I’ve said for years that James Wan without Leigh Whannell is massively overrated. (Though Whannell on his own looks a lot less impressive since The Wolf Man a couple months back.) And I’ve been saying ever since the film came out that Longlegs is fool’s gold. So I feel quite a bit validated to see The Monkey — a film heavily promoted on the names of producer Wan and Longlegs writer/director Osgood Perkins — come out in the February dead zone between a Marvel premiere and the Oscars. And the box office returns have been appropriately underwhelming, though the budget was low enough that the film has assuredly made back its money already.

Then again, it’s a film about a haunted toy monkey that causes random and spontaneous deaths. It’s miracle enough that such a film didn’t go straight to DVD, never mind that it got greenlit at all. And yes, of course the film is based on a Stephen King story — the man has told so many stories that have been adapted into so many films of such wildly varying quality, that tells us nothing.

So what exactly have we got here? Well, it’s a horror/comedy that leans hard and heavy into how stupid the premise is. That’s a huge part of why it works so well.

This is the story of twin brothers Hal and Bill Shelburn, played as adults by Theo James and as children by Christian Convery. Hal is the protagonist, while Bill is the estranged brother who’s a relentless two-dimensional bully (it’s a Stephen King story, you know the type). Long story short, their father (played by Adam Scott) is an airline pilot who picked up the eponymous monkey in his travels. He tried destroying the toy, but it somehow managed to return like nothing happened. (It does that a lot.) At some later point, the father disappears to places unknown — it’s not entirely clear why, but one imagines the haunted monkey had something to do with it.

Anyway, the boys grow up under the care of their struggling single mother (played by Tatiana Maslany with her typically wry sense of humor). The boys discover the monkey, they get to playing around with it, Hal gets the bright idea of trying to use it to get back at everyone bullying him, and that goes about as well as you’d expect. So the brothers drop the monkey down a well and eventually drift apart.

Cut to 25 years later, when the monkey resurfaces and the bodies start piling up. It’s not entirely clear as to why now, but the brutally random and unpredictable nature of the monkey is the entire point (we’ll come back to that). The bottom line here is that Hal has to try and stop the monkey before any more innocent people get hurt. Most especially Hal’s estranged son (Petey, played by Colin O’Brien), who was of course brought up knowing nothing about the monkey, asshole Uncle Bill, or anything else about his bloody family history.

What’s important to know about this movie is that everything is heightened. With the exceptions of Hal and Petey, both of whom act as the “straight men”, every last character is an obnoxious heel and the actors are all hamming it up for the cheap seats. Yes, that includes Theo James in the Bill role.

Perhaps more importantly, the kills in this movie are outrageously over-the-top. We’ve got kills that freaking Mortal Kombat would reject as too juvenile and implausible. We’ve got people spontaneously exploding into red mist with a frequency and sinister hilarity like nothing I’ve seen outside a Radio Silence picture. And yet it works.

For one thing, the cartoonish kills hammer home the point that something supernatural is at work here and there’s no way any of these fatalities could be mere accidents. For another thing, the absurd kills fit the tone of the absurd characters, and it all blends together into a pitch-black horror/comedy. I might further add that a great many Stephen King characters are recurring paper-thin archetypes, and leaning into that in the process of making a demented horror/comedy was an ingenious tactic.

Moreover, this is very much a film about the inevitability of death and the capricious nature of bad luck, both of which are personified by the monkey. Somehow, the senseless nature of the characters dovetails with the senseless nature of bad luck, and it all works elegantly. It’s regrettably easy for a film about chaos to itself turn out incomprehensibly chaotic, and I applaud the filmmakers for edging right up to that line without ever quite crossing it completely. It certainly helps that Hal and Petey are just grounded enough that they can sell the themes of grief and generational trauma.

In retrospect, considering that Perkins’ father died of AIDS in the early ’90s (at the height of AIDS panic, remember) and his mother was killed in the 9/11 attacks, it’s really little wonder he was so remarkably capable of delivering this movie about how death is so unpredictable and yet so inevitable. Given that history, approaching the subject with such a sense of humor is commendable. And balancing that humor with heart makes for a solid film.

The Monkey turned out to be a delightful surprise. I wasn’t expecting it to be so merciless or funny, but that pitch-black sense of humor sets it apart from other modern low-budget horror films in this lane. I was not expecting to like this movie more than I liked Longlegs, but it certainly helps that The Monkey was clearer in its intent and doesn’t take itself so seriously.

We could always use a good horror/comedy, and this one blows Heart Eyes into a fine red mist. I’m happy to recommend it.