The Monkey

The latest Stephen King adaptation goes for monkeyshine with its horror, making for a weird, often dull but occasionally funny gross-out spectacle.

Say what you will about the sheer profligacy and range of genres Stephen King has tackled in his 50+ year writing career, but comedy has never exactly been his wheelhouse. Sure, there are wry moments in some of his works, so many of which have been adapted for the screen, but it’s pretty much always the slice of cheese in an otherwise expansive sandwich heavy on scares and thrills.

I haven’t read his 1980 short story, “The Monkey,” so I can’t rule out that it was intended as a comedy, though from what I’ve gathered it’s not. However, the movie version written and directed by Osgood Perkins is very much playing monkeyshine with its horror — aka, going for laughs.

Perkins made last year’s “Longlegs,” which I really really dug, in no small part because it’s one of the few modern horrors that left me genuinely unnerved. This movie is a real code switch from that, and not a particularly successful one.

I laughed a few times, was amused by the deliberately over-the-top gory stuff (of which there’s plenty), but also found myself twiddling my thumbs through long talkie sections that could’ve been much shorter, or left out entirely.

Usually with page-to-screen adaptations the challenge is what to cut. In this case, trying to pad out a 34-page short story into a 98-minute movie results in a flick that feels overstuffed.

It boasts a lot of cameos by name stars, including Adam Scott, Elijah Wood and Tatiana Maslany (best known for “She-Hulk: Attorney at Law,” which I say is one of the best Marvel streaming shows, and screw all the haters.) Perkins himself has a small role as creepy Uncle Chet, though I’ll admit I thought it was Will Ferrell at first.

In a lot of ways the movie is a spoof of all those horror movies involving toys or other inanimate objects: the “Chucky” series, the “Annabelle” movies, and so on. In this case, an old-fashioned wind-up monkey doll that plays the drums. Except whenever he bangs his tune, someone dies.

I’ll (slightly) spoil things by saying that the never-named monkey doesn’t come alive and start running around stabbing people a la Chucky. Instead, terrible accidents befall seemingly random people, from shotgun blasts to brain aneurysms to death by bowling ball.

Hal is a meek, bespectacled kid with a true dick for a twin brother, Bill (both played by Christian Convery). They discover the monkey amongst the stuff of their dad (Scott), an airline pilot who took off long ago and never returned. Their first clue it’s not just a silly toy is when their babysitter (Danica Dreyer), whom Bill has a crush on, gets some radical reduction at a teppanyaki place.

More tragedies follow, further estranging the brothers, and then the movie cuts to 25 years later, with Theo James taking over the role of both Hal and Bill. Hal has become a loner loser who clerks at a convenience store, only seeing his son, Petey (Colin O'Brien ), once a year. Of course the kid thinks his dad doesn’t care about him, but Hal is worried the monkey’s curse on the family will return — and, of course, it does.

Hal is browbeaten by Bill in returning to their Maine hometown after the hilariously gruesome death of their aunt Ida (Sarah Levy), a pretty good indication the monkey has returned after a long absence. I should note the monkey clearly has supernatural abilities, as Hal tried chopping it into pieces after its first murders, only for it to return unharmed shortly thereafter.

The various funny kills are the best thing going for the movie, even if they don’t particularly make any sense.

For example, there’s a scene where Hal is angrily talking to Bill on the phone in the middle of the night at the cheap roadside motel where he and Petey are staying. For some reason, a hot girl in a skimpy red bikini emerges to go swimming in the pool at this exact moment. Very bad things will happen to her.

The thing is, the moment she emerges and drops her robe we know this is what will happen to her. It’s the only reason she’s in the movie. But how much sense does it make that a random chick shows up for a swim at 3 a.m.?

I hate this kind of film writing, where the creators stick stuff in just because they like the sound of it, not because it has any kind of authenticity. Problem is, when you make everything ridiculous, there’s no weight to all the murder and mayhem.

For me, the best horror-comedies are equally adept at both the scaring and the rib-tickling. Take the “Terrifier” flicks as an excellent recent example. I wasn’t frightened for a second of “The Monkey,” because we know it’s all just one big joke.

The last half turns into a turgid revenge face-off between Hal and Bill, with predictable results. Certainly there’s no delving into the history or motivation of the monkey (or whoever created it); it’s simply a MacGuffin to move the story along.

Maybe we’ll get that in “The Monkey 2,” if this one does well enough. But I doubt it; this furball bangs the drum woefully.