Metacritic-Rezensionen

The Monkey is one of the best horror-comedies (and Stephen King adaptations) in recent memory, exploding off the screen with both gory kills and big laughs.

The Monkey might be a horror, but it's a laugh riot too, as Osgood Perkins offers up a plethora of inventively gruesome kills and some surprisingly profound ideas surrounding life and death.

You’d be hard-pressed to call it moving, but at least there’s an emotional narrative that drags us through the grisly bits. Sick, dark and laugh-out-loud nuts.

There’s no cheating in The Monkey. It’s coming for you. And it’s gonna be messy.

The Monkey is at its weakest when it tries too hard to explain what’s happening, either on a plot or on a thematic level. (The narration can be especially detrimental in this way.) And it’s strongest when it abandons its search for meaning and does a silly dance in the face of Death itself. A dry, mocking one though it might be, The Monkey is ultimately just a laugh.

It may not feel as polished or suspenseful as Longlegs, but you can tell Perkins is having a whale of a time putting his years of horror filmmaking to the maximum.

Don’t expect the true terror of Perkins’ Longlegs or King’s source story. Do expect plentiful gags to make you, well, gag. The best scenes here are a gory glory.

For all its unpredictability and nerve, the film too often feels snarky rather than subversive.

The Monkey is a blood-soaked barrel of laughs and grisly kills that never finds an effective way to reconcile either of those.

The Monkey has no pace, no rising sense of urgency or suspense, no real path it’s following and little or nothing that amounts to a message.