The Monkey

If you’re willing to dig past The Monkey’s blood and guts, you’ll find a thoughtful inquiry into the very different lives of people depending on their response and disposition toward the random, inordinate, and callous suffering around us.

The film, shot in oily gloom by Nico Aguilar, sets out to dispatch every passerby in fashions that would appal Caligula. Good old-fashioned disgusting fun. I had a blast.

This is a riot of a film and I pretty much enjoyed every moment of it.

Perkins’s film never explains how the monkey migrates so much, but follows it from pillar to post on an equal-opportunity killing spree. As spectacle, it’s garish.

A horror film can’t survive on kills alone, and the narrative of The Monkey — for all the movie’s craft and pedigree — is the worst thing a horror saga can be: boring.

A droll and stylish expression of these sentiments, yet there is still something about this gory fable that feels a bit like an exercise, rather than an epic. It’s too glib to fully penetrate, but sometimes, all you can do is laugh in the face of death.

At its core, The Monkey is just a really good horror comedy that made me cry and I am not afraid to admit it.

Strives, with sweaty desperation, to simultaneously generate screams and laughs, but it succeeds mostly in eliciting groans.

Perkins, fresh off the success of Longlegs, wields his darkly comic sensibilities like a scalpel, cutting between supernatural horror, macabre family drama, and outright farce. The film leans into absurdism, fashioning its deaths as punchlines rather than

Its talented cast are powerless to save this film because the horror elements of the film are never fully explored while the screenplay often contradicts itself. Osgood Perkins showed some talent with Longlegs but The Monkey is a real letdown.