The Monkey

Movie Review

You can’t plan trauma.

Well, maybe you can if you especially hate trips to the dentist. But for the most part, the disasters in our lives don’t follow much of a schedule. We do not pencil in “lose beloved Aunt Edna in fishing accident” between “parent/teacher conference” and “Take Tatiana to bowling lesson.”

But, at least, we can hope and pray that those sorts of tragedies don’t visit us too often, right?

Enter the Monkey.

Twin brothers Bill and Hal Shelburn dig the box literally out of a family closet—the closet where their mother stuffs all the gifts that their long-lost father sent home over the years. “Like life!” the box promises, which Hal figures is just a misprint. When he and Bill lift the lid off the box, they uncover what appears to be a toy monkey straddling a drum, two drumsticks in its hairy little hands.

“Turn the key and see what happens!” So the boys turn the key in the back of the Monkey.

The plush critter forms a toothy grin, raises its furry paw, a drumstick mechanically twirls in its fingers and … that’s it. Broken, the boys decide.

But that evening, when their babysitter takes the kids to a local Japanese joint, they take the Monkey with them. They leave it in the car. And as the chef flings knives and preps food tableside, the Monkey begins to drum.

Seconds later, the boys are in need of a new babysitter.

Bill and Hal suspect the Monkey had something to do with the crazy tableside disaster that befell them. It becomes an object of fear, of wonder and, perhaps, of possibility.

Even though Hal and Bill are twin brothers, Bill has always been a jerk to his three-minute-younger sibling, calling him all sorts of unprintable names and turning Hal into a target for a bevy of bullying middle school girls. Hal has long wished his brother would just, um, go away. And now, perhaps, is his chance to make it happen.

Turn the key and see what happens!

So Hal turns the key—asking the Monkey to turn his horrific talents on Bill, his brother.

But the Monkey is not interested in making Hal happy. He follows the beat of his own diabolical drum. The disaster he will dole out follows his plan, and his alone.

Positive Elements

Well, both Bill and Hal manage to survive into adulthood. And somewhere in the 25 years between what we know of their childhood and their adulthood, Hal fathered a child. His name is Petey. But Hal has always been leery of getting too close to the boy—for fear the literal monkey in his past might come back and hurt the boy. Hal only sees Petey one week a year.

This leads to a rather awkward final weeklong reunion between himself and the boy—the last, we’re told, they’ll ever be able to spend together. (Petey’s stepfather is in the process of adopting the boy, and we’re told that once that adoption is complete, Hal will lose all rights to see his son.) Hal truly loves Petey. But because of that love, he continues to keep what he hopes will be a protective distance between them. He won’t answer Petey’s questions about his past. When they’re forced to make a detour to Hal’s teen-hood home, he tries to make Petey wait in the car—just in case the Monkey is waiting for them both.

Naturally, The Monkey (the movie, not the toy) won’t allow that sort of protective distance to last throughout. Circumstances force both Petey and Hal into close proximity with Hal’s dark past. Hal is forced to come clean, and that honesty allows him to draw much closer to his son.

Spiritual Elements

Bill and Hal attend their babysitter’s funeral, where a very young, very confused priest does what he can to salve the pain of the mourners. He is, alas, not very good at it.

“Gone by accident,” he begins, referring to the babysitter. “Or not in an accident, because there are no accidents.” It’s the first of many nods The Monkey makes to the problem of pain and the apparent randomness of death—a randomness that can be difficult to make peace with when you believe in a loving, all-powerful God.

Shortly thereafter, the boys try to work out this dissonance with their mother, Lois. “Everything is an accident, or nothing is an accident,” Lois says. “Same thing.”

Bill and Hal ultimately draw some different conclusions from their experiences. These and other horrific deaths are no accidents: The Monkey is causing them, even if the victims appear to be chosen at random. Only the person who turns the key seems to be immune to the Monkey’s wrath. Hal says that the Monkey is “basically the devil.” So when someone decides to try to use the Monkey as an infernal instrument of revenge—complete with petitions that sound like prayer—it can feel very much like devil worship.

We hear quotations and paraphrases of Revelation 6:8: “And I looked, and behold, a pale horse! And its rider’s name was Death.” We see a pale horse ridden by a sad, spectral entity.

Petey’s stepfather, Ted, is a wildly successful parenting expert and author. One of his most recent books (prominently displayed in his house) reads, “Jesus’ Dad!” The guy’s no orthodox Christian, though; when he shakes Hal’s hand, he later proclaims that that handshake allowed Ted to “take your power.”

We see crosses in the background of some scenes. A church steeple gushes flames at one point.

Sexual & Romantic Content

Young Bill has a crush on his babysitter. But the babysitter has eyes for the Japanese chef cooking tableside. (He forms the rice he’s cooking into the shape of a heart, much to the delight of the babysitter.)

In scenes when Bill and Hal are kids, we hear references to oral sex and masturbation. A bunch of bullying girls apparently steal Hal’s pants, and Hal is forced to come home in his underwear. Bill and Hal’s Aunt Ida and Uncle Cliff are self-described “swingers.”

As an adult, Bill goes to a strip club. He imagines that one scantily clad pole dancer is actually the Monkey.

Hal fathered Petey out of wedlock. There’s a reference to a deadbeat dad whom his ex-wife envisions being with a prostitute. There are references to another absentee father sleeping around. We see a woman in a very skimpy bikini.

Violent Content

All right, let’s buckle in for a rough ride here.

It begins with the man who sells the Monkey to Hal and Bill’s father: As the father tries to return the Monkey, the merchant is skewered in the gut with a harpoon. The harpoon is then retracted, pulling out the man’s intestines.

The babysitter serves as the Monkey’s next onscreen victim: A knife slices her head clean off, which then tumbles onto the hot griddle and fries there. (Bill is amazed that the babysitter looks so … together during the open-casket funeral.)

And it goes on. Someone is killed by a falling shotgun. Another person is bitten by a cobra on a Maine golf course. A rare aneurism claims another victim, despite the 44 million-to-one odds against it. A guy is killed by a vape pen lodged in his throat, another has his head blown off by a cannon-propelled bowling ball. Hornets pour into someone’s mouth, eventually causing the body to simply fall apart. One unfortunate victim gets trampled to death by, we’re told, “67 stampeding horses” during a hunting trip; we learn that in the aftermath, his body (or what was left of it) reportedly looked like someone had drop-kicked a cherry pie. (We indeed see a sleeping bag full of the leavings.)

But perhaps the most unfortunate victim suffers some seriously painful indignities before death: She falls into boxes full of old fishing hooks and lures, and her face is covered with them. When she removes them and heats up some water (perhaps to treat the wounds), the burner explodes in her face, setting her head on fire. She runs out of the house, steps in what looks like a cylinder of flowers (causing her to hobble) and finally meets her Maker by running into the pointy end of a sale sign.

And we could go on. And on and on and on. Someone grotesquely dies by lethal lawnmower. We see another victim skewered by a surfboard. Several people are bloodily sideswiped by a speeding semi. A woman explodes by diving into an electricity-filled pool. (A leg thuds off a nearby wall.) Planes crash. Buildings explode. Faces melt. And most of the deaths we see are as bloody and grotesque as the filmmakers could possibly make them. We’re treated to a steady barrage of limbs, organs and oh so much blood.

The Monkey suffers its own indignities, too: The thing is set on fire, and we see it melt before our eyes (before returning to its own pristine condition once again). It’s chained in a box and thrown down a well. Someone tries to hack it to pieces with a cleaver, and the hacker is surprised when a severed arm seems to ooze thick blood.

In a dream sequence, the Monkey seems to turn the tables, placing his attacker on the table and raising a cleaver. Another dream sequence depicts someone painfully bleeding out of her eyes and mouth.

Crude or Profane Language

More than 50 f-words (some of which are used in connection with abuses of Jesus’ name) and about half as many s-words. We also hear “g-dd–n” (about 10 of those) “a–,” “b–ch,” “h—” and “p-ssy.” Jesus’ name is elsewhere abused 10 times.

Drug & Alcohol Content

We see people drink beer. Petey asks Hal whether he’s high at one point. A character vapes. We hear that Bill and Hal’s father went out for a pack of cigarettes one night and never came back.

Other Noteworthy Elements

Hal’s middle school tormentors (including brother Bill) attack Hal with a couple of boxes of bananas. We don’t see the attack itself, but we do see Hal come home with banana mush smeared on his face, hair and chest.

Bill acts like a big ol’ jerk, both as a kid and as an adult. Well-meaning adults don’t often say quite the right things. Lies are told. Hal admits to urinating in a bush. We’re told that in the womb, Bill ate most of his and Hal’s placenta—and as children, he threatens to eat the rest.

Conclusion

If to this point you looked at our review of The Monkey and concluded that this is an utterly ridiculous film, you’d be right.

But underneath all the blood and insanity and uncomfortable laughter, director Osgood Perkins is trying to talk about some pretty important things.

Perkins, who also directed the much more serious horror film Longlegs, is no stranger to the perplexing mysteries of death. His father, Psycho actor Anthony Perkins, died of complications from AIDS. His mother, photographer Berry Berenson, died during the 9/11 disaster. The movie’s ruminations on the perplexing randomness of loss is, Osgood admits, deeply autobiographical. So, too, in a way, is Hal and Bill digging the Monkey out of their father’s closet. According to an interview with Vanity Fair, he discovered his closeted father’s porn collection when he was a child.

“So the idea that The Monkey would be something that came out of a father’s closet as a secret horror—those things clicked early on in the development,” Perkins says.

He has said in other interviews that he doesn’t even consider The Monkey to be a real horror movie. “[Death is] a pretty tricky conversation topic for most people,” he tells slashfilm.com, “so you might as well pitch it with a smile.”

Alas, The Monkey itself doesn’t leave Plugged In smiling.

Whatever Perkins is working through, and whatever he’d like us to consider as we watch The Monkey, his drum-thumping toy demon brings along horrors of its own. The language is wince worthy. Its spiritual musings are interesting but, ultimately, they land well outside a Christian perspective.

And then, of course, we must deal with the blood.

The gore we see here is ludicrously and, indeed laughably, extreme. Sure, it’s meant to shock. But more than that, it’s intended to trigger a simultaneous gasp, smile, headshake and chuckle.  I admit, I did all that more than once watching The Monkey.

But while some might argue that it’s good to laugh in the face of death, is it healthy to laugh at pain? At brutality? At a movie that turns people into slabs of torn, burned and bloody meat?

It’s one thing to whistle past a graveyard. It’s another to gleefully mock and abuse those interred there. And when we do, it may speak to our darker, more fallen inclinations. Inclinations we try to overcome, not feed.

The Monkey is both very silly and kinda scary. And it does indeed try to deal with some difficult, delicate issues. But it’s sad, too. And it leaves me mourning not so much the doomed characters therein, but ourselves.