THE MONKEY

Let's be plain. THE MONKEY is a bloody Stephen King horror movie about a wind-up toy with vague demonic powers, and it earns its −3 the hard way — through relentless, gruesome death and a torrent of foul language.

There is one thread of light here. One of the two brothers loves his teenage son and wants to shield him from the toy's evil, and the ending leans faintly positive. The movie even nods, ironically but not hatefully, to the Pale Horseman from the Book of Revelation. But a flicker of moral content can't carry a film this depressing or this violent.

So our answer is simple: skip it. The atmosphere is real, but what it's in service of — a hollow story of death and revenge, wrapped in extreme gore and heavy profanity — isn't worth your time or your conscience.

When their father disappears, twin brothers Hal and Bill find a wind-up toy monkey hidden among his belongings — a little drummer with a terrible secret. Wind its key, and someone dies. Gruesomely.

After the deaths pile up, the boys try to be rid of it, dropping the toy down a well. But twenty-five years later, the monkey mysteriously reappears. Hal, long estranged from his family and his own teenage son, is pulled back into its orbit as freak accidents begin again — and the death toll starts climbing toward something that looks like the end of the world.

Two stars, and here's what they mean. Writer-director Osgood Perkins gives the film a genuinely dark atmosphere — he has said he drew on personal experience of his father, the troubled actor Tony Perkins, who died when Osgood was young, and that grief seems to seep into the mood.

But atmosphere isn't enough. The story is a depressing, ultraviolent cycle of death and revenge, built around set-piece killings rather than characters you care about. The ending turns slightly hopeful, yet the filmmakers plainly leave the door open for a sequel, which drains even that of weight. It's a competently gloomy horror movie with little underneath the gore.

At its center, THE MONKEY carries only a light moral worldview. Its one genuinely good impulse is a father's love: one brother wants to protect his teenage son from the toy's evil, and he seems to succeed. That protective instinct is real, and the movie honors it in a small way.

Around that faint light, though, is a great deal of darkness. The toy has vague demonic powers — the film never explains how it gained them, but at one point it's compared to the Devil. The story is fundamentally about death and revenge, and revenge here backfires tragically, as it tends to. There are scattered images of crucifixes and a funeral scene with a priest, plus two light references to Revelation, including the Pale Horseman and the coming Apocalypse. The nods are ironic but not hateful — decorative rather than reverent.

The trouble is that whatever light exists is buried under extreme gruesome violence and a flood of profanity. A movie that gestures at the end of the world but treats human death as a string of gory gags isn't wrestling with judgment; it's using it as set dressing.

Scripture takes both death and revenge more seriously than this film does. "Vengeance is mine, I will repay, says the Lord" (Romans 12:19) — the very thing the brothers try to seize for themselves is the thing God reserves for Himself, and their grasping for it only multiplies the dying.

There's a father's love buried in here, and a flicker of hope at the end. But it's smothered by extreme gore, a mountain of profanity, and a story that treats death like entertainment. So here's our answer, the same one we opened with: skip it. Looking for something for the family instead? Start with our latest family-friendly picks.