The Monkey is an adaptation of an early Stephen King short story that, perhaps, would be a little silly to produce today. So they didn’t take it seriously… and I’m not sure how obvious that is from the trailer. But I was pretty continuously laughing at a pretty silly King premise.

It’s about an organ grinder toy monkey that kills! When you wind up its key, someone will die in a very accidental, borderline Final Destination, way. Decades after dealing with it as a child, Theo James and his twin brother (Theo James) must stop it before it kills again… or keeps killing.

I laughed my butt off at this film’s campy dark, bloody humor. The film takes its silly premise to its logical conclusion as people keep dying (often in brief vignettes) in the most unlikely and gruesome ways. And it’s not just the dark humor of random deaths… the film has genuine quirk to its dialog, characters, and scenarios. Even they can’t believe this shit.

But it’s almost too much humor as it treats everything like a joke. And if everything’s a joke, then the characters nor the horror really matter. If they’d found a slightly more balance way to tell the story and laugh at it, I’d have rated this very fun little flick a little bit higher.

My favorite bit is realizing this is an Osgood Perkins film whose previous film was Longlegs. Longlegs had some freakout weird comedy-adjacent moments but was generally a very atmospheric, dour, and dark thriller. I love that his follow-up was a goofy gory movie King adaptation. My attention is now focused on him.

The Monkey definitely worth a watch if you can laugh at some darkly humorous kills (favorite being… the guy in the cop uniform… haven’t seen that kind of buzz before). The movie is gleefully murderous and you have to be able to chuckle at that or you’ll have a bad time.

Score: 84