'The Monkey': Gore with a comic twist

 

Director Osgood Perkins won over horror fans (I wasn't one of them) with Longlegs, a 2024 movie that featured another unmoored performance from Nicolas Cage. Now Perkins returns with The Monkey, an adaptation of a 1980 short story by Stephen King. 

   Slickly realized and gurgling with blood-soaked humor, The Monkey focuses on twin brothers (both played by Theo James) who are tormented by a large toy monkey with a terrifying grin. When wound up, the monkey begins drumming ominously. Guess what? Someone is about to die. 

   Attempts to find laughter amid the gore meet with intermittent success; these include swarming hornets, a cobra that springs out of a hole on a golf course, and stampeding horses that turn a man's insides to mush. That's where we are, I guess. Inventive violence has become a measure of creativity. The fun -- if it's your cup of gore -- stems from the variety of ways Osgood and his team devise for characters to meet their ends.

   The Monkey reaches its finale when one brother (James's Hal) reunites with the teenage son (Colin O'Brien) he hasn't seen for years. Long divorced, Hal has kept his son at a distance to protect the kid from the monkey curse. 

  Despite antipathy between the two brothers and the burden of guilt one them carries, the movie can feel as if its marking time, offering bits of story until it's ready to serve up another piece of cleverly contrived gore.

   A final joke struck me as tastelessly cruel, but audiences can decide for themselves how far over-the-top they want to go with Osgood. I laughed some, but when I reflected on the movie, a lyric from an old Chuck Berry tune began to run through my mind. "Too much monkey business for me."

    

   

A mostly subdued helping of horror

Here's a horror movie with an intriguing pedigree: The Blackcoat's Daughter was directed by Osgood Perkins, son of Anthony Perkins, an actor who's still most remembered for his indelible performance as Norman Bates in Alfred Hitchcock's Psycho. In addition, the film's music was written by Elvis Perkins, Osgood's brother and another of Anthony Perkins' children. Pedigree aside, Perkins' film stands as its own helping of quietly engineered horror. Blackcoat's Daughter focuses on two girls (Kiernan Shipka and Lucy Boynton) who remain at their private Catholic school during a break in which the other students have headed home. Shipka's character is the weirder of the two, a girl with a spooky affect and a look of eerie determination. (You may recognize Shipka as the girl who played Don Draper's often sullen daughter on Mad Men.) Boynton's Rose seems more normal, although she's grappling with a difficult issue: She's pregnant. Later, we meed Joan (Emma Roberts), a young woman who escapes from a mental institution and is given a ride by a married couple (James Remar and Lauren Holly) who are heading toward the school. The movie's brooding score and its somber, snow-covered images leave little doubt that something awful will happen before the film concludes. It takes time for the inevitable violence to arrive, but that's part of what makes the film effective. No sense over-praising Perkins' debut accomplishment, but this small hunk of horror shows more than enough promise to make us look forward to his next outing.