The Monkey review: darkly comic mayhem but it's not The Shining

Moviegoers with a taste for slapstick splatter will lap up this gleefully gruesome horror comedy loosely adapted from a 1980 short story by Stephen King. With The Monkey, writer-director Osgood Perkins, the son of horror icon Anthony Perkins (best known, of course, for playing homicidal motel owner Norman Bates in Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho), serves up 98 minutes of mayhem during which the drumming of the wind-up toy of the title presages a series of improbably gory deaths. But as one character after another meets a sticky end, Perkins is clearly seeking to raise grisly chuckles rather than out-and-out scares.

Left behind by their absent airline pilot father, the toy monkey comes into the possession of twin brothers Hal and Bill (played as boys by Christian Convery and as adults by Theo James). We already know the monkey is bad news. The film’s darkly comic opening scene has shown us the boys’ dad (Adam Scott) attempting to rid himself of this malignant object in a pawnshop, only for the shop's hapless clerk to fall victim to a gut-splitting freak accident. The next to go is the brothers’ babysitter (Danica Dreyer), after which they realise that each time the monkey’s drumsticks (cymbals in King’s story) start playing someone winds up dead in macabre circumstances.

The twins couldn’t be more different. Bill, the elder by a few minutes, is a loathsome bully; sensitive bespectacled Hal, our point of identification in the story, is his brother's perennial victim. Even so, following further deaths, including one that is even closer to home, the pair work together to throw the monkey down a deep well. Fast-forward 25 years to the present day and Hal has lost touch with his estranged brother. He is also about to lose contact with his teenage son, Petey (Colin O’Brien), who is shortly to be adopted by his ex-wife’s new husband, smug self-help author Ted (a cameoing Elijah Wood). Hal has kept his distance from his son in a bid to shield him from the curse of the monkey, but as he reluctantly takes Petey on a week-long road trip back to his childhood home in small-town Maine, he comes to realise that both the monkey and his brother are still menacingly at large.

Critics and readers of King’s original story have found all manner of meanings behind the monkey's malignity, from the sudden release of suppressed impulses to the return of repressed trauma. Perkins has personally experienced more than his share of trauma and tragedy in his own life: his famous father was a victim of AIDS and his mother, photographer Berry Berenson, died during the September 11 attacks as a passenger on American Airlines Flight II, one of the hijacked planes flown into the World Trade Center. In The Monkey Perkins toys with the idea of inherited family trauma, but doesn’t take it overly seriously. If his film has a message it is one that is much more on the nose, expressing a view of life that some will see as stoic resignation to fate, others as bleak nihilism. The twins' beloved mother, Lois (Tatiana Maslany), sums it up succinctly: "Everybody dies. Some of us peacefully and in our sleep, and some of us... horribly. And that's life."

Fear not. Perkins doesn't use up his film's brisk running time waxing philosophically. He's far more interested in staging gory decapitations, eviscerations and disembowelings. If you have an appetite for this kind of thing then you will find The Monkey tremendous fun. Perkins knows what he's doing and teases us with the build up to each death, slowly cocking the trigger, as it were, before setting off the series of events that will result in a character’s demise. The ludicrously intricate chain reactions involved will remind American viewers of the outlandish mechanical devices invented by artist Rube Goldberg, while British viewers may recall the harebrained contraptions devised by Goldberg’s slightly earlier English counterpart, cartoonist William Heath Robinson.

The protracted manner in which Perkins leads up to the story's deaths doesn't really count as suspense, nor does it deliver jump scares, and it certainly doesn’t create an atmosphere of creeping dread. If these are features you seek in a horror film, you will have to look elsewhere. Yet even if the cartoonish violence gets a bit samey, there’s no denying the inventiveness with which Perkins stages his film’s episodes. The acting fits the bill, too, with Convery and James splendidly doubling up as the younger and older versions of the twins, while the supporting cast seize their roles with relish. Perkins himself plays one of the victims, the brothers’ swinger uncle, who ends up resembling “cherry pie” after getting trampled by stampeding horses during a camping trip. The Monkey won’t join the likes of Carrie and The Shining in the pantheon of Stephen King horror adaptations, but its tongue-in-cheek absurdity is sure to find it an appreciative audience all the same.