Accidents Happen: Ranking The Six Gnarliest Kills From ‘The Monkey’
The recurring line in director Osgood Perkins’ The Monkey sums it up well: “Everybody dies, and that’s life.”
Perkins’ adaptation of Stephen King’s short story from 1985’s Skeleton Crew, now streaming on Hulu, uses its source material as a loose framework for a Final Destination-like, gory romp filled with a nonstop onslaught of over-the-top, elaborate deaths.
The plot centers around twin brothers who find a mysterious wind-up monkey, triggering a series of outrageous deaths that will tear their family apart. When the Monkey’s arm winds up, get ready; a brutal death occurs whenever the cursed object bangs his toy drum. It’s always at random, too. Per the wind-up toy’s box, it is “like life,“ after all.
And in this movie, death comes fast and furious in morbidly funny fashion. So much so that there are over two dozen gruesome demises packed into The Monkey’s runtime, all highlighting the gallows’ humor with gore. However, many of them are shown in fleeting montages or featured in the background, especially in the film’s final act when the cursed object’s reign of terror unleashes chaos.
Now that The Monkey is on streaming, we’re highlighting six of the horror-comedy’s standout kills beyond the quick montage and background deaths. Spoilers ahead, of course…
6) Hibachi Grill Decapitation
The first time Hal Shelburne (Christian Convery) winds up the Monkey, he doesn’t know what it does or what’s to come. That the audience does means a suspenseful build-up as Hal and his twin brother Bill (also Convery) get treated to dinner by their babysitter, Annie (Danica Dreyer), at a Hibachi restaurant. The chef at the trio’s tableside grill strikes up a flirtation with Annie while attempting to impress with cooking flair. It spectacularly backfires; a quick flip of the wrist with a sharp spatula winds up decapitating the babysitter instead. While The Monkey quickly reveals itself to be rather fond of decapitations, Annie’s freak accident is the twin brothers’ first tangible brush with death. More noticeably, the babysitter’s full name, revealed at her funeral service, makes for an amusing joke in itself: Annie Wilkes, as in Misery‘s Annie Wilkes.
5) Uncle Chip Mince Meat
Of the deaths on this list, Uncle Chip’s is the briefest for good reason. It’s arguably the goriest of the bunch and only shown in quick flashes. After Hal and Bill’s mom dies from an aneurysm courtesy of the monkey, they’re taken in by their swinging Uncle Chip (Osgood Perkins) and Aunt Ida (Sarah Levy) in Casco, Maine. Somehow, the wind-up monkey finds its way to them and promptly triggers another freak accident. This time it claims Uncle Chip, who was decimated off-screen by a horse stampede in his sleeping bag while on a camping trip, but Perkins does give a gag-worthy look at the mince meat aftermath that earns a spot here.
4) Wasp Face Ricky
When Bill finally connects the dots on the Monkey’s M.O. as an adult, he hires Casco local Ricky (Rohan Campbell) to find and retrieve it so he can enact vengeance upon his brother. Ricky becomes obsessed with the wind-up toy, holding Hal and his son Petey (Colin O’Brien) at gunpoint under Bill’s orders. Just before the final confrontation between estranged brothers, the monkey bangs his drum once again, sentencing Ricky to an outlandish demise courtesy of one massive hornet’s nest whose pissed off inhabitants charge straight into his mouth to rearrange and mutilate his jaw.
3) Pawn Shop Harpoon
Talk about a great hook for an opening. The Monkey begins in 1999, where the twins’ blood-drenched dad, Petey (Adam Scott), frantically makes his way to a pawn shop to offload his cursed object. The skeptical owner isn’t interested in the children’s toy or Petey’s insistence that it isn’t one. That’s when the Monkey’s arm comes banging down, setting off a chain of events within the shop that causes a harpoon gun to fire, landing straight into the pawn shop owner’s belly, revealing just how long the small intestines can coil in a brutal disemboweling. It’s the type of scene that warns to buckle up for an absurdly wild ride.
2) Going to Pieces Over a Night Swim
Hal and Petey’s father/son bonding trip derails almost immediately, thanks to Bill’s murder scheme. The pair stops at a motel not unlike the famous Bates Motel, where the deeply broken a/c signals the grim reaper is lurking near. It arrives shortly after Hal steps outside to take a phone call, where he begins to notice the telltale signs that something is amiss. The faulty a/c unit slips from the roof, crashing into the wet pool area and electrifying the water just as a woman takes a dive. Hal is helpless to warn her; she doesn’t even hit the water as she explodes mid-air. It’s as nasty as it is funny, only further underscoring the random cruelty of death.
1) Fish Hooked
The randomness of death doesn’t just apply to who dies, but how they die, too. Some are lucky to receive a swift death, while others inexplicably suffer protracted fates of immense suffering. The worst of it befalls poor Aunt Ida, whose insanely elaborate death reignites a new wave of annihilation 25 years after the twins thought they’d destroyed the Monkey for good. The perky but quiet woman, living alone, succumbs to a bizarre chain of events that sees her falling through basement steps into a faceful of fish hooks. Ida manages to dust herself off and clean her wounds with rubbing alcohol, the move that proves fatal when she ignites her stovetop for a calming beverage, only for her newly flammable face to go up in flames. She runs out the door and impales her fiery head upon the realtor’s sign in her yard. It’s a centerpiece kill that heralds in the second half of the film, and Perkins marks the occasion with Rube Goldberg Machine-style gallows humor.
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