osgood perkins

the monkey movie poster

“Everybody dies. Some of us peacefully and in our sleep, and some of us… horribly. And that’s life.”

So says a mom to her twin boys just after attending the funeral of their babysitter whom they both watched die in a horrible accident involving a hibachi chef and his sharp blade.

Life is random and unfair, the film tells us over and over, and sometimes darkly funny.

Loosely based on a Stephen King short story of the same name The Monkey is short on plot and not much for delving deeply into those themes, but full of creative, often hilariously droll violence and death.

Somewhere in the 1990s two twin boys, Hal and Bill Shelburn (Christian Convery as a kid, and Theo James as an adult) live with their mother (Tatiana Maslany) as their father mysteriously abandoned them. Digging through his things they find a toy monkey holding a little drum. When they turn the key inside his back it spins its drumsticks then rat-a-tats a little song.

Later that evening the monkey, sitting in the car while the boys eat hibachi with their babysitter, plays a song on its own causing that horrific death I mentioned earlier.

A few days later Hal will wind the monkey again causing more death. When the boys realize it is the monkey causing all the horror they wrap it up and throw it down a deep, dark hole.

Flash forward twenty-five years later. The brothers no longer speak to each other and Hal has an estranged son whom he only sees once a year, for Hal is terrified he’ll cause harm to come to the boy. On their annual week together Hal receives a phone call from Bill claiming some more mysterious deaths have been happening in their hometown. The monkey must have gotten out.

There isn’t much more to it than that. Hal and his son investigate. More deaths occur. Eventually, they will figure out what is happening.

It is a weirdly glib, pitch-black comedy with wild and creative deaths. This is a film that begins with a man having a harpoon shot through his gut and when it is retracted it takes his small intestine, strung out like a chain of hot dogs, with him.

It totally worked for me.

poster

A young F.B.I. agent, Lee Harker (Maika Monroe), and her partner go house-to-house door knocking. They are looking for someone. Someone dangerous. As soon as she gets out of the car she stares at one particular house. She knows it is the one. The killer is there.

She tells her partner. She suggests calling for backup. He scoffs. How could she know? She’s right. The killer is there. She has some light clairvoyance.

Right from the start Osgood Perkins lets us know this film is going to be a police procedural, and one that believes in the supernatural. It also lets us in on the fact that Nicolas Cage is gonna give one of his strongest performances.

In a brief flashback, the film opens with a little girl hearing a noise out on her isolated farmhouse. A man (Cage is some wild prosthetics and makeup) appears seemingly out of nowhere. Cage affects a high-pitched voice and behaves erratically. It is a bizarre, yet effective performance. More on that in a minute.

Harker is recruited by Agent William Carter (Blaire Underwood) to join his task force investigating a series of murder-suicides. In each case, the father kills his wife and children before offing himself. Each time a note is left behind with some strange symbols, written in an unknown person’s handwriting, and it is signed “Longlegs.”

Harker has an innate ability to decipher the symbols and follow clues that will lead her and Carter to Longlegs. But he seems to have a connection to her, too. He visits her house and leaves her a note.

I won’t spoil what happens next except to say I wasn’t always with it in terms of story and plot. I found the last twenty minutes to be a bit much. But the film creates a vibe that I really dug. It is full of dread and menace.

It is a film that makes you look in the background just to see what might be sneaking up on you. There is one scene where something happens in the back of the screen that I had to rewind just to see how they did it.

And that Cage performance is one for the books. He’s an actor that can often go way over the top and this is crazy even for him. I’m not sure I actually loved it but I admire it just the same.

Actually, the entire film is a bit like that. I did not love it, but I dig that this type of film is still being made. Filmmakers are willing to take risks and do something a little different.