The best thing about Osgood Perkins’ adaptation of the Stephen King short story is the titular toy, whose malevolent intentions are obvious just by looking at its sick grin and wide-open eyes. Unlike the windup monkey you’re more likely to imagine, this one doesn’t play crash cymbals, but rather a drum, and as soon as it starts striking those skins someone in the vicinity dies a comically horrible death. Perkins, who made the deliciously demented but dramatically uneven serial killer movie, Daddy Longlegs, knows how to get the viewer’s motor running, and opens with what amounts to an origin story, with a U.S. military officer played by Adam Scott desperately trying to return the toy to some Southeast Asian emporium and, in the process, causing the disembowelment of the proprietor, who apparently didn’t know what his merchandise was capable of. It’s the first of many crass jokes and a pretty effective one. 

This officer is married and has twin sons (Christian Convery), and for reasons unexplained he abandons them. Inevitably the boys discover the toy in the closet and turn the key, which leads to a number of deaths. As it turns out, one of the twins hates the other for the bully that he is and thinks he can use the monkey to get rid of him, but that’s not the way things work (“It doesn’t take requests”), and in the process it’s the boys’ mother (Tatiana Maslany) who dies. Skip ahead two decades after the twins, adopted by their aunt and uncle, a pair of swingers, throw the cursed simian down a well and we find them estranged and still suffering separately for what happened. The more sensitive one, Hal (Theo James), is divorced and trying to forge a relationship with his adolescent son, Petey (Colin O’Brien), whom he sees only once a year so as to keep him as far away from the monkey’s telepathic attention. Right on cue, his toxic brother, Bill (also James), calls him and says he has learned that the monkey has somehow returned and plans to get rid of it once and for all. As it turns out, the toy has come into the possession of a weirdo named Rick (Rohan Campbell), who knows it’s something special but unaware exactly how special. When Bill steals it from him, Rick attempts to get it back and, literally, all hell breaks loose.

It would be easy to dismiss The Monkey as a piss-take on the Final Destination series, but King’s characteristically clever plotting and Perkins’ witty direction combine to emphasize the nihilism at the core of the best horror movies. We all will die, after all, hopefully not as spectacularly as the unfortunate people in this movie, but random death is more of a fact of life than we would like to believe. That is basically Hal’s and Bill’s curse, which is why they are so monumentally and permanently traumatized. Osgood, the son of Tony “Norman Bates” Perkins, who died of AIDS, and actress Berry Berenson, who perished in the September 11 terrorist attacks, knows whereof he directs. 

Opens Sept. 19 in Tokyo at Shinjuku Piccadilly (050-6861-3011, Human Trust Cinema Shibuya (03-5468-5551), and from Sept. 26 at Kadokawa Cinema Yurakucho (03-6268-0015).

The Monkey home page in Japanese

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