The new movie The Monkey is based on a Stephen King short story of the same name from the collection Skeleton Crew, so they claim. Actually, it does owe a few things from its plot to that story; things like character names, locations, and the eponymous “killer monkey” idea. Sort of. Wait—what’s this about a killer monkey? Well, if you haven’t read the short story the film says it’s based on, it’s about a toy wind-up monkey that supposedly kills someone every time it beats its drum. Figure 1 shows the concept poster for the film, and the film’s monkey.
Here’s the thing: one of the signature things about a King story or book is that he begins slowly—he takes the most innocuous, everyday items or situations, and turns them into nightmares. In film terms, he isn’t like Tom Savini working for George Romero—he doesn’t hit you with the shock images until you’ve gotten comfortable with the soothing background music. He’s not Quentin Tarantino or Tobe Hooper, either; he doesn’t dwell on the scare factor and “blood and guts” as the visceral heart of the story; his story centers on those things that are waiting just beyond the glow of the candle or the weak beam of the flashlight… but he has to ease you into the horror, using something everyday like, oh, maybe a toy windup monkey.
If you’ve never seen one of these toys in the flesh, you’ve seen them in movies—one appears at the auction in the film musical The Phantom of the Opera, for example. Figure 2 is a typical wind-up monkey toy. According to IMDB, the filmmakers didn’t use the King-specified monkey because Disney “holds the rights to them since one appears in a Toy Story movie.” I find that hard to believe—but here’s the rub: the windup monkey is in a Toy Story movie because Toy Story’s director apparently loved the King story. (And a fun triival fact: in Fallout 4, there are any number of broken/burnt toy windup monkeys with cymbals strewn around the wasteland. But I digress….)
Here’s the plot of the story and, more or less, the plot of the film: Hal and Bill Shelborn (both played by Theo James, Figure 3) are twins, but not quite identical as Bill was three minutes before Hal, making him the “older brother.” Apparently in that family, the older brother is a jerk, whose role it was to make his kid brother’s life miserable. Their father, an airline pilot, “went out for a pack of cigarettes and made like an egg and…scrambled,” according to their their mother (Tatiana Maslany, Figure 3). She was a fatalist and told them that everyone dies, which is a hell of a philosophy to raise kids on. The early part of the movie, due to several kinda gory deaths (including their mother) made it appear to be a standard horror movie—especially if you’ve seen the trailer. You quickly get the idea than when the monkey bangs its drum, someone dies. (Never mind that it apparently doesn’t need batteries for its eyes to light up and circus music with several instruments to play, when it just gets wound up.)
All this is an expansion on, and different from, the short story; in that story Bill was several years older than Hal; their father was a sea captain, and the monkey just banged its cymbals which caused someone to die.) So, from this point, let’s ignore the short story (hey, Osgood the director did, so why not?) and just deal with the movie.
Bill is a bully who hates his brother, but when they figure out that the monkey kills people, they throw it down a welll.But it manages to beat its drum anyway. Then there’s a 25-year gap where nobody dies from the monkey, until all of a sudden people start dying in droves. (All deaths from this point on are lovingly dwelt on by the camera, by the way.) The problem is that the movie started out as a horror movie, and now it’s turning into a comedy-horror movie. In the first place, that’s false advertising, so to speak; here you are, settling down to watch a good semi-slasher horror film, and all of a sudden it becomes serio-comedic.
There’s the rub—the director and/or writers aren’t sure how to do that. It’s not terribly funny, even though you can see it’s trying to be. If I want a funny slasher/horror movie, I’ll go for Evil Dead II or Tucker and Dale against Evil, for example. It’s very clumsy humour, with occasional high points—what happens with Lois’s bowling ball, for example. I’ve seen some really well-done horror movies—with or without a “high-blood” factor; for example, Sting, about a girl and her pet spider—or humourous horror movies like Shaun of the Dead, which delivers on gore and humour. The Monkey, alas, has gore, but not enough humour.
Comments? Anyone? Please comment—you can do it here or on Facebook, or even by email (stevefah at hotmail dot com). All comments are welcome as long as they’re polite. My opinion is, as always, my own, and doesn’t necessarily reflect the views of Amazing Stories or its owner, editor, publisher or other columnists. See you next time!
