Just the idea of a Stephen King story in the hands of writer-director Oz Perkins, who creeped us out big time with Nic Cage in "Longlegs," gives me shivers of anticipation.
And "The Monkey," now in theaters, doesn't disappoint, even if it never quite reaches the horror heights.
No matter. It's still a grabber. The monkey is not a real monkey, it's a toy with a curse on its head. Wind up the key on its back and it plays a menacing drum roll that portends a gruesome death. I mean the blood splatter here is serious business.
Luckily, so are the laughs.
A gory prologue sets the tone in a pawn shop where a pilot ("Severance" MVP Adam Scott in a killer cameo), his uniform covered in blood, tries to sell his two-foot-tall, plastic monkey toy to the owner, who turns the key and ends up harpooned by a spear that's on one of the shelves.
Then we're off to Maine, King's birthplace, where we meet Hal and Bill Shelburn (played by Christian Convery), preteen twins who are sons of the now-MIA pilot and a neurotic mother (Tatiana Maslany). The bookish Hal is bullied by his brother and everyone at school, that is until the boys find the monkey and all unholy hell breaks loose.
Perkins, the son of "Psycho" star Anthony Perkins, stages a series of spectacular kills (I won't spoil the shocks) of the kind recently made famous by the "Final Destination" franchise.
One scene, catching a blend of mirth and menace, finds the boys watching in horror as their babysitter, Annie Wilkes (a scenestealing Danica Dreyer), is skewered in a hibachi restaurant.
Things get so bad that Hal and Bill try to kill the monkey by throwing it down a well. An earlier attempt to melt it with a flamethrower also failed.
Spring forward 25 years and Hal, now a divorced dad who only sees his son once a year, is basically a recluse. It's the reappearance of the monkey that spurs him to reconnect with his estranged brother.
Theo James, an Emmy nominee as the cheating husband in season 2 of "The White Lotus," steps into the dual role. And he's having a blast. But he also captures the insidious darkness haunting the brothers. Perkins picks up on the theme of generational trauma that's being passed on to Hal and Bill from their father and now to Hal's son Petey (Colin O'Brien).
King himself has praised the movie for being batty "insanity." Of course, it's more than that. Otherwise audiences would be stuck staring at a series of showstopping slaughters that soon grow tired from repetition and rank silliness.
There's plenty of that as the movie loses steam in its final section. But King and Perkins are still a dream team of fright masters when it comes to revealing the psychological dread lurking under the macabre monkeyshines that keep us up nights.
The scariest monsters invade us from the inside.
Wind up "The Monkey" and you'll see.
