Released: 21st February
Seen: 29th May
It is a truth universally accepted by anyone who is cool that Stephen King is the greatest horror author of the last 50 years. His stories are modern classics, transforming the way horror books are viewed in the literary world and serving as the foundation for some of the greatest films of the last several decades. He is a truly prolific author with over 65 novels and 200 short stories under his pen and by the time I’ve posted this specific review he will have undoubtedly added to that (To repeat George R.R. Martin’s question to Stephen King “How the fuck do you write so many books so fast?”). He’s also infamous for taking basic everyday things and making them terrifying. This is such a well-known thing that it served as the foundation for a pretty great cutaway gag from an early episode of Family Guy, where Stephen King tried to sell his publisher on the idea of a book about a cursed lamp. It’s a Stephen King classic, take a basic thing we’ve all seen and twist it into something terrifying. For his 1980 short story The Monkey, he did this by taking a wind-up monkey toy that would clash a pair of cymbals and made it into a mysterious force of evil that led to elaborate, brutal deaths. Now, in 2025, the director Osgood Perkins took that idea and ran with it to bring us The Monkey, a high-energy horror comedy that is one of the most exciting films of the year.
The Monkey largely focuses on Hal Shelborn (Theo James), a man trying to deal with what life has thrown his way. It’s his week with custody of his son Petey (Colin O’Brien) whom he only sees for one week a year and has promised to take to an amusement park. Hal is also dealing with the intense trauma brought on from his childhood when he and his identical twin brother, and primary bully, Bill (Also Theo James) were turned into orphans because an evil wind-up monkey banged a drum that led to several brutal deaths, including that of their mother. That intense trauma is not helped by the fact that the monkey keeps finding ways to get back around Hal, even if it’s thrown into a well or brutally dismembered. So begins a family road trip where Hal and Petey have to try and do something to make the monkey stop killing people, which it seems to be doing a lot more of lately, in gloriously brutal ways.
The fact that this film is called The Monkey and is about a monkey doll that makes people die in Final Destination-esque accidents should give you a good hint as to the tone of this thing. There is no real attempt to make this some serious piece about grief or how families can be complete assholes, no this is a goofy-ass fuckfest of insanity and gore that is about two sound effects away from being a cartoon and it’s absolutely glorious. There is no need to do some deep investigation of the themes of this one (though they are there, because they always are) because this is just a truly glorious bit of over-the-top horror where everything is played for laughs. It should be horrifying when someone has their head cut off, The Monkey uses that as a punchline and then a setup for about 4 more jokes because it doesn’t really care about good taste, it’s going for broke and you’re coming along for the ride.
It helps a lot that The Monkey is a fast-paced film, so fast that any potential questions you might have end up not mattering. Sure, I could ask about the origins of The Monkey and how it came to haunt this family, but it’s a little hard to care when someone just exploded by the side of a pool. That speed means that every single character is presented as broadly as humanly possible, you know exactly who each of these people are within about three lines of dialogue, which means they can very effectively introduce someone, get us to like them and then kill them in an over-the-top manner and it just works. It also helps us when it comes to the relationships between characters, particularly the sibling relationship between Hal and Bill. Those two characters so clearly hate each other and you can tell that within seconds of them sharing the screen, but in that weird way that all brothers can kind of hate each other but will still help each other hide a body or kill an evil monkey if they need to. It’s a great dynamic that helps sell the insanity of the film and both the young and old versions of the relationship are hilarious in different ways.
It’s also kind of impressive how a film that’s this gloriously and knowingly silly has the ability to pause the silliness to have a few serious moments about dealing with childhood trauma, and that sometimes bad things just happen. To use the insane comical imagery of a wind up monkey banging a drum and have that lead to a serious scene where someone contemplates if they were just looking for someone to blame for a weird incident from their childhood is pretty impressive on the filmmakers part, I’m stunned they pull it off as well as they do… I also appreciate that they never lose the silly tone that they’ve set, undercutting that moment and other moments like it with either a very stupid joke or someone getting impaled and having their intestines removed. Look, I’m all for looking into the deeper meaning of films, every film is political in some way and can be investigated using a myriad of intellectual theories that can all be fascinating… but those films can also be full of idiots who die in comical ways because a monkey did a drum solo, we can have both things.
The Monkey pretty much delivers what you probably expected it to, based on the ads, a very silly horror comedy with a bunch of cool over-the-top deaths and a bunch of hyper-active performances by a cast who have been encouraged to play everything at an 11 at all times. It’s got a few moments that are actually kind of scary but most of it is just a big joyride that’s intended to have you cackling like a banshee at the sheer ridiculousness of everything going on. To the shock of no one, a film called THE MONKEY is just a good time from start to finish… I’m just glad it didn’t throw any poop at me.
Movie Meister Reviews 