2. The Monkey, dir. Osgood Perkins
The Monkey is a movie I never expected out of Oz Perkins. Imagine of Celine Song's next movie were to be a boner comedy, that's how much of a radical shift left of the dial that this is. Perkins' career so far has been a series of sullen, enigmatic horror films. He's had moderate hits here or there, usually too dense for a wide audience. Which is what made 2024's wild success of Longlegs so inexplicable to me. Heck of a marketing campaign for that one, I guess. Perkins has done pastiches or direct adaptations of many horror writers like Shirley Jackson, Thomas Harris, the Brothers Grimm, so it seems inevitably he would cover Stephen King eventually. I just didn't expect him to go so silly with it. This director has been a lot of things: irrelevant shock comedy is definitely a new one.
Perkins decided to out Final Destination-Final Destination. However, making a black comedy gross-out work in The Monkey does not preclude this movie from being very personal to him. Longlegs was a response to his father, horror legend Anthony Perkins' own closeted sexuality and death from AIDS-related complications. The Monkey is a response to an even more shocking loss, his mother, Berry Bereson's death in the 9/11 attacks. It sounds like a bad 2007 internet humor joke: "your dad died of AIDS, your mom died on 9/11, haha". To borrow the line of a character in The Monkey: "shit, man, that sucks". (The Monkey is the kind of movie to have a character whose only role in the script is to say that one line about twelve times.)
What else can you do with a life history that was, to use the correct term, absolutely fucked except find a way to laugh at it?
The Monkey is about two twin brothers Hal and Bill Shelburn (Christian Convey as children, Theo James as adults) who have just reached their nastiest phase of middle school puberty. They discover an inheritance from their long absent, probably dead father (Adam Scott in one scene), a magical evil wind-up toy monkey that kills people once you turn its crank. And yeah, the verbal metaphor for masturbation is not lost on this movie - "he's playing with his monkey!" teases Bill to the entire class to humiliate his brother Hal. One of the first victims is Hal and Bills' babysitter, Annie Wilkes (Danica Dreyer). This happens as she takes the boys out for a nice meal, and is visibly aroused by a hibachi chef. The two boys are not yet able to fully process this show of adult sexuality. Then they never get a chance to, because the Monkey slams his cymbals together and much of Annie's head splits in half. The get more Freudian, the Shelburn twins are jealous for their mother, Lois (Tatiana Maslany)'s affection, and well, crank the Monkey with terrible results.
And yeah, I did say Annie Wilkes - she's that Annie Wilkes, Kathy Bates from Misery. I'm not really sure what to do with that, does not seem anything. There was a ton of Stephen King adaptations in 2025: some really bad (that IT series), some really good (The Long Walk), some simply not interesting (The Running Man remake). The Monkey feels like the most King-like(?)/Kingly of them all. It is unfaithful to the source material, though actually by deviating, Perkins made it more idiosyncratically Stephen King. He put more King than King had in there.
The original short story The Monkey is based on is not one of King's best or his most memorable. It does not go to the level of cartoon horror that Perkins takes it to. (For instance, he casts himself as the boys' uncle, and we're told after his wild and elaborate death death, his body looked like smashed cherry pie, cut to the coroner opening up a body bag full of smashed cherry pie. Delightful.) That story is just about a father and son getting rid of an Evil Object, trying to overcome the family curse. You'd never guess that most of what is iconic King details were not there, that was Perkins adding them. The ribbing between Hal and Bill feels like the way King writes kids, all spectacular vulgarity and lewdness. Gallows humor is aplenty in King. The Monkey has a mother screaming while running in a circle in a circle as she pushes a pram that is completely on fire, and King's lone directorial effort, Maximum Overdrive has things like this.
Now if neither of those things sound funny to you, I don't think The Monkey is going to work for you.
The Monkey is the kind of movie where we get a classic Final Destination Rube Goldberg kill set-up: a pretty woman is about to jump into the motel pool, and a broken air conditioner means the water is dosed full of killer volts of electricity. You know what's coming: she drives in and screams and screams, maybe a gore effect. Except, you don't know what's coming. She doesn't electrocute herself, she explodes! The second her body touches that pool, she's goes out like a fire cracker. How does that make sense? I don't know. Why was a woman swimming at 2 AM anyway all alone at night? This movie sets up a wedding skydiving service, and you better believe that card is going to get played. If you think The Monkey has hit the limit of how gonzo it will get, you're wrong, it has just one more gag up its sleeve.
Hal and Bill never learn to work out death. (Though who does, really?) Hal grows up to work in a supermarket with a very distant teenage son, Petey (Colin O'Brien) who is about to be legally adopted by another man. Bill makes... I won't spoil it, but he makes different life choices. They're both living gruesomely incomplete, terribly lonely lives since their mother passed and they hid the Monkey down a well. Only the Monkey the back, of course. At the beginning of the movie, Lois tells the boys "everybody dies, and that's life". It's the second time hear something like this. The Monkey comes in a box with an engraving saying it is "Like Life". Not 'lifelike' but "Like Life", choosing the wording carefully. Life is temporary, fleeting, confusing, incredibly painful, and then it's over and really nobody knows what to say, especially the extremely young pastor at the funeral who seems like he just got hired at this job ten minutes ago. Or is high as hell. Or both.
What else can we do but turn out traumas into Troma exploitation? The boys grew up and forgot their mother's most important lesson, "The hell with it, let's go dancing." They never danced, and they did not adjust well. There's a lot of movies that wallowed in a lot of feelings in this Top 15, but I knew, The Monkey had to be the highest ranked when it comes to my favorite subject lately: death. You gotta learn to take it in stride, have a laugh, and make room to dance in the face of oblivion. Because oblivion is coming anyway, so why be miserable?
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But of course, The Monkey is not the best movie of 2025. We have one more to go. The competition was not close. The last one laps the field. I don't think you'll be surprised by my choice.
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