In a summer without blockbusters and gaps in the release schedule due to the 2023 WGA and SAG-AFTRA strikes, Osgood Perkins made his parents proud: his Longlegs managed to become the one major sleeper hit of the summer last year. I saw it the night before Donald Trump was nearly assassinated in Butler, PA. The oppressive and predatory feeling of the film filtered through that whole weekend, and that’s what endures in my memory, not the movie or anything in it. It fell apart at the end, and despite a promising opening five minutes, the movie was, like so many other new releases, horribly under-lit, high on itself, and far shallower than it realizes or we deserve. So it’s all magic in the end? Come on.
But I have to give Perkins credit: more directors should be as prolific as him. The Monkey is out now, also via Neon, and at some screenings there’s a trailer attached for his next film for Neon, another horror movie called Keeper out on October 3. If he’s going to reiterate or work through something, now’s the time: he’s on Lucio Fulci time. Even mentioning the Master’s name in the same paragraph as Perkins feel blasphemous, besides being misleading: what they have in common is the inability to make films as they are—instead, they’re both forced to work in horror in order to keep working. Perkins is on a high right now, but he may be nobody in a year when everyone’s sick of his schtick.
Don’t know it yet? Here it is, allegedly: both Longlegs and The Monkey are bloated with references to his parents’ deaths—Anthony Perkins died of AIDS in 1992 and Barry Berenson was on one of the planes that crashed into the Twin Towers. Perkins was 28 then, having just appeared in a supporting role in Legally Blonde (which I saw blocks away from the World Trade Center, at the Battery Park 16 when it was run by Regal); he spent many years in a depression, and then began directing films. I haven’t seen the three he made before Longlegs. I will… get around to it.
The Monkey was advertised with the line “THE MONKEY THAT LIKES KILLING OUR FAMILY IS BACK.” That line is nowhere in the movie. Strike one. It’s a comedy compared to Longlegs, trashier and grosser, with way too many ridiculous CGI deaths that lose their impact after a handful. A practical dummy or an exploding head captured on film will remain amazing as long as they’re obviously real; too much obvious CGI turns your brain off, totally disengages you. There are probably 30, 40 people who die in The Monkey, many of them elaborately killed. I don’t remember more than four, and one of those is the opening with Adam Scott (a problem actor for me who’s unfortunately having a moment right now). Decapitations, intestines flying everywhere, boomerang aneurysms—despite cutting up and abusing the whole body, The Monkey is remarkably one-note in its rampage.
Perhaps Perkins will redeem himself with Keeper, which I know nothing about because I didn’t see the trailer before The Monkey. Maybe in October, he’ll have a movie with a proper ending, and a more sound sense of its own internal logic. And if not? That’s life.
—Follow Nicky Otis Smith on Twitter and Instagram: @nickyotissmith