The Monkey

Born from an egg on a mountain top
The punkiest monkey that ever popped
He knew every magic trick under the sun
to tease the gods and everyone and have some fun
Monkey Magic!
dir: Osgood Perkins
2025
The Monkey is probably one of the best Stephen King adaptations ever. At least, “best of” for this year. There have been so many, probably more than Dickens, adaptations of his work, that probably even he can’t keep track of them all.
But this feels like a perfect melding of King’s gruesome ideas and this director’s various obsessions, into a flick that is often hard to watch in just how gory it gets, but manages to be relentlessly entertaining throughout.
And it’s funny. It’s the darkest humour you can imagine, but damn if it didn’t have me chortling like a foolish thing.
The monkey in question is styled like the stereotypical organ grinder’s monkey (an image / ‘meme’ from a million years ago) with the vest and such, but with drumsticks and drums instead of cymbals. Disney apparently own the copyright on the monkey with the cymbals somehow, due to the Pixar Toy Story movies, because of course they do.
It is large. Its eyes are huge, and terrifying on their own. But the monkey’s grin, those teeth, well it’s the stuff of nightmares. It is not alive but it’s also not dead. If you dismember it, it somehow gets put back together. If you burn it, it reappears, somehow. You can’t give it away, but you also can’t live it. You think you successfully buried it somewhere, and then it’s back in your cupboard behind the Hungry Hungry Hippos and the Connect 4.
It’s especially gratifying for me because, unlike a lot of strange, possibly funny-smelling people, I did not care at all for this director’s previous outing, which was called Longlegs, and I absolutely adore an older film of his called I am the Pretty Thing that Lives in the House. I’m not saying this is his best film, but this feels certainly like the time where all the elements have come together to deliver a coherent, nasty delight.
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