You may be wondering why Osgood Perkins’s disreputably entertaining follow-up to Longlegs concerns a wind-up monkey that plays the drums. Don’t those things usually clash cymbals? Isn’t that what happens in Stephen King’s source story?
“The producers came to me and said, ‘It can’t be cymbals. Disney owns the monkey that plays the cymbals,’” Perkins told Vanity Fair. “It’s because of Toy Story. One of the villains is the monkey with the cymbals.”
Anyway, none of that restrains Perkins from spreading plasma by the merry bucket. Longlegs was praised for its sustained fug of misery and criticised for prevaricating over its narrative destination. None of that matters here. The Monkey bins story for concept.
We encounter fleshy beings with arms and legs that just about meet the definition of characters. The middle comes between the beginning and the end. But the latest Osflick is really just a mechanism for delivering spectacularly gruesome – often inventive – beheadings, eviscerations and disembowelment.
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This is a film in which one victim is trampled to death, then emptied out from his sleeping bag like an amorphous flow of strawberry jam. It owes an unmistakable debt to the gleefully horrible Final Destination films (the much-delayed sixth episode of which is due in May) but eschews that series’ Heath Robinson invention for immediate and irresistible annihilation.
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Only the core of King’s story remains in Perkins’s own screenplay. We first meet sensitive Hal and belligerent twin brother Bill (both played by Christian Convery) scowling at one another in premillennial cohabitation with their single mother, Lois (Tatiana Maslany). Among the few artefacts remaining after dad left is the titular clockwork monkey. After two or three too many catastrophes, they realise that each time it stars to bang its drum someone nearby dies.
There is something of King’s interest in dysfunctional families. When the adult twins (now both Theo James) meet up they show, in different ways, the scars of unhappy childhoods. Hal is barely allowed to see his estranged son. Bill is a grown-up bully. Those sorts of nuances take a back seat, however, as the film, shot in oily gloom by Nico Aguilar, sets out to dispatch every passerby in fashions that would appal Caligula.
Good old-fashioned disgusting fun. I had a blast.
In cinemas from Friday, February 21st
