On this blog, I’ve pledged to elevate the stuff I enjoy and not spend any time writing about the stuff I don’t like. That’s not just part of the “Good Vibes Only” policy I’m more strictly observing since the 2024 election, but because a negative review is almost always worthless. Not only is our time better spent promoting the stuff we love, but it’s time wasted to dwell on the negatives. It won’t (and shouldn’t!) dissuade anyone who’s eager to enjoy something, and it won’t (and shouldn’t!) change the opinion of someone who’s already enjoyed it or disliked it.1Also, tonight I’ve been reading some of my old posts where I just trashed a movie or TV show, and I invariably came across as a smug little shit.
I’ve worked on stuff that has been panned by reviewers, multiple times. And even after I got over the initial impulse to take it personally, I was left with a feeling of impotent frustration. You’re never going to like this, we’re never going to get anything out of the reviews, and it’s never going to change, so just move on, pal. There’s literally nothing to be gained by complaining about it over and over again.
So I’ll mention one thing that I genuinely liked about the new movie The Monkey, written and directed by Osgood Perkins based on a short story from Stephen King’s collection Skeleton Crew. There’s a scene where our young protagonist Hal is sitting in his bedroom, growing increasingly convinced that the toy monkey he found in his father’s belongings is somehow the cause of the horrible misfortune that’s started to befall his family and their acquaintances.
It’s a quiet scene, and when he looks up, there’s a sudden close-up shot of the monkey at the top of the dresser, with a jump-scare stinger of horror movie music as the frame is filled with the toy’s malevolent stare. Like the best moments in Longlegs, it’s horror movie artistry perfectly timed and executed, and it’s funny because it’s so discordant and such a non sequitur.
That’s also the last thing I liked about the movie2Okay, I did like the detail that Elijah Wood’s loathsome parenting guru character was wearing some kind of sweatshirt with a flesh-colored stripe in the center that bizarrely and needlessly accentuated his nipples, which I really, really disliked.
If anyone’s been looking forward to seeing the movie, but is on the fence, like I was, about how scary and gory it would be: I won’t (and shouldn’t!) dissuade you from seeing it. It’s not at all scary, and it quickly establishes itself as going for black comedy instead of unsettling horror, and it is not at all subtle. So there’s not even the drawn-out tension of the best moments in Final Destination, which it’s frequently compared to.
I’d also heard it compared to the Peter Jackson movie Dead Alive/Braindead, which is an over-the-top zombie movie.3If it doesn’t sound familiar, it’s the one where the priest shouts “I kick ass for the Lord!” and a pack of zombies are taken out by someone holding a power lawnmower like a shield. That worried me, because I have a fairly low tolerance for gore, and Dead Alive is one of the few movies that’s made me actually feel like I was going to throw up, even though it was clearly intended to be so over-the-top that it was funny. The Monkey is very bloody and gory, but it’s all done so cartoonishly that to me, at least, it neither registers as scary nor as nauseating. There’s one bloody death scene4With the kids’ mother. that seemed intended to be intense, but it’s not very gory. Most of the gore moments are done in quick succession as 5-10 second punchlines.
So that’s my review. Not my thing, but if an over-the-top horror comedy seems like your thing, and you’ve been wary because of word about the gore factor, be assured that it’ll probably be fine if you’ve been able to handle any recent horror comedy.
Now, my reason for writing anything at all: I so wanted this movie to be my thing.
I was primed to love it, as someone who loves the idea of a darkly funny horror movie and especially as someone who loves the first three entries in the Final Destination franchise. My consternation with Longlegs was that it clearly demonstrated an innate understanding of the craft of horror movies, but it was impossible to shake the feeling of dissonance: is it being deliberately silly? Is it all supposed to be a joke? I thought that if The Monkey were making its intentions clear from the start, it’d be freed of any need to be sincere and could just be clever. Insert here the GIF of Tyra Banks screaming “I was rooting for you!”
If I could sum up the problem with The Monkey, it’s that the entire thing is so eager to be sardonic that there’s nothing to hold onto.
All of the characters are thoroughly unlikable, which wouldn’t be bad if there were the sense that anybody involved in the movie were invested in these characters. Instead, they all seem to be played with a wink. The only exception is Tatiana Maslany’s character, who is the closest this movie gets to a moral center, and even she is cynical. (Although she is the spokesperson of the movie’s overall philosophy of “can’t do anything about it, so f it.”) Maslany seems wasted in the part, except for the fact that her character does have to come across as instantly and irrevocably likable.
Because it’s based on a Stephen King story, I kept being reminded of Maximum Overdrive. That movie was also aiming for a kind of over-the-top camp, and it also felt as if no one involved was committing to making any of it feel the slightest bit genuine or sincere. (I’m also reminded of the adaptation of The Shining starring Stephen Webber, which apparently was the only adaptation of the book that King actually liked, which makes me believe that King and I have diametrically opposing takes on his work).
Going for over-the-top absurdity can work, to some degree: I’m thinking of Mars Attacks!, which was nonsense completely in service of delivering dark comedy. Or the beginning of Men in Black, which had a farmer couple somewhat similar to the aunt and uncle in The Monkey, who existed only to be backwoods stereotypes. It feels a little mean to point out the key difference, which is that The Monkey isn’t nearly as clever as it thinks it is.
And it’s a shame, because you can tell there is in fact a sincerity buried under all the self-satisfied winking in The Monkey. The original story took the basic idea of The Monkey’s Paw and transformed it into a semi-confessional story about generational trauma, a father’s fear of passing his trauma onto his own son. That theme has been emphasized here, and because of the number of interviews with Perkins talking about his own relationship with his parents, it feels as if he’s putting a lot of his own spin on the material.
So it’s too bad that this movie is simultaneously overloaded with the sense of a filmmaker working out his issues and the feeling that he’s unwilling to ever let the audience get closer than arm’s length. Any time the movie is in danger of revealing any genuine sentiment, it immediately goes for a clumsy gag. That’s especially true in the climax, when the iredeemable brother seems to be reaching some sort of redemption5After a painfully predictable and clumsy gag where he pulls the hand of friendship away at the last second, not once but, interminably, twice, and then gets his head blown off because he is the bad guy, after all.
Because The Monkey is based on a story from 1980, and because much of it takes place in an alternate-history early 2000s that has to be accurate for the ages of the actors but looks and feels a lot more like the 1980s (presumably because that’s when Perkins grew up), I kept being reminded of myself as a high school student and just afterwards. I was fascinated by black comedy and the ways that teenagers — or at least, myself as a teenager — understand it: just taking something schmalzy or insincere and putting a twist on it with some violence.
I thought that the point was simply to subvert the false positivity and sentimentality with something dark. I didn’t yet appreciate how much doing it right requires an understanding of irony, subtlety, and understatement. Because I’m in the middle of reading a biography of Edward Gorey, I was also reminded of the poster of The Gashlycrumb Tinies that my college roommate had on his wall. It’s one thing to get that that book is darkly funny; it’s another thing to understand why.
The deaths in The Monkey have none of the sense of irony of The Monkey’s Paw, nor the elaborate setup and subversion of expectations as those in Final Destination. The montage of quick-cut deaths just shows the violent or gory punchlines, instead of being edited to cut away at exactly the most impactful moment.6The lawnmower death, for instance, I can’t help but compare to the one in Sinister, which is so effective because of its timing. (I haven’t seen the movie but you can bet I can picture that one scene vividly). To The Monkey‘s credit, though, death by lawnmower was a favorite thing of Stephen King’s back in the 80s. I’m almost surprised there wasn’t a scene of someone clawing out their own eyes, another favorite. There’s a lengthy bit with a real estate agent trying to open a closet door, and we all know that something gruesome is going to happen as soon as the door opens, but the movie delays the tension over and over as the agent gets distracted, can’t find her key, etc. That would be great! Except that it’s filled with the same crass and obnoxious dialogue that every character speaks with in The Monkey, so it feels like the dialogue and the tension are stomping over each other. It doesn’t work as comedy or as suspense.
You could argue that the whole point of the deaths in The Monkey is to reiterate that all death is horrible and senseless, we’re all basically living in a black comedy, and we essentially need to get desensitized to it just to be able to function. But even there, the movie is inconsistent in which deaths are played for laughs and which are supposed to be horrific.
I guess there’s one more thing I did like about The Monkey: there’s a shot at the end, as Hal sees the image of Death on its horse riding through an intersection, and it was exactly the kind of tone I’d been hoping the movie would have more of. It’s weird enough to play as real or metaphorical, and it was just understated enough for a black comedy. It perfectly ties together the idea that death isn’t something we have to be afraid of; it’s just always there, and we have to be aware of it.
But even that is undercut immediately, by a gag that kills off a bus load of cheerleaders in a method that is nonsensical and lacking any real sense of irony or artistry.
It’s entirely possible that my expectations were just too high, or simply that I was expecting an entirely different movie than the one they intended to make. But I guess at least it’s helped put to rest any lingering doubts that there were layers to Longlegs that I might’ve missed, and I can be content to just say that the filmmaker’s work doesn’t connect with me as much as I’d like. And it also let me be glad I’m not the smug teenager I once was. Maybe I’ll even find some grim camaraderie with other people who wanted to love this movie and went away disappointed.