I Barely Survived "The Monkey"
It’s not completely explicable why there’s been a horror-movie craze in the past several years.
Yet one cultural rationalization for it says that since we don’t experience death all that much anymore, compared to times past, so then we get our healthy dose of it virtually, which can be vicariously through movies.
Along comes “The Monkey” to poke fun at that phenomenon. It’s a Stephen-King adaptation that doesn’t try to scare and squirm as much as it tries to get you to laugh.
And yet the real lesson we’ll learn from “The Monkey” is that we’re all meat in the end.
One death in this movie has a man trampled while camping by 67 horses. He’s turned into “cherry pie.”
This is the kind of movie that will show you the cherry-pie-ification of a person, too.
As King adaptations go, “The Monkey” contains his hallmarks: weirdo towns in Maine, absentee fathers, mysterious talismans that cause inexplicable deaths, remote devices that enable normies to become serial killers remotely, and extremely thin characterization.
As in almost no characterization.
The movie stars Theo James as twin brothers in its second and third acts. The sum total of these brothers is that one’s a jerk and the other one’s a picked-on nerd.
In childhood, they discover this monkey in their absent dad’s closet.
It takes one death before they figure out that whenever this toy monkey is wound up and bangs its drum with the drumstick in its hand, somebody dies.
And they die always through excessively ridiculous means, ala the “Final Destination” series.
Such as being trampled by 67 horses . . . and not a horse less or a horse more.
The brothers secure the monkey in a box and throw it down into a remote well, once — *laughs could ensue* — their mother dies by its deadly drumming.
But years later, the monkey resurfaces, only to bang on its drum all day some more.
Humor is slathered onto this movie, including many forced moments, such as when a duddy boss gets choked to death by his vape pen after stepping on a rake and having the rake launch the pen down his throat at speeds that would impress a Space-X launch.
Meanwhile, the lame attempt is made to say something about absent dads causing problem children.
The toy monkey subs as a dad; in three instances, it’s a reminder of his absence. That includes the adult nerd twin, who is trying to reconnect with his own son for a week, when the toy monkey returns to paradiddle again. It’s up to nerd-twin dad to find the monkey and figure out what to do with it as a family heirloom that cannot be destroyed.
The movie postures as a postmodern play on the dad-son relationship in media, and possibly in horror films in particular. Could a father and son really bond while combating a killer toy? In what universe does that kind of idiotic occurrence happen in besides the movies? Same thing with the twin brothers, and with the human relationship to death.
It’s the latter issue that always bugs me regarding these flippant postmodern productions. They don’t have the decency to take the final destination of all things seriously. The rule in art I follow is that first you do that — you assume that death really matters — and only then you can joke about it.
For example, when the twin boys’ babysitter dies by meat-cleaver at a Japanese restaurant around a hibachi grill — let your imagination run! — their mother takes them out to dance after the funeral.
That’s the invaluable lesson we must all learn: to boogie in the face of death, and also to dance with our children right after planes crash into Maine towns and an entire bus of cheering cheerleaders gets side-swipped by a Mack Truck.
With this ethic, I half-expected Stephen King to end the picture by singing “Always Look on the Bright Side of Life.” Does he even believe in what he’s writing about?
I think the movie has some promise, because there are occasional notes of the wicked satire “Idiocracy” in it. Had this been a mash-up of that movie and “Final Destination,” I might approve.
That means I am saying that “The Monkey” is neither cheesy nor campy enough!
More camp please!
Although no more horses. 67 is, I am deadly certain, more than enough.