowtorch, it was pretty clear we were going to be in for a silly ride. The vast majority of the film keeps this campy, tongue-in-cheek approach. Often the dialogue seems stilted and unreal, characters will say things with an abrupt bluntness or a heartless nonchalance that is rarely ever seen in real life. This tone is quite a lot of fun, but this is also where the movie can falter from time to time.

The problem isn’t the campy tone. I think this is a strength for the movie and largely what makes it fun. The problem is the fact that it doesn’t commit to the tone 100% of the time. This is a small problem because it doesn’t happen that often, but there are a handful of scenes that seem to want to wander into touching family drama territory, which sometimes felt a little jarring amidst all the splatter-slapstick and bizarre tone. I can’t stress enough how so many of the scenes felt unreal and cartoonish.

When the movie was going for over-the-top bleakness and gore, the more subtle aspects of the touching parts actually worked for me. It was when the movie seemed to forget that it was not a serious movie that the touching parts seemed off. Again, this didn’t happen often, but there were these moments when the over-the-top gore comedy tried a little too hard at dramatic pretenses, and it just felt off.

See, I have been arguing that this strange mixed tone was a weakness of the film, but then I am reminded of the original short story by Stephen King. Until today I had only read the story once, when I was probably an early teenager, 13 or 14. I remember thinking it was quite long for what it was and a bit bad. At the time, I didn’t have the words to describe why I thought it was bad; it was just something I felt. Even though I thought the story was bad, I had a super clear feeling and memory from it. I could remember visions of that damn hotel room in my head just as clear as day, and even though I didn’t want to admit it to myself as a kid, I was scared of that fucking monkey.

Not too long ago, I discovered the podcast Just King Things. This is probably my favorite podcast of all time. (I still must check out Lynchpins, as I am almost certain that it also will compete for favorite.) The premise of Just King Things is that they are reading all of Stephen King’s books in publication order and discussing them, one book per episode. The only negatives to the show are that you only get one episode a month, and eventually there will be no more King books, thus no more episodes.

Anyway, I was listening to the Just King Things episode for Skeleton Crew, the collection that the short story, “The Monkey,” appeared in. (Short story? That story is over 10k words; it’s a novelette.) The show’s hosts, Michael and Cameron, put the feelings I had when I was a kid into words. I will paraphrase them here.

Basically, for a story that has such a corny premise, King’s attempts at literary depth and style feel disjointed. He takes a silly premise and tries to paste this metaphor for… life? The way trauma gets passed down through families, specifically from fathers to sons? For the random ways death can come at any moment for us? All the above?

I have made it this far into the review without explaining the premise of the story, which is given away in the opening seconds of the movie, so I feel like I can do so here without the need for a spoiler warning. The notorious monkey of the title is nothing more than a simple toy. (Don’t call it that!)

In the original story (and we will stick with that for now; I didn’t read it again this morning for nothing), it is a windup monkey that clashes cymbals together. In the movie, the monkey has a drum instead of cymbals, but the effect is the same. When the monkey plays, somebody dies. The monkey seems to choose the person who dies at random, and the death will otherwise appear to be an accident or unfortunate event. The monkey can seemingly move itself when no one is looking and haunts a man from his childhood and into his adulthood when he is a father, threatening the lives of his children (or to infect their lives the way it did his). The monkey’s original discovery is attached to his own absent father.

So, now that you know the premise of the story, an evil toy monkey that causes “accidental” deaths when it plays, maybe you could see why giving it this deeper meaning can feel jarring or off-putting.

Why did we go through all that? Osgood Perkins’s The Monkey not only captures that strange mismatch in tone but turns it up to the max. Until I read the OG story again this morning, I didn’t remember the story being gory, so I thought it a tad bit strange that the movie went as far as it did. Turns out, my memory was both right and wrong, because no, the story doesn’t depict a ton of real-life gory moments, but the monkey speaks to the young character in his head and tells him all sorts of gory, disgusting stuff. Perkins seemingly picked up on the darkly morbid comic glee of the monkey’s voice and ran with it.

Instead of the deaths caused by the monkey just being accidents like they were in the story, the film revels in machinations of dismemberment and mayhem. This is quite reminiscent of the way deaths occur in the Final Destination series, but done here with a playful reckless abandon. But, just like the story, the movie still tries to dial in that touching family tone as well. The movie is even MORE obviously a metaphor for trauma passed down from fathers to sons than the story is. Perkins took both aspects of the mixed tone and dialed them up. So, the tone is MORE uneven.

Everything about the film is the story on steroids. For example, the story features two young brothers, one sweet and one a little bit of a sass mouth, and two older brothers, the main character and his own brother. The movie dials that up by making the brothers twins, reducing it to one set of brothers, making the sweet one a comical push over, the sass mouth one a total bully, changing where in the lineage this relationship occurs, and exploring an aspect of conflict between them that the original story barely hints at. This serves to heighten the melodramatic tone that underpins and conflicts with the campy tone.

The more I think about this film, the more that I think this unevenness is not only intentional but brilliant. The choice to make the brother’s twins really stands out to me. I think one could easily read this film to be about Perkins himself. In my head, I can see how all the pieces fit.

Something horrifying is passed down from father to son; in this case, it is the legacy of horror that comes with being Anthony Perkins’s son. Then I can see the twins as two aspects of Osgood himself. I know that Theo James, who plays our main character, Hal Shelburn, is not a dead ringer for Osgood, but something about the casting feels like an indirect self-cast. These two twins then become aspects of Osgood’s personality, or perhaps different aspects of his creative ambitions.

The soft-spoken Hal could represent an Osgood who no longer wants to live in the shadow of his father’s horror legacy (and perhaps has anxiety about his own children living in the shadow of the legacy he is currently creating), while the brash Bill could represent an aspect of Osgood that wants to lean full bore into the mayhem. These two aspects of the twin pair also represent the conflicting tones of the movie. One of the final moments of sincerity between the brothers is undercut by mayhem, which mirrors the ending of the movie itself. This may speak volumes about Osgood’s own journey of deciding exactly how to do this movie.

Anyway. This was supposed to be a movie review, not an analysis.

The cinematography is fun. The actors do wonderfully at nailing the crazy tone. Tatiana Maslany is a standout as Lois Shelburn. There is a certain menace and yet tenderness she brings to the role as the young twins’ mother, and it is a shame that we do not get more of her. I also loved Rohan Campbell’s slacker metalhead character.

This is by no means a perfect movie. It is, at best, an elevated B-movie that has a certain kind of brilliance. The plot is thin, and some of the details don’t exactly add up. It slows down in the middle, and I thought the ending was kind of silly. Regardless of this, it is still a lot of fun. I laughed many times. The main thing that I want to leave you with in this review is this: If any of this sounds fun to you, go see it in the theater, or if you are going to wait to watch it at home, watch it with a couple of friends, because it feels like it was designed to be enjoyed with a group. I had just as much fun with the other audience member reactions as I did with the movie itself.