The Monkey ★★★

IF IT wasn’t for The Substance, Osgood Perkins’ Longlegs would likely have been my favourite horror film of 2024.

The son of Anthony, returns this year with a more comedic approach in The Monkey, based on a Stephen King short story.

Unless you thought Nic Cage’s performance was funny, Longlegs was full of dread and tension.

In The Monkey, Perkins again leans heavily into the supernatural, but there are less scares and more moments of darkly comic horror. Basically, we’re in Sam Raimi territory.

Theo James gives two of his best performances as twin brothers Hal and Bill Shelburn whose lives are forever changed when they find an old wind-up monkey in their late father’s possessions.

What follows is a narrative that too often becomes a collection of sequences involving bizarre, comic and gory death sequences that while entertaining in their own right don’t advance the film as coherently as they should.

There are a couple of nice cameos from the likes of Adam Scott and Elijah Wood.

Watched at the cinema.