The blood and guts of “The Monkey” is played for laughs in Osgood Perkins’ film of Stephen King’s monstrous wind-up toy thriller.
It’s a heavy-handed, staggering splatter comedy with random laughs mixed with random slaughter, all of it cast and played as broadly and as subtly as that elbow you get in the ribs from the friend whose jokes rarely work, but who wants to be sure you “Get it?”
“Stand By Me” voice-over narrated to death, with many a murder just sort of flashing in our face with little set-up, personal introduction, anticipation or “satisfaction,” we grasp for laughs at disembowelings and Japanese steak house beheadings or airline crashes and flaming baby strollers pushed by a screaming mother.
An uncredited Adam Scott plays an amateurishly uniformed airline pilot father who tries to return a monkey toy to a pawn shop, only to get the shop owner killed and the monkey flame-throwered.
An over-the-top tone is set and the fates of the twin sons (Christian Convery) of that “went out for cigarettes and never came back” pilot are sealed by that simple “No returns” policy. Because when thoughtful, introverted and bullied Hal and his bullying “older” twin Bill find that toy, people around them start dying.
Hal would like to vanquish the mean girl gang that abuses him in middle school (the one hilarious bit here), and maybe rid himself of one cruel sibling. Bill likewise has “brother” issues.
But the monkey “doesn’t take requests.” As their mother (Tatiana Maslany of “Orphan Black”) tells them, “We all die.” Sometimes it’s expected. Sometimes it’s explainable. Sometimes you deserve it. Death is random.
Death, however, doesn’t come to the person who dares to wind up the monstrous drumming monkey.
And nothing the siblings do — dismembering it (it bleeds) or throwing it down a well — can stop it or keep the gift that Dad once gave them from keeping on giving.
The adult Hal and Bill are reflections of that tormented childhood. Theo James plays Bill as a twisted, obsessive bully bent on reclaiming the monkey for revenge and repurposing his childhood “funeral suit.” Hal, meanwhile, has become the best looking, best-groomed convenience store clerk in his corner of Maine, guiltily laying low, all but allowing his teen son (Colin O’Brien) to be adopted away from him by his wife’s creepy ditz of a parenting guru (Elijah Wood, almost funny) just to protect the child.
The brothers are doomed to reconnect and clash, and this time the body count won’t be limited to a baby sitter or a parent. This time Casco, Maine could have a lot of empty housing — the houses not destroyed by the jetliner crash, anyway.
The prolific King never creates in a vacuum, and for much of his work — as a fun exercise — you can name the “Twilight Zone” episode or other antecedent that sets up this neighborhood monster or that possessed “doll.” As “The Monkey” was published as a story in 1980, one guesses that he saw how scary such a toy could be in Steven Spielberg’s “Close Encounters” and thought, “Yeah, but what if it was a mass killer, unearthed by kids…in MAINE?”
The actor turned director of “Longlegs” and “Gretel & Hansel” Osgood Perkins also plays a “swinger” uncle who takes the orphaned siblings in as kids, and the broad, chronologically-inaccurate characterization of Uncle Chip sets the tone for the movie — anything for a laugh. Not that Chip really finds one.
Nicco del Rio plays a long-haired, 20something priest who is anything but comforting to mourners at the funerals he presides over.
“Everything for a reason — yeah, totally. ‘It is what it is’ — the WORD of the Lord.”
There are laughs that land, some of them generated by the shock of “Oh no he DIDN’T.” But James, playing two parts, is more professional than comically engaged in all of this. Only the broadest characters — a mop-topped goof played by “Halloween Ends” and “Hardy Boys” alumnus Rohan Campbell — register. Only the murders are memorable.
“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.
But reducing horror to a series of creative (ish) killings treated as jokes will appeal to some, especially those inclined to elbow their friends in the ribs as they’re exiting the multiplex.
“Remember when she died of an anuerysm? How funny was THAT?”
Rating: R, gory, bloody violence, and lots of it, profanity, sexual references
Cast: Theo James, Tatiana Mislani, Christian Convery, Colin O’Brien, Rohan Campbell and Elijah Wood.
Credits: Scripted and directed by Osgood Perkins, based on a short story by Stephen King. A Neon release.
Running time: 1:35
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