I have a theory about Oz Perkins: He’s not actually a great filmmaker, he’s just very good at marketing. The director behind the recent horror hits Longlegs and The Monkey has a knack for crafting viral marketing campaigns that build up tons of hype they can’t actually deliver on.
Longlegs was supposed to be the scariest movie of the decade. It definitely wasn’t, even though Nicolas Cage turned in a diabolical performance. Perkins’ follow-up, The Monkey, was billed as a hilarious riff on Final Destination meets Stephen King. It arguably comes pretty close to filling all of those buckets, but still adds up to a pretty forgettable horror flick.
It’s tough to deliver on a scary movie when the hype is so high (although Weapons seems primed to do just that). But with The Monkey making its streaming debut on Hulu, it’s worth revisiting where this movie goes wrong, and whether Perkins still deserves our attention when his next film comes around.
It might make sense to pick apart The Monkey based on those two franchises used to sell it to audiences: Stephen King and Final Destination. Let’s start with King, a franchise unto himself. The Monkey is based on a 1980 King short story of the same name about a wind-up monkey toy that causes people to die whenever it bangs its cymbals together. Like much of King’s best work, it’s a short, punchy story with an ominous twist ending. However, stretching that story into a full-length movie (even a 98-minute one) proved surprisingly challenging.
Perkins’ solution is mostly to pad out the story by focusing on the shared childhood of his protagonists, a pair of twins played in the film’s present by Theo James. We get a long sequence in which the twins come into possession of the monkey and slowly begin to understand its terrible power. This isn’t out of place for a Stephen King story — he seems to love torturing his child protagonists — but it doesn’t exactly make for a great movie-watching experience, especially since the marketing for The Monkey focused mostly on the part of the story where the main characters are adults played by a recognizable movie star.
The best solution might have been a much shorter flashback, which would have given the rest of The Monkey more time to explore the fun stuff that comes later on. Then again, even the better parts of this movie also have their flaws.
On to the Final Destination comparisons. Perkins’ biggest innovation is giving his movie’s inanimate killer the ability to activate overly complicated, Rube Goldberg-esque murder machines. Sometimes the vibrations caused by the monkey’s drum set (a change from the short story version, forced by Disney copyright) cause some object to activate. In other situations, it feels more random.
However, in pretty much every major death scene, The Monkey relies heavily on CGI to sell its biggest scares. This undercuts the gruesome nature of Perkins’ most creative deaths, which range from an army of wasps flying into a character’s mouth to a woman jumping headfirst into an electrified swimming pool and exploding on impact. In concept, these are memorable moments. In reality, they’re visually unimpressive to the point of feeling forgettable.
To be fair, The Monkey does have its moments. (I still think about those wasps from time to time.) But overall, it left me feeling disappointed, and worse, lied to. I was expecting big, impressive death contraptions on the scale of Final Destination. What I got instead felt like a pale imitation.
There’s still plenty to enjoy in The Monkey. The cast is great — James does an impressive job playing a twins with wildly contrasting personalities, tatiana maslany makes the most of her very limited screentime, and there’s even a funny cameo from Oz Perkins himself — the soundtrack is eclectic and well-selected, and the toy monkey prop is downright terrifying to look at.
If I hadn’t gone into theaters last year with sky-high expectations, I probably would have enjoyed it a lot more. So hopefully, this article serves to lower the bar for anyone curious about watching The Monkey now that it’s on Hulu. With all that viral marketing and hype a distant memory, there’s a chance to judge this movie on its own merits. I still wouldn’t expect much more than a middling Final Destination knockoff with light Stephen King vibes, but if that description isn’t a turnoff, you might just enjoy your time with this weird little horror movie.
