WW Jacobs' 1902 short story 'The Monkey's Paw' might be the most influential work in the horror genre. In the century since its publication we've received countless novels, stories, plays, TV shows and films that riff on its "be careful what you wish for" template. With his 1980 short story 'The Monkey', Stephen King playfully acknowledged the influence of Jacobs on his chosen field, but rather than merely a paw he presented readers with a whole damn monkey. An organ-grinder's monkey to be precise, one that causes death whenever it's wound-up and its cymbals crash.
Osgood Perkins' adaptation of King's story is The Monkey's Paw on crack, influenced as much by the Final Destination series as King's original tale. A far cry from the sombre mood of most of Perkins' work, The Monkey is a live-action cartoon, complete with Looney Tunes-esque denouements in which characters explode in puffs of red as though they were animated coyotes stepping on ACME bombs. So many body parts fly towards us that The Monkey is a rare movie that might have justified a 3D presentation.
The chaotic tone is set by a 1999 prologue in which a pilot (Adam Scott) desperately attempts to get rid of the toy chimp by flogging it to a pawn store owner, which ends in the latter dying in an elaborate fashion. The pilot is never seen again but the monkey pops up in his home, where it's discovered by his 12-year-old identical twin sons - the shy and sensitive Hal and the obnoxious Bill, who makes the former's life a nightmare of bullying and torment. When people around them start to perish in gruesome and statistically unlikely circumstances, the twins realise that the monkey is somehow responsible, so they take action to get rid of the toy. 25 years later however the monkey returns, and Hal (Theo James) is forced to confront his past demons to ensure his estranged teenage son Petey (Colin O'Brien) doesn't become the demonic toy's latest victim.
As with the Final Destination movies, much of The Monkey plays out as a series of vignettes that lead to someone meeting a sticky end. The key difference is that Perkins opts for shocks rather than suspense, largely eschewing the sort of Rube Goldberg-esque build-ups that are the raison d'être of Final Destination and ignoring Hitchcock's advice that a ticking bomb under a table is far more effective than one that takes the audience by surprise with a sudden detonation.
But Perkins is playing this for laughs rather than scares, and his shocks do indeed result in hilarity. Perkins knows that we're all sickos when it comes down to it, that our initial reaction to seeing someone go head over heels on black ice is to laugh out loud rather than worry that they might have just cracked their skull open. In such moments our lizard brains kick in and we tell ourselves "I'm glad that wasn't me." As The Monkey makes abundantly clear through both its actions and the words of its cursed characters, death is coming for us all. Horror movies like The Monkey help prepare us for our unfortunate ends by offering us glimpses of the sort of outrageous deaths we can take solace in knowing are highly unlikely to happen to us when our time is up. They also appeal to our ego as we assure ourselves that we would never be stupid enough to step on a rake. But at the same time horror movies unsettle us by suggesting that our intelligence and awareness of our surroundings may not be enough, that maybe we aren't as in control of our fates as we believe. Perkins' film succeeds by hammering home this idea that death has its own plan for how you're going out, and it could be very messy indeed.
At just over 90 minutes, The Monkey has a manic pace, speeding from one blood-soaked set-piece to another. It's only in its final act when the movie morphs into something closer to John Carpenter's In the Mouth of Madness with an entire town seemingly afflicted by the monkey's curse that it flounders, unsure of how exactly to wrap up all these cartoon antics. As if we hadn't gotten the movie's theme of "everyone dies, and that's fucked up" (which is literally the poster's tagline), characters speak it out loud in some clunky dialogue, and I'm not sure I entirely bought a certain character's motives in a late reveal. Perkins attempts to go out on an apocalyptic note ala In the Mouth of Madness, but it's one his film hasn't earned by that point. The late switch from Chuck Jones splatstick to something more ominous doesn't quite work but Perkins has the good sense to end it all on a comic note, finally acknowledging the influence of Final Destination with the appearance of a literal Rube Goldberg device that leads a bloody mess.
Directed by: Osgood Perkins
Starring: Theo James, Tatiana Maslany, Elijah Wood, Christian Convery, Colin O'Brien, Rohan Campbell, Sarah Levy, Adam Scott
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