{"id":10040837,"date":"2025-02-20T14:31:53","date_gmt":"2025-02-20T19:31:53","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/vanyaland.com\/?p=10040837"},"modified":"2025-02-21T04:26:00","modified_gmt":"2025-02-21T09:26:00","slug":"the-monkey-review-osgood-perkins-entertainer","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/vanyaland.com\/2025\/02\/20\/the-monkey-review-osgood-perkins-entertainer\/","title":{"rendered":"&#8216;The Monkey&#8217; Review: Osgood Perkins, entertainer"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<p>Around eight months ago, I wrote a defense of \u201cvibes-based horror\u201d to try and compliment what Osgood Perkins was doing in <em>Longlegs<\/em> because I could feel the old criticisms bubbling up to the surface even before the first reel ended. You know the familiar refrains: \u201cThat was bullshit\u201d; \u201cThat didn\u2019t make any sense\u201d; and, worst of all, \u201cThe marketing lied. That wasn\u2019t scary at all.\u201d It\u2019s true: For all of his style and skill, Perkins never had his breakthrough moment until NEON blasted out carnival-barker hype about Maika Monroe\u2019s elevated heartbeat during filming and the usual \u201cscariest movie ever\u201d assurances, which are impossible to live up to given the subjective nature of experience itself. What Perkins makes are exceptionally creepy movies, painstakingly constructed to preserve an otherworldly atmosphere and the feelings that tone imparts (hence, \u201cvibes\u201d). To misquote Vonnegut, the viewer is trapped in the amber of the discomforting moment. There is no way or any acceptable take on the other four Ws beyond the tritest specifics: Mood matters more to him, as it should, given that Perkins has so thoroughly mastered it. This is why his latest, <strong><em>The Monkey<\/em><\/strong>, is so interesting, as it plays up another one of his strengths \u2014 bleak, black-as-fuck comedy \u2014 without totally abandoning that carefully crafted sensibility.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>The concept is beautifully simple: An evil toy monkey kills somebody after a poor chump turns its key. One crash of the cymbals, as in the text, or bang on the drum, in Perkins\u2019 take, and someone somewhere is gonna meet a fucking terrible end at the hands of fate. In Stephen King\u2019s original short story (published in Skeleton Crew, which ranks among the best-collected editions in all literature, genre or otherwise, and, since the story is older than I am, I\u2019ll leave it to you to read rather than recap), the situation is both vaguely folksy (as is King\u2019s way) and a source of immense dread in its Poe-esque persistence as a reoccurring feature in the protagonist\u2019s life. The sins of the past are haunting him in the present, and no matter what he does, he can\u2019t outrun this creepy monkey. It works like clockwork in the hands of a storyteller like King, who can suspend your disbelief and make the ordinary-if-a-bit-discomfiting things in life into suspicious harbingers of a grand supernatural cosmology that dwarfs us. Perkins, on the other hand, recognizes how <em>funny<\/em> of a concept that is stripped away from the seriousness of King&#8217;s world, and plays with the larger plotting possibilities that it might hold: What if a nutcase got ahold of the monkey? What happens if you wind it up and let it bang away for a few minutes? Is the key-turner saved from the carnage he unleashes? For a filmmaker so committed to vibes, it\u2019s wonderful to watch him try to extend this story to feature-length by complicating the simplicity.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Gore-hounds will bark like seals for this one because Perkins unleashes the full brunt of his imagination on his mutilations. Between this and the next <em>Final Destination <\/em>movie out this summer, It\u2019s lovely to know that, after gathering dust in the corner, filmmakers are once again feeding quarters into the Rube Goldberg machine of precisely staged \u201caccidental\u201d deaths. There\u2019s a perverse pleasure in watching how these situations unfold with their complex mechanics, exceptional timing, and coup de graces at the end. Take, for instance, the first kill, happening to a poor shop owner \u2014 the key is turned, and a rat chews through a rope suspending a spear gun in a diving-goods display. It fires, piercing the guy through the belly, which is bad enough, but then retracts a moment later, pulling his guts out as the line recoils the spear into the barrel. It\u2019s the cartoonish nature of this \u2014 the creepy monkey\u2019s grin, Adam Scott\u2019s horrified-yet-unsurprised reaction, and the quick cuts from Scott to a for-sale flamethrower on a shelf to him setting the toy ablaze Rick Dalton-style \u2014 that makes it so goddamned funny.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>But again, the tone holds everything together: Each part of Perkins\u2019 repertoire is repurposed. The aloof, estranged protagonists? In Theo James\u2019 hands, his dark and bitter narration is a source of constant humor (the man should narrate audiobooks for the rest of his life). The suspenseful misdirects? They\u2019re used to make bloody punchlines land harder or to heighten the emotional impact of certain scenes (yes, this movie does have a heart, as blackened as it might be by hellfire). The piercing jump scares? They\u2019re Raimi-like exclamation points punctuating a moment for emphasis (such as one absurd kill at a swimming pool following James\u2019 plot-initiating phone conversation with his estranged brother). It\u2019s a wholesale embrace of the absurd, which is what Perkins has been asking of his audience for his last few features in which one doesn\u2019t just have to roll with it \u2014 it\u2019s actively encouraging you to enjoy the ride instead of appreciating how it feels. I think this is the kind of expansive step forward that the best artists in the \u201celevated horror\u201d space make, in which their films expand the audience enough to include former haters as much as they invite in new ones.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p><em>The Monkey <\/em>has all the trademarks of what should be a letting-off-steam feature, a lighter companion to the heaviness of <em>Longlegs<\/em>, and I\u2019d agree \u2014 this is a \u201cfuckin\u2019 around\u201d b-side compared to the last feature. But you\u2019d be stunned to discover how many classic songs were consigned to the other side of the 45, at the least the first go-round: \u201cRock Around the Clock,\u201d \u201cInto the Groove,\u201d \u201cHow Soon is Now?,\u201d \u201cWe Will Rock You.\u201d So, yeah, I love \u201cWilliam, It Was Really Nothing,\u201d too, but I know a true blue classic when I hear it. Likewise, <em>The Monkey<\/em> is a great and absurdly entertaining time at the movies, requiring no explanations or disclaimers for you to enjoy. Just turn the key and see what happens.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Around eight months ago, I wrote a defense of \u201cvibes-based horror\u201d to try and compliment what Osgood Perkins was doing in Longlegs because I could feel the old criticisms bubbling up to the surface even before the first reel ended. You know the familiar refrains: \u201cThat was bullshit\u201d; \u201cThat didn\u2019t make any sense\u201d; and, worst of all, \u201cThe marketing lied. That wasn\u2019t scary at all.\u201d It\u2019s true: For all of his style and skill, Perkins never had his breakthrough moment [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":48,"featured_media":10040844,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"om_disable_all_campaigns":false,"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[19452],"tags":[20180,26409,8141,34599,21111,34600,10482,34970],"class_list":["post-10040837","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-filmtv","tag-film-review","tag-header","tag-horror","tag-longlegs","tag-neon","tag-osgood-perkins","tag-stephen-king","tag-the-monkey"],"yoast_head":"<!-- This site is optimized with the Yoast SEO plugin v24.2 - https:\/\/yoast.com\/wordpress\/plugins\/seo\/ -->\n<title>&#039;The Monkey&#039; 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