The Monkey

Evil-looking windup toy monkey causes someone's gory "accidental" death every time it beats its toy drum. That's it, for an hour and a half. Every ten minutes somebody dies in an elaborate fashion that nonetheless lacks the ingenuity or suspense of the "Final Destination" (or even "Saw") movies because it's all played as a joke. Even that would be fine if the director really had a flair for jaunty black comedy--something like early Coen brothers--or spectacular bad-taste slapstick. But he doesn't, so this just comes off as one dumb gag after another, played out by characters who are all cartoonishly one-dimensional, so there's zero emotional stake in their fates.

I enjoyed at least some of Perkins' prior movies, but this reminded me that the weakest thing about Stephen King books and writing is when they're trying to be funny (think "Maximum Overdrive"), which is not his strong suit. It's better crafted than a lot of low-budget movies in a similar vein, but given that it's not particularly low-budget and involves some talented people, its ideas should be better than that of your average lowbrow gore comedy. I was very disappointed. If my expectations had been lower, I would have found it an okay throwaway movie--but even so, one that's neither particularly clever or scary, just sort of mildly amusing.

The previews made this horror movie seem different and it peaked my interest.

In the end, the previews were better than the movie.

This seemed like a take on a couple of Twilight Zone episodes. The one with Talking Tina and the one with another doll that showed up in war zones and as evil charm.

The two main characters, the twins, were not likable characters. You didn't really get to know them, but what you do see in them, it's not something adorable or likable.

The killing scenes were just over the top unrealistic, made it seem like a cheap slasher movie made to attract a high school audience. We don't learn much about the monkey and not because of a cloud of mystery, more like and oversight. The plot in the end wasn't believable and the movie did little to make it believable. ...again, like they were more interested in just showing guts, buckets of blood, heads being blown up or removed, and deaths that defied the laws of physics . The other bright spot was I had the entire theater to myself with a bucket of popcorn and a Coke Zero.

Twins Bill and Hal unearth a toy monkey that used to belong to their late father, the twins soon discover that the sinister looking toy has deadly powers, a force that caused the death of their babysitter, mother and many more. After buying it, the years pass and the brothers drift apart, the monkey however returns.

I was genuinely looking forward to it, the cast on paper impressed me and the trailer looked great. The final result is a little bit of a disappointment, it aims to be an edgy, black comedy horror, most of the time it's just underwhelming.

There's nothing new here, everything done here has been done before, better, in terms of pacing it is too slow, it takes ages to get going. I'm not too sure it knew what it wanted to be, I couldn't take it seriously as a horror, I wasn't expecting to yawn my wah through.

On the plus side, the monkey looks awesome, I love the look on its face, especially when the lighting is dark and subtle, plus the period details are great, the early scenes look spot on. One or two of the scares looked good, very Final Destination at times.

Fair to say all of the best material was crammed into the trailer, most of the material just wasn't up to much. They certainly made a great trailer, sadly they exhausted all of the best bits.

Theo James does a good job, he adds a bit of life into the part and is as handsome as ever, sadly some of the other performances are a little lifeless.

Overall, it's somewhat disappointing.

6/10.

I read a lot of Stephen King books but this short story from him I must have skipped as I have no recollection of it so I can't really compare this movie with the book. There have been a lot of his books made into movies, some really good ones that became classics in the horror genre like The Shining, Misery, Carrie and so on, but also a lot of movies that honestly were an insult to the books. The Monkey was a bit of good gory fun with multiple innovative killing methods which resulted in a lot of blood spatters. My wife and I enjoyed this one. It's not a bad story, good acting and well shot horror scenes and the monkey is creepy. A fun watch!

Right from the start you can tell how you'll fell at the end of the film. You either love or hate this movie. There's no in-between.

The movie is too goofy to work as a horror movie and it's too serious to be a dark comedy. There are horrible tonal shifts throughout the entire film. This actually feels like someone tried to write "marvel humour" into a Stephen King movie. By the way, that "based on Stephen King works" is a total disappointment, no single recognizable traits from his works can be seen in here. There is a kind of "twist" at the mid point but it's there just for shock value and totally inconsequential.

The worst part of this "slasher" is that all the deaths are so complicated yet so boring.

What a waste of time.