“DIE YOU SON OF A WHORE,” yells Petey Shelburn Sr. (Adam Scott) as he lights a wind-up monkey ablaze via blowtorch after it ruthlessly and mysteriously disembowels a pawn shop owner with a harpoon gun. Five minutes in, and Ozgood Perkins’ “The Monkey” has already shown me the use of two of my favorite esoteric projectile weapons.
“Hell yeah,” I whisper in the theater to F News designer and staff cartoonist, J.E Paeth, who had already seen the movie, and he gives me that reluctant look back which tells me, “This is about as good as it gets.” And unfortunately, he is right.
My only real takeaway from “The Monkey” is genuinely wondering how this script made it to production. This film has the bones of a movie, but the dialogue goes nowhere or falls completely flat. The structure is a mess, with act one taking up almost half of the movie’s runtime. As a horror movie enthusiast, I found “The Monkey” to be underwhelming, but as a woman who writes horror, this film boiled my blood for how it treated and disregarded its female characters.
I know what you’re thinking: “It’s horror; people die; and usually, women die.” But it’s not about who dies, it’s about how and why they are killed. How brutal? And by whom? Often, when a woman dies in a horror movie, it’s also a question of how the man closest to her is motivated by her death. When women are killed in horror, it’s political.
Especially in a film like “The Monkey,” where violence takes precedence over substance, storytelling, and nuance, all we are left with is the kills. In “The Monkey,” women are not killed at random (as the film suggests), but based on a system of morality clouded by steep layers of misogyny.
First up to die is a character named Babysitter Annie (Danica Dreyer), who is referred to throughout her short time in the film as such: first name Babysitter, last name Annie. The two twin brothers, Hal and Bill (both played by Chirstian Convery), are taken care of by their single mother, Lois, and Babysitter Annie. When Babysitter Annie takes the kids to a Hibachi restaurant, she is decapitated after smiling and making eye-contact with the cute hibachi chef.
Lois dies next, while cooking dinner, of an unusually bloody aneurysm. The twins, orphaned, move in with their swinger Aunt Ida (Sarah Levy) and Uncle Chip (Perkins); the monkey kills Chip. The twins throw the monkey down a well, hoping it will never be used again. Twenty-five years later, they’re estranged (and really messed up).
After the time skip, Aunt Ida, who had been characterized as a free and open spirit — a swinger, for god’s sake — is chained to the memory of a man, desexualized by hair curlers and a baggy robe. Head on fire, she flees the house and is impaled by a “for sale” sign, a literal signifier for the potential to move on from the death of her husband.
The next death is an unnamed woman (Corin Clark) in a scarlet two-piece bathing suit, getting ready to swim at a motel pool. She’s given no lines, but scandalizes adult Hal (Theo James) (she’s in JUST A BATHING SUIT!), who is staying at the motel with his son Petey (Colin O’Brian). The woman jumps into the pool just as the monkey charges it with electricity, and she explodes; her severed, nude leg, soars through the air and flies narrowly past Hal’s face. The monkey hates women — especially sexual ones.
Next, Barbara, Aunt Ida’s posthumous realtor who tours Hal and Petey around Ida’s empty house, explodes à la shotgun, and her severed red-painted fingertips fly into Hal’s throat. For the record, Barbara’s characteristics are as follows: blonde, pretty, airheaded, attracted to Hal, murdered.
An unnamed “sky bride” falls out of the air — Hal had expressed disapproval of skydiving marriage in the film, and she’s punished. In the final shot of the movie, an entire bus filled with unnamed cheerleaders are decapitated by oncoming traffic. Cut to credits.
The only two women who have speaking lines and survive are credited simply as “Petey’s Mom” and “Police Officer,” and both appear in one scene each. (Oh, and no, this movie does not pass the Bechdel test, if you were holding out any hope.)
The film also showcases a weird swath of potential transphobia in the film’s antagonist, Hal’s twin brother Bill (also Theo James), also known as “Mrs. Monkey,” who’s been turning the key and causing the deaths all along.
Bill is vaguely implied to be queer — he wears a crop top, a flame-print button-up, a mullet, jewelry, calls himself Mrs. Monkey, and has a room full of CRT TVs, which, if you know anything about trans women, is a sure-fire trans signifier. (Perkins has a habit of toeing the line with trans or queer-coded slashers but not fully committing to avoid running afoul with trans audiences.)
I know Perkins can do better. I actually enjoyed “Longlegs,” despite its weirdness around trans misogyny. I thought it was an effective thriller. The script was tight, and the women were awesome and weird! It’s ultimately about a serial killer who turns men against their wives and children, but centers the narrative in the hands of its female leads and the survivors of the slasher’s abuse. It’s leagues better than “The Monkey.”
So this leaves me wondering, as a woman who’s now seen two of Perkins’ films, what changed? What changed about Perkins’ approach to writing for women this time around, and why is it worse than his last film? All I know is that I would hate to be a woman in his next film, almost as much as I would hate to be a woman watching it.
