Producers: James Wan, Dave Caplan, Brian Kavanaugh-Jones and Chris Ferguson  Director: Osgood Perkins  Screenplay: Osgood Perkins   Cast: Theo James, Tatiana Maslany, Christian Convery, Colin O’Brien, Rohan Campbell, Sarah Levy, Adam Scott, Elijah Wood, Tess Degenstein, Danica Dreyer, Laura Mennell, Zia Newton, Nicco Del Rio, Janet Kidder, Kingston Chan and Shafin Karim   Distributor: Neon

Grade: C-

Osgood Perkins’ “Longlegs” was an unexpected smash despite its insultingly dumb final explanation for the creepy goings-on it had so artfully deployed.  Perhaps aware of that flaw, in “The Monkey” the writer-director doesn’t bother offering any rationale for the powers wielded by the menacing titular creature at all.

Of course that’s a trait it shares with Stephen King’s 1980 short story (reappearing in revised form in his 1985 collection “Skeleton Crew”), which Perkins has substantially expanded in his script.  Like the story, the movie is basically just a demon doll tale, except that the doll is an old-fashioned mechanical toy, a monkey that beats a drum rather than clanging the usual cymbals (as in King) or swinging on an overhead pole.  It differs, though, by becoming a parade of gross-out death sequences, intended presumably as a snarky spoof of that increasingly commonplace horror-movie phenomenon but unhappily neither funny nor scary.  Osgood’s death scenes are rather like the campy ones you’d expect in an installment of “Tales from the Crypt” or “Creepshow”—pretty boring stuff, however complicated. 

We first meet the malevolent critter when blood-soaked Pete Shelburn (Adam Scott in a game cameo) tries to dispose of it at an antique shop and it springs into action, baring its fearsome teeth and banging on its little drum; on the final beat a gruesome fate of Rube Goldberg complexity befalls the storekeeper (Shafin Karim).

So much for Pete, who, some years later, is revealed to have abandoned his family, leaving twin sons Bill and Hal (both played, in nicely differentiated performances, by Christian Convery) to be raised by their mom Lois (Tatiana Maslany). Bill’s a nasty bully and wimpy Hal his favorite target.  While rummaging through their dad’s closet one day they come upon the monkey, and unwittingly cause the decapitation of their babysitter Annie (Danica Dreyer) by turning the key.

Hal, fed up with Bill’s abuse, decides to try using the monkey to kill his brother, but instead it causes Lois to die of a bloody aneurysm.  The distraught boy chops the toy up with a hatchet, but it reassembles and appears at the Maine home of their Uncle Chip (Perkins) and Aunt Ida (Sarah Levy), who have taken the orphaned boys in.  Bill winds the toy up again in an attempt to kill Hal, whom he blames for Lois’ death, but instead Chip is crushed into mush in a stampede while out hunting.  The chastened boys put the toy in to a box and toss it down a deep well.

A quarter century later Bill and Hal are totally estranged.  Shy Hal (Theo James), working at a hardware store under perpetually zonked-out manager Swayne (Zia Newton), goes off for his once-a-year reunion with his adolescent son Petey (Colin O’Brien), only to be informed that his ex-wife (Laura Mennell) intends to have her egomaniacal guru husband (Elijah Wood) adopt the boy, severing Hal’s ties to him.  So father and embittered son go off on what could be their last weeklong session.

It does not go well, because deaths intervene—a woman at a motel where they stay, and then Aunt Ida in a grisly accident involving her husband’s fishing lures, a kitchen blaze and a lawn post.  Bill calls out of the blue, demanding that Hal go to Ida’s place to settle her affairs; but the visit is interrupted by an apparently accidental shotgun blast that that dispatches Barbara (Tess Degenstein), a chirpy real estate agent.  It turns out that hers is only the latest in the locality’s growing death toll.

That’s because Bill (also played by James), a raving lunatic, had searched out and acquired the monkey using a zonked-out doofus named Ricky (Rohan Campbell) as his go-between.  He’s been turning the key of doom in an attempt to kill Hal, accepting whatever demises occur—including, for some reason, Swayne—as collateral damage.  Inexplicably Ricky has grown possessive of the monkey himself—it reminds him of his absentee father—and drags Hal and Petey to Bill’s lair, where he dies gruesomely while father and son enter a standoff with brother/uncle. 

But that’s not the end of it.  Bill goes berserk with the toy, leading to an apocalyptic explosion of carnage in which even the Book of Revelation’s Rider on a Pale Horse trots menacingly by—a CGI apparition that’s as chintzy as the death sequences.  (King, by contrast, contented himself with some dead fish.)  What’s to follow?  Perkins doesn’t say.

“The Monkey” strives, with sweaty desperation, to simultaneously generate screams and laughs, but it succeeds mostly in eliciting groans.  It is, to be sure, a visually stylish piece of work.  Perkins is expert in staging scenes, and with the assistance of production designer Danny Vermette, costumer Mica Kayde and cinematographer Nico Aguilar, the individual images are exceptionally well composed.  On the other hand, the pacing is bumpy—editors Greg Ng and Graham Fortin are stymied by the episodic nature of the script—and Edo Van Breeman’s music relies far too heavily on  the big crash of sound to alert us to the gotcha moments.

The cast are a variable bunch.  The youngsters—first Convery, and then O’Brien—surprisingly come off best.  But James seems flummoxed by Perkins’ expectation that he provide some serious emotional depth to Hal as a father trying to connect with his estranged son while going wildly zonkers as the unhinged Bill.  As to the supporting cast, all appear to be playing their parts in italics, making for a succession of cartoon figures—Wood, Newton and Degenstein are worst in that respect, but the others aren’t far behind.  And as for Campbell, the less said the better; Ricky’s a pointless character in any event, and the actor seems at a total loss how to play him. 

But what can be expected when the dialogue is of a sort that seems to have “air quotes” around every line, and the gags are so lame (what’s the point of the pom-pom carrying cheerleaders who show up to do their routine at the site of recent deaths—except to allow for a grisly end topper?).  Even a potentially amusing scene, of a flustered priest (Nicco Del Rio) delivering a eulogy at a funeral falls flat when he concludes, “It is what it is.”   (Just compare Peter Cook’s turn in “The Princess Bride” to see how it should be done.)

Perkins is not an untalented fellow.  But in “The Monkey” he’s beating out a crude, monotonous tune.