While the Marvel Cinematic Universe continues its slide into unwitting self-parody, there is a filmmaker who has embraced the idea of genre burlesque and is running with it to fantastic effect.
That person is Osgood Perkins – director of last year’s much-hyped super stylish thriller-horror Longlegs – and a little understanding of the man’s personal history before getting into a review of his much-hyped comedy-splatterfest The Monkey proves quite the view-enhancing revelation.
Osgood is the son of Anthony Perkins, who boomers and seasoned cinephiles will know was the original Psycho – Norman Bates – in Alfred Hitchcock’s seminal film that not only created the slasher genre but also, arguably, was a blueprint for our current fascination with true crime. Anthony Perkins, a complicated man, died of AIDS related pneumonia in 1992.
“Dad was not the most knowable of people,” Osgood has been quoted as saying, and although he was closer to his mother – actress Berry Berenson – she would also die less than a decade later in one of the hijacked planes of the 9/11 attacks.
Knowing this going in to The Monkey creates a whole new layer of understanding and meaning as to the ideas the film is playing with. To the casual viewer it may be a series of extremely gruesome death scenes, somewhat akin to the Final Destination series.
But forearmed with knowledge of the Perkins family heritage, The Monkey – loosely based on a Stephen King short story – becomes something infinitely more interesting about parents shielding their children from family secrets, intergenerational trauma, feeling cursed, but mostly what it must be like to keep losing those close to you in ways that are hard to understand.
But don’t be fooled – this is not a super serious treatise on the subject. This Monkey has its tongue firmly in its cheek.
“Nothing matters,” one character exhorts somewhat nihilistically, before giving the caveat “otherwise everything matters.”
This is a film that stares death in the face and giggles at the ridiculousness of it all, helped along the way by slapstick level buckets of blood and a killer cast that brims with cameos: Perkins himself (known as a comedy actor who starred in Legally Blonde among other hits), Sarah Levy (Twyla from Schitts Creek), Tatiana Masley (She Hulk), Elijah Wood as a power tripping surrogate father and Adam Scott as a crazed flamethrower-wielding father. I mean you can see the daddy issues coming to the fore, right? It makes for an interesting twist on the standard horror film mummy issues that started with… well, Psycho.
Horror fans will gleefully embrace this slice of Grand Guignol, an escalating series of comic book violent prank vignettes for audiences who, if they are like this reviewer, find ever more elaborate and absurd deaths splattered up on the big screen strangely soothing to their own anxieties about mortality.
The Monkey is screening in cinemas across Fiji right now.
