ABOUT THE AUTHOR: Exploitation-film historian A.C. Nicholas, who has a sketchy background and hails from parts unknown in Western Pennsylvania, was once a drive-in theater projectionist and disk jockey. In addition to being a writer, editor, podcaster, voice-over artist, and sometime actor and stand-up comedian, he’s a regular guest co-host on the streaming Drive-In Asylum Double Feature and has made multiple appearances on Making Tarantino: The Podcast. He also contributes to the Drive-In Asylum fanzine, the B & S About Movies Podcast, and the Horror and Sons website. His most recent essay, “Jay Ward, J-Men, Dynaman, and the Comedy Re-Dub,” will appear in the next issue of Drive-In Asylum.

I was thinking of giving The Monkey a two-word review: “Stupid fun.” But the more I thought about it, perhaps it deserved five words: “Very stupid, sort of fun.” Those lines are accurate, but you want and deserve more, don’t you? Hang with me, and I’ll elaborate.

I rarely enjoy new horror films because I find most of them to be inferior to those from the 1970s and 1980s. For every excellent film by one of my favorite directors of this generation—Robert Eggers, Peter Strickland, or Ben Wheatley—there are a dozen formulaic cash-grabs from filmmakers who don’t understand the genre. Back in the day, with the first cycle of movies based on Stephen King properties, you had three categories of adaptations: masterpieces like Carrie, The Shining, and Dead Zone; low-rent stuff like Thinner, Graveyard Shift, and The Mangler; and things, that, while not great, were either better than expected or at least fun, like Cujo, Christine, and The Night Flyer.

Which brings us to The Monkey, a recent addition to the killer-toy universe inhabited by Chucky and M3GAN, written and directed by Oz Perkins and based on a story from Stephen King’s Skeleton Crew collection. With his first three films—The Blackcoat’s Daughter, I Am the Pretty Thing That Lives in the House, and Gretel & Hansel—Perkins stood out on the playground. He was a talented filmmaker who understood horror (of course; it was in the DNA he got from his father, Anthony) and made idiosyncratic, personal films, which were arty without being pretentious and self-important (yeah, that’s your filmography, Ari Aster). But then he had a huge commercial success with Longlegs, a film that Sam Panico and I despise. A lot of folks, especially critics enamored with “elevated horror,” loved it, comparing it favorably to The Silence of the Lambs and calling it scary as hell. (OK, Nicolas Cage in a dressing gown and a putty nose was frightening … at first.) I, on the other hand, thought it was a mess. Despite having a distinctively cold look and feel, it seemed as though Perkins had simply written down a bunch of commercial ideas that he liked on 3×5 cards and shuffled them to create the screenplay. It was dispiriting watching a fine cast, in a well-made film, trying to inject something, anything into this lazy, borderline insulting, conglomeration of tropes. See Nic Cage chew scenery as a serial killer writing a crazy manifesto in code! But wait. There’s more! Maika Monroe’s a troubled FBI agent on his trail, and guess what? She’s psychic! Wow! Is that Alicia Witt playing an old woman in an old house with scary old dolls, who’s harboring an old secret? And look! There’s Blair Underwood—haven’t seen him in a while—collecting a paycheck in a nothing part. Maybe “dispiriting” is too kind. Longlegs made me angry.

With that background, I approached The Monkey with trepidation. Would this be a return to form for a filmmaker I once liked? I’m afraid the answer is “no.” Once again, Perkins, now a beloved horror icon, leans hard into his own worst traits. The King story about a mechanical monkey toy that can kill in Final Destination style when its key is turned is short and to the point. But, like most of King’s writing, it doesn’t lend itself well to a feature film. Perkins, aware of this, gives the lead character an evil twin and incorporates a non-linear structure with lots of flashbacks. Though the film runs a commendably short 98 minutes, for well over the first hour, my thought was Perkins had only about 20 minutes’ worth of material. And, as others have suggested, this material might have been better served as an episode of a streaming anthology series, like Creepshow or Guillermo del Toro’s Cabinet of Curiosities. Things do pick up with some plot, rather than just set pieces, in the last act, but it’s all yet another trope: sentimental Stephen King reconnected-family boilerplate.

As for the cast, for the second film in a row, Perkins wastes some talented folks who give nice performances. Christian Convery (Cocaine Bear) plays the twins as boys, with Theo James (Divergent and Underworld films) taking over when they become adults. Both are excellent, with James having fun doing a riff on Tim Hutton’s evil twin in George Romero’s flawed, but still very good, adaptation of King’s The Dark Half.

In addition, it was nice to see a movie role for the wonderfully natural Sarah Levy from Schitt’s Creek. Perkins himself plays her husband and proves that he’s not just a filmmaker, but also a competent actor. But both are cardboard cutouts, around only long enough to die gruesome deaths. More about those shortly. Adam Scott shows up in the funny cold opening, which promises a better film, but then he’s gone. And Elijah Wood has an unfunny cameo, which exists only to play to the horror fandom.

But the most egregiously wasted cast member is Tatiana Maslany. Since first seeing Ukrainian-Canadian Maslany playing multiple clones (and those clones impersonating each other) on BBC America’s Orphan Black, I’ve referred to her as the “Meryl Streep of Television.” She’s a phenomenal talent, one of the best actresses working today, who has yet to break out and become a mainstream success. Here, she’s perfect as the boys’ put-upon, bedraggled mother, smoking cigarettes, tossing off quips, lecturing them on the inevitability of death, and making the most of her few scenes before the inevitable.

And I’ve saved the inevitable, all the gory deaths, for last. They’re outside the hopscotch boundaries of a film released to thousands of theaters. I’ll hand it to Perkins, his sense of humor, almost nonexistent in his previous films, is sick. Really sick. I was startled, shook my head, and laughed at the ridiculous ways people die, including via a shotgun, a lawn mower, an errant air-conditioning unit, and stampeding horses. (And wait until you see the cheerleaders on the school bus.) Perkins, cinematographer Nico Aguilar, and editors Greg Ng and Graham Fortin get high-fives for replicating a Tex Avery cartoon. The nuttiness of the violence is the best thing about the film, but even that’s a mixed blessing. Unlike another recent horror film, Malignant, which starts out stupid before becoming stupid and ludicrous—and ultimately stupid and ludicrous but entertaining, The Monkey never finds its tonal footing. Perkins earns my respect for trying something different, but it’s well-nigh impossible to deliberately make a campy cult film. They happen accidentally.

To wind up (feel free to groan out loud), The Monkey’s not great, but at least it’s not dire, like Longlegs. I enjoyed the cast, appreciated the craftsmanship, and chuckled at the set pieces. But that’s about it. I’ll lump it into my category of King adaptations, that, while not dreadful, aren’t anything to lose your feces over, though lots of folks did over The Monkey. Hmmm… Maybe I shouldn’t have monkeyed around with all those keystrokes and instead settled upon a three-word review: “Barely passable junk.”