The Monkey Parent Guide

Identical twin boys Hal and Bill (Christian Convery) couldn’t be more different in temperament: Hal’s a sweet-natured kid, and Bill’s a jerk in a human suit. Their mother, Lois (Tatian Maslany), a stressed-out single parent, has never been able to help the boys to get along, so when they find a strange toy monkey among their absentee father’s (Adam Scott) possessions, they fight over that as well.

The monkey isn’t much of a toy; definitely not worth fighting over. Once you wind it up, it plays a little tune and beats a little drum, and then it just sits there and stares at you with its awful empty eyes. Oh, and someone inevitably dies a horrible and untimely demise in the vicinity.

Following the horrible and untimely death of their mother, the brothers became well and truly estranged. Hal (played as an adult by Theo James) hasn’t heard from Bill in at least five years, and he likes it that way – if he’s not near to anyone he cares about, no one will die in awful circumstances. He only sees his son, Petey (Colin O’Brien) one week a year at his own request. Hal is simply terrified of losing anybody else. But a phone call from Bill during his week with Petey derails Hal’s plans. Their aunt has died, and since the boys hid the monkey in her house, Hal must find it before somebody else does…and it looks like Petey’s coming along.

Comedy horror is a tricky balance to find, and this movie wobbles around some on the tightrope, but I have a hard time explaining why. The comedy elements are genuinely pretty funny, if grotesquely dark (which you should expect from anything written by Stephen King), and the gore is certainly gory. The two just never quite seem to gel – at least, not for me. My bigger issue was with some of the dialogue, but I’ve always been a picky snob about dialogue.

That aside, I was darkly impressed with the commitment to carnage the film displayed. The on-screen deaths really shoot the moon past scary-gory and straight into insane. The monkey doesn’t really do much but beat the drum, so all the deaths are caused by random nearby objects. By the time someone fully explodes from touching some electrified water, you get the impression that the film is leaning ever so slightly further into comedy than horror.

As you might have gathered, The Monkey is not family viewing, and that’s cemented by the 50+ f-bombs distributed haphazardly throughout the script. But if you’re looking for blood-soaked laughs, and just weren’t satisfied with Heart Eyes, then this ought to scratch that corpse-y itch you’ve developed. (You might want to see someone about that.)