And it’s well populated, between the sociopathic optimism of Elijah Wood’s Ted Hammerman, stepdad to Hal’s son Petey (Colin O’Brien); the secretive mania of Tatiana Maslany’s Lois, Hal and Bill’s mom, who so enthusiastically tells her children of death’s inevitability; and Perkins’s own role as Chip, Hal and Bill’s uncle, who sports the finest pair of mutton-chops you can imagine.
Perkins’s follow-up, The Monkey, revolves around a pair of twins cursed by a mechanical monkey that’s really a harbinger of death – every time it goes tap, tap, tap on its tin drum, somebody dies.
Bill isn’t as eccentric as the plot tells us he should be, while Hal, the more passive of the two, should still read as a frayed-nerve loner likely to yell the phrase, “We gotta make like eggs and scramble!” That doesn’t mean The Monkey necessarily needed Cage.
Longlegs, certainly, had its moments of self-conscious silliness, once its serial killer hunt descended into a devilish game of peekaboo, but The Monkey feels like a more conscious move away from the Gothic chambers of Perkins’s earlier horror films, The Blackcoat’s Daughter (2015) and I Am the Pretty Thing That Lives in the House (2016).
Perkins has expanded a short story by Stephen King, and The White Lotus’s Theo James – playing the roles of both Hal and Bill Shelburn – has a good handle on the author’s charmingly peculiar tempo.
