Fashion stylist Ari (Grace Sol) hasn’t looked at the title of the movie that she’s in. I mean, to be fair, she’s in a science fiction movie. How else do we describe a world where women pay male cam actors for FaceTime sex? I mean, yes, it is Johnny Longway (Leandre White), but I think that perhaps no woman has ever paid for cyber sex or watching guys on cam.

Anyways, after she gets cock blocked by her boyfriend Todd (Daniel Jeffries), she goes and jills off before getting into a second relationship with Darnell (D. Da Don). Then, she decides that she still won’t look at the name of her movie and gets both to move in with her. Arguments about breakfast come quickly.

Directed by Beasy Jones and Rodney Sizemore, this is one of those movies where people keep making bad decisions before meeting violent ends and the whole time, you wonder, “Do you realize how off everyone is here?” No one cares, because it’s a movie and if they could hear you, that would be weird.

This might be the most entertaining Tubi Original ever because everyone in at starts at 10 and then just cranks it up. Everything is the end of the world. Everyone is a horrible person. Everyone just wants Ari, and she pays for it. Also: Tremendous CGI gunfire.

You can watch this on Tubi.

I have sworn not to go Amityville on these Popeye movies or the Mickey Mouse Steamboat Willie slashers and here I am, watching one.

Directed and written by Paul Stephen Mann, this takes place in 1986 — a strange choice, stay with it — as Olive Oyl (Amy Mackie) and her brother Castor (Brendan Nelson) go camping to watch Hailey’s Comet.

They already have Popeye and now they need a comet to land in his pipe and transform him?

Anyways, Popeye goes total Victor Crowley and rips heads off. He also likes to shit down their necks, which I don’t remember ever happening before. Toxic waste is another of his weapons. And then Olive Oyl uses the comet to build an Ash chainsaw and saws the sailor in half before making a robot hand.

Um, yeah.

I appreciate all the references to 80s movies, but it’s as if they were making a slasher and ended up using a character that first showed up in 1929. Because that’s precisely what they did.

This is 65 minutes, at least. And just like Robert Altman, Mann refuses to show Popeye eat spinach, because you know, why would you have him do something that he’s expected to do? No, just make a slasher. At least they balanced the colors and the sound isn’t bad.

You can watch this on Tubi.

New Religion (2022): Miyabi (Kaho Seto) has lost her daughter when she falls from the balcony, which puts her in a dark place, working as an escort in a basement somewhere with two other women. Sure, she has a new guy, but one of her co-workers — Aiwaza (Daiki Nunami) — loses her mind and kills a whole bunch of people with a knife.

One of Aiwaza’s prize clients — Oka (Satoshi Oka) — now needs someone to take care of his needs, so Miyabi takes over. His needs? He takes photos of women, slowly, strangely and in ways that make them feel like they’re being dissected. Yes, that’s strange. But what’s weird is that his house is either always pitch black or blindingly red. Strange enough? What if he had no vocal cords and now spoke through the sound system of his home at body-rattling volume? And what if, with each photo that Oka takes, Miyabi gets closer to seeing her dead daughter?

Also, none of this could be happening. Or all of it.

Directed and written by Keishi Kondo, this is not a movie to go into hoping for a straight-up horror film. But for those willing to journey toward its heart of darkness, there’s something strange and wonderful here.

Neu Mirrors (2025): “Neu Mirrors is a spin-off short film that attempts to answer certain unanswered questions of I and begins just after a scene in the previous film.”

Aizawa wakes up in a strange hotel room as a voice calls him from his earphone. Aizawa notices a man in a white shirt in the room with a photo book at his feet. There are the faces of many strangers and his own face printed on it.

Things don’t get any less weird from there.

This film takes on blue instead of red as its primary color. I love that it can be seen as an expansion or meditation on the past film or entirely on its own. Either way, director and writer Keishi Kondo is a force that creates otherworldly art.

Extras include an interview with the director, behind-the-scenes footage, outtakes, audio commentary on the film, an early concept version of the movie, a crowdfunding teaser, a trailer, an international trailer and a slipcase and reversible sleeves with original artwork for both films. You can buy this from Terra Cotta.

Brittany (Lovely Joyce Glenn) accidentally shot a hostage, which means that, like every cop should, she’s going to therapy with a doctor named Stephanie (Sarah Pribis). But her boss, Captain Sommers (an unrecognizable Lorenzo Lamas, the Snake Eater himself), wants her back on the streets to help solve the case of a killer who shoves chess pieces into the mouths of his or her victims. In the middle of her PTSD, she’s also trying to rebuild her relationship with her father, Marcus (Dorien Hill), a former chess grand master and judge.

Directed by Jamal Hill and written by Patrice Escoto, this has a killer going for revenge against the men who she feels set her father up. It also has Brittany running out to stop them when she figures out the real killer — you may in minutes — and her cigar-smoking cop boss says, “No, Brittany. Wait for backup,” with all the urgency of a bus driver announcing the next stop. I like the idea that the killer smashes out teeth to jam chess pieces in the mouths of victims, but after that, this gets slow. A lot of sitting at computers and no one is yelling, “Enhance. Enhance! ENHANCE!” Come on. Don’t we still do that?

Someone took the time to share this quote on IMDB: Captain Sommers: There’s been another murder.

Someone else reviewed it there and said, “I am not sure if I like this movie or not.”

You can watch this on Tubi.

Directed by Rockey Black (Surprise 2, Surprise 3) and written by Denise Mone’t (Killer Zaddy, Black Santa), this is a home invasion film ala Tubi: the acting and filming may not be up to the standards you expect, but everyone is going for it. Shot in 6 days, Tubi Originals are nearly the last gasp of the direct-to-video movies we all miss and so many people aren’t watching these. I’m here to tell you that you’re missing something.

There are enough twists and turns in this to fill multiple movies, along with a final one that seemingly sets up a sequel, which would make the name The Ultimate Vendetta kind of an oxymoron if the next one is The Ultimate Vendetta 2.

This is a movie made for yelling at the screen during. For going wild and cheering, for just forgetting that we live in a pretty horrible time, but you can always escape to watch people make the dumbest mistakes and trust the wrong people. Tubi Originals forever.

You can watch this on Tubi.

Chris Stokes goes for something different here in his latest Tubi Original, going away from the world of psychosexual crime and sequels to explore the inner city world that fuels boxing.

Sean (Robert Ri’chard), a former boxer, comes back into his sons’ lives to face his most formidable challenge. Fatherhood. With his oldest son, Sean Jr. (Akheem Cheatam), who is starting to compete in professional boxing, the father must step up to guide him not just in the ring, but in life.

Sean and his family’s enemy is Big Phil (Benzino, joining the Stokes acting group), who has had it in for the father for years. His son also wants to be a boxer, and he does everything he can to make him a winner. Of course, the final boxing battle will be between the two of them, with Sean’s mother appearing as a ghost to get him to his feet once he’s knocked out.

The boxing on this feels like either dancing or video games, but who cares? The only question I have is, “Why does this movie have to be 2 hours and 25 minutes long?”I get that Stokes wanted to make a boxing epic, but his films have always been lean. That choice aside, he makes the most of his budget to make the crowd scenes look full and the fights feel exciting. At least Stokes sets up a sequel at the end with the promise of a street fight with a $25,000 buy-in. If he makes it and it’s on Tubi, I’m there.

You can watch this on Tubi.

Elliot Kintner (Paul Rudd) and his teenage daughter, Ridley (Jenna Ortega), are driving through Canada toward his boss, Odell Leopold’s (Richard E. Grant) house when they hit a unicorn.

That’s the start of this film, which also finds Ridley having cosmic visions through the fairy tale creature’s horn before her dad bludgeons it to death. The blood removes her acne and improves her father’s allergies. The Leopolds — mother Belinda (Téa Leoni) and son Shepherd (Will Pouter) — experiment with the body they find in Elliot’s car and cure Odell’s cancer.

Meanwhile, the unicorn’s parents come for it, killing everyone in their path.

I liked how the unicorns are basically velociraptors. This wears its influences proudly and isn’t afraid to be a dumb monster movie, and I say that with peace and love. This has a lot of Aliens in it, too, which is unexpected. I mean, the family has alien eggs in the kitchen! This is weird in the best of places, and I applaud that.

The special edition Blu-Ray release of Death of a Unicorn has a commentary track with director and writer Alex Scharfman, deleted scenes, a “How to Kill a Unicorn” featurette and six collectible postcards. You can order it from Deep Discount.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR: Joseph Perry writes for the film websites Gruesome Magazine, The Scariest Things, Horror Fuel, The Good, the Bad and the Verdict and Diabolique Magazine; for the film magazines Phantom of the Movies’ VideoScope and Drive-In Asylum; and for the pop culture websites When It Was Cool and Uphill Both Ways. He is also one of the hosts of When It Was Cool’s exclusive Uphill Both Ways podcast and can occasionally be heard as a cohost on Gruesome Magazine’s Decades of Horror: The Classic Era podcast.

Official synopsis: Anything That Moves follows nubile sex worker Liam who bikes with his girlfriend — his partner in both business and pleasure — through the city delivering snacks and divine satisfaction to his love-hungry clients. Meanwhile, a serial killer’s gory murders are piling up and all the evidence seems to point back to the lovers’ bed. 

If you have been wondering what Ginger Lynn and Nina Hartley are up to these days, writer/director  Alex Phillips has you covered with his latest feature Anything That Moves. The two actresses add adult-film authenticity to this tale of bicycling sex workers Liam (Hal Baum) and his girlfriend Thea (Jiana Nicole), who get caught up in the case of a serial killer who targets Liam’s clients.

The film’s aesthetic combines 1970s era porn vibes with that decade’s sleazy, gory grindhouse horror gruesomeness. There’s more here than mere pastiche, but social issue elements and sincerity tend to get muddled amongst all of the calculated weirdness and exploitation activity.

There’s no denying the fine 16mm cinematography work by Hunter Zimny, who marvelously captures the oppressiveness of both the Chicago summer and the powers that be that try to hold down the sex workers, along with the sex scenes that vary from tender to violent as well as the decidedly graphic horror mayhem. The performances are all committed in their own ways, from the more sincere to the over the top, the latter including Frank V. Ross and Jack Dunphy as two police officers accusing Liam and Thea of being prime suspects.

Anything That Moves is a unique vision. If you’re in the mood for what Fantasia’s official synopsis describes as “a psychosexual dark comedy thriller” that bounces around but never seems to quite settle on a main thematic focus, it’s certainly worth a view. 

Anything That Moves screens as part of Fantasia 2025, which takes place from July 16–August 3 in Montreal, Quebec, Canada. 

DISCLAIMER: I am a huge nerd and I don’t care about your superhero fatigue.

How ironic is it that it took four times to get the Fantastic Four right?

Sure, the 1994 Roger Corman-produced Fantastic Four gets the characters right, but it didn’t have the budget to make it perfect. Then again, it was created primarily to maintain a copyright.

In 2004, we had Fantastic Four and in 2007, a sequel, Rise of the Silver Surfer. The effects were there, the costumes were close, but they felt too compressed. The Marvel Cinematic Universe was not what it would become, and, well, Galactus was a cloud.

2015 brought the Fantastic Four, the fascinating Josh Trank-directed failure that had no idea what it wanted to be.

As I said several years ago, when I covered that film, “The creators should have taken a note from the cartoon versions, as both the 1994-96 series and the 2006-07 Fantastic Four: World’s Greatest Heroes captured much of what makes these heroes so special. Unlike the Avengers, they are two things: a family and adventure scientists, not truly superheroes.”

The Fantastic Four: First Steps is the first movie that gets that. And gets a better understanding of who these characters truly are.

I was inspired to write this after seeing a social acquaintance describe it as a boring movie, filled with talk instead of action. This kind of upset me, as it showed that this person, like the filmmakers before, didn’t understand who these characters are.

There are two aspects: an intriguing breakdown of the four basic Myers-Briggs archetypes and the distilled personality of Jack Kirby.

In my past advertising life, I volunteered to help teach the Myers-Briggs classes. To keep things simple, we didn’t delve into the sixteen types, but instead focused on the four archetypes: Rationalist, Romantic, Defender, and Creator. We broke them down into marketing terms: Body Copy, Illustration, Logo, and Headline.

Haha, this is a movie review, but let’s go deep.

Oh yeah — spoilers from here on.

The Rationalist (ETNJ, INTJ, ENTP or INTP) is “characterized by their ability to think critically, analyze complex situations and propose innovative solutions. They are known for their independent problem-solving skills, strategic thinking and strong-willed nature.” Other studies will refer to these as the Idealists. They are given to charity and causes, which is who Sue Richards is in this movie. No other film — even several comics — has portrayed her so accurately as she should be. The Invisible Woman isn’t someone blinded by her love for Reed, nor is she a heroine who needs to be saved. She’s dynamic, and her actions change the world for the better beyond her superheroics.

The Romantic (ENFJ, IFNJ, ENFP, INFP) are “typically idealistic and dreamy, and they often have a strong appreciation for beauty.” They are drawn to art, music and writing, while looking for a perfect, true love. Johnny Storm is this personality, someone who the movie notes always has a new girl and who we see designing new costumes for the space mission. Yet he also possesses a strong level of intuition, recognizing that the Silver Surfer’s voice is the same as the space signals Reed has discovered. When he meets her, everyone thinks he has a crush on her, but the truth is that he sees something beneath her cruelty —a humanity that she believes is long gone.

The Defender (ESTJ, ISTJ, ESFJ, ISFJ) is loyal and devoted to family, but may have difficulty expressing their emotions. They follow strict schedules and feel a sense of duty. This is Ben Grimm, The Thing, who is the true heart of the Fantastic Four. The movie shows that he’s the member who remains connected to his Yancy Street community, still shopping at the same places he did when he was a child. He’s the member who cooks dinner for everyone and tries to protect them. As for his emotions, he feels something for the teacher, Roz, but struggles to express his feelings until the night he meets her at the synagogue, when he tells her that he doesn’t want to be around people. He wanted to be around her.

The Creator (ESTP, ISTP, ESFP, ISFP) is a problem solver, but one who often gets lost inside their own thoughts. Usually, they live in the now and “sometimes fail to think about how current actions will lead to long-term consequences.” Reed Richards fits in here, as he’s always thinking of solutions and often forgets — such as when he gave his son Franklin to Galactus, which seemed like a logical decision at the time — how his thoughts will end up angering those he loves. He is constantly thinking of worst-case scenarios and, often, what could versus what will happen. Think of this within the movie, where he confesses to Sue that he always has to think of the most horrible things so that he can protect her, his family and the world.

What the movie truly grasps is that the Fantastic Four are, in many ways, a reflection of Jack Kirby himself.

As the movie ends, this quote emerges: “If you look at my characters, you will find me. No matter what kind of character you create or assume, a little of yourself must remain there.” Then, we learn that Earth-828, where this movie takes place, is named for Kirby’s birthday: August 28.

Director Matt Shakman’s words to Marvel echo this sentiment: “He’s a visionary. We would have no Marvel Studios today without Jack Kirby. He created numerous amazing characters and built this world alongside Stan Lee. So many of our heroes launched from his mind and his pen, and we wanted to honor that. We wanted to honor his distinctive style.”

Marvel Studios president Kevin Feige also said, “We wanted it to be more than just a passing tip of the hat. There are direct lines from his pencil that he drew with at his drawing board by himself, pouring his universe-spanning imagination onto the page. There are direct lines from there into this film.”

In fact, they planned this comic as a tribute to Kirby meeting Kubrick, as seen in the making of 2001, which is, well, fantastic because The King drew a series of continuations to Kubrick’s classic movie and was inspired by it himself, as evident in his collage work.

And most of all, The Thing is Jack Kirby.

According to Jewish Currents, “In the Lee-Kirby collaboration, Lee provided his signature pop sensibility and glib humor, but there’s no question that Kirby was the driving creative force of the team. Of all Marvel characters, Ben Grimm is the most directly autobiographical. Kirby and Grimm were both born on the Lower East Side of New York and grew up poor; Kirby on Delancey Street, and Grimm on a fictional street called Yancy Street. Benjamin Jacob Grimm takes his first and middle names from Kirby’s father and Kirby’s real first name, respectively. Kirby and Grimm both fought in World War II and came home moody and prone to fits of anger.”

They go on to claim that The Thing is one of the few Jewish Marvel superheroes and is an outright golem, a creature from Jewish myth.

Yet there are echoes of Kirby’s life in his other characters. The Invisible Woman, Sue Storm Richards, is named for his daughter Susan. Mr. Fantastic’s drive to support his family and protect them in the fact of overwhelming odds comes directly from Kirby drawing all night long, his superhuman endurance creating more comics and characters in a month than some creators do in a lifetime, all to keep his family fed — no health insurance or safety net until way into the 1970s, when he worked in animation.

Seeing this quote at the end of the movie made me happy because it was a realization that, while Stan Lee is important to Marvel, it was Jack Kirby, who brought his characters to life, that made them happen. Jack of all trades created the Silver Surfer. He never intended Sue to be jealous of other women who were around Reed or a damsel in distress. Many of those things originated from Lee’s word balloons. Depending on which story you believe, Kirby had Galactus show up and had to explain it to Stan; Galactus was literally Kirby trying to confront God and see what God would do if He came down to judge His creations.

How much does this movie love Jack Kirby? It names The Thing’s love interest Rachel Rozman (Natasha Lyonne).

Kirby’s wife’s name? Roz.

Beyond the look and feel of this movie, it gets something right: these are really the Fantastic Four.

Only Johnny could realize that the language of the Silver Surfer was in those recordings, while everyone thought he was just chasing girls.

Only Ben could remind everyone that real people were in the buildings they were about to knock down.

Only Reed could devise a plan to save the world that quickly.

And only Sue rallies the world and inspires them to see how to put it all together.

What really worked is that we don’t need to learn the origin of the Fantastic Four. We can understand it quickly, from the TV special that bookends the film. We can see that they’ve changed their world for the better, not just by fighting monsters and villains, but also through their inventions and Sue’s political skills.

Pedro Pascal, Vanessa Kirby, Ebon Moss-Bachrach and Joseph Quinn become these characters to the point that I was able to shut off and enter their world, a place of mid-century future tech. Sure, we don’t get to see any Mole People with Mole Man (Paul Walter Hauser), and the Red Ghost is absent (too much footage was shot, they say). However, the character moments are everything in this, such as when Reed is shaken to the core by how they barely escaped Galactus (Ralph Ineson) and the Silver Surfer (Julia Garner), cosmic horrors who demand his son’s life in exchange for sparing everyone on Earth.

At once, this can be a movie for people who have no idea about these characters while also rewarding those excited for the appearances of Diablo, Dragon Man, Mad Thinker, Puppet Master, The Wizard, Giganto and Super Ape Peotor (I did say I was a nerd up above, right?*). Writers Josh Friedman, Eric Pearson, Ian Springer and Jeff Kaplan get the most important thing about the FF right.

They aren’t just superheroes. They’re a family.

*Nerdy facts: The Excelsior rocket is named for Stan Lee’s catch phrase; Shalla-Bal was the Silver Surfer’s lover in the original comics; Alex Hyde-White, Jay Underwood, Rebecca Staab and Michael Bailey Smith from the Corman version all show up; you can see Stan and Jack working at Timely Comics in a quick scene and how about that empty Latervia chair setting up the ending?

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.”