In the Flesh: The Monkey

“Stupid and mean,” turns out to be the register in which Osgood Perkins goes, for me, from a talentless tryhard auteur to a straightforwardly enjoyable, if not particularly inspired, B-movie gross-out guy. The Monkey is dumb, nasty, and often pretty funny, a far cry from the airless, overwritten sludge of his previous films. Its sense of humor is straightforward. The smash cut to a funeral photograph every time something goes wrong may be a fairly shopworn gag, but Perkins executes it repeatedly and with relish. The flat irreverence of each kill often works, though the truly awful CGI hamstrings many of the later ones. The hibachi beheading, the fishhook-immolation-stumble-impalement, the closet shotguns — it’s all a fun combination of Final Destination and Home Alone. The wasps and the pool electrocution don’t work as well. There’s a sloppiness to the execution there, a lazy reliance on CGI to paper over the holes which does not in any way pay off.

The titular clockwork organ grinder monkey is a fun little piece of machinery, and its real human teeth are a wonderful touch. The first time it cracks a smile it feels like reaching into cloudy dishwater and touching something soft and rotten. Genuinely repulsive. When a young Hal (Christian Convery) tries to destroy it with a meat cleaver, its severed limbs leak real blood. It’s fun that they never beat the monkey, though I’m not sure the vision of Death as a pale rider on a white horse amidst the collapse of Hal and Bill’s (Theo James) childhood hometown quite plays as a final touch. Whenever The Monkey tries to go serious it feels like a film at odds with itself. Its father-son generational trauma material is lifeless, its brotherly feud one-note. No half-hearted reflection on the nature of mortality hits as hard as the hilarious smash-cut to Uncle Chip’s funeral or the young Hal’s recollection that the county coroner said his trampled body looked “like someone had drop-kicked a cherry pie.”

Outside of the always fantastic Tatiana Maslany as Hall and Bill’s mother, Lois, and Elijah Wood as New Age fatherhood guru Ted Hammerman, there’s no real talent onscreen here. Theo James isn’t bad as Hal, but his Bill is tedious, and Colin O’Brien isn’t up to much as Hal’s son, Petey The Monkey is a mixed bag, at once lazy and sharp, gleefully nasty and boring. It may curb some of Perkins’ worst traits as a director and reveal previously hidden knacks, but what it reveals most plainly is his limitations, no matter the tone or subgenre. He has no ear for dialogue, no facility for the complexities of human connection, no sense of (or interest in) what will and won’t play visually. Still, a half-fun movie is better than one that’s no fun at all, and if there’s nothing original about The Monkey, there’s still more than enough there to make it an amusing way to kill an hour and forty.