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The Monkey’s approach to the mechanics of death is so incidental, so blasé, the overall effect is far more off-putting than anything you’d see in a Final Destination movie... The real issue with The Monkey is that it’s far messier than it should be.

It’s all in good fun provided you’ve got the stomach for it... but the law of diminished returns kicks in after the third or fourth time watching someone combust into a cloud of red mist and body parts. As [The Monkey] heads into the homestretch, the flimsiness of the conceit starts to become a real liability.

[The Monkey] is like the Cheshire Cat’s grin, hanging in thin air. It’s an inventive enough anthology of gruesome deaths... but its sick-puppy humour is a game of dwindling returns, and the film’s sense of malevolence never rises above the level of grisly mischief.

Perkins made one of the 21st century’s best horror films last year, and now he’s made another. But even if Longlegs’ intensely creepy atmosphere was too much, don’t be tempted to dodge The Monkey. This little guy has a whole new set of tricks to amuse and astound.

The Monkey is a resolutely minor, down and dirty B-movie, relishing cartoon gore and comic excess... Emotions are though purposely blunted at every turn, a seemingly self-defeating ploy.

The problem [with] The Monkey [is that it] has a hole at its center. It isn’t comedic enough to distract from the fact that the film traffics in rote archetypes, and it doesn’t quite pluck the heartstrings of its audience over the ragged inheritance from fathers to their sons either... A horror film can’t survive on kills alone, and the narrative of The Monkey... is the worst thing a horror saga can be: boring.

The Monkey manages to lean full-force into sight gags and dry one-liners while still making plenty of room for beheadings, electrocutions, and a death-by-beehive sequence that has to be seen to be understood... In the hands of another director, the tone could wobble too wildly. Perkins is a specialist in making childhood trauma feel grounded and relatable, however, and that holds true for the loopy scares of his latest movie.

Yes, death is inescapable... Disappointment, however, is not so certain. Yet, it’s disappointment that Perkins serves up most frequently in “The Monkey,” detouring from every wide-open chance to showcase depth and humanity in favor of juvenile humor and gross-out splatter gags.

The Monkey is far less interested in—or, at least, far less effective at—being a moralistic tale of restored family harmony than it is in being a delirious gross-out hoot. And on that level, it delivers the gooey, batshit goods in spades.

King’s narrators always sound like they’ve hustled up to you in the last, dead hours of a city bar, with a can of beer in hand and a tale of woe on their lips. James captures that drawled morbidity... It’s the twitchiness, though, that’s absent. And it’s key here

The Monkey seems to take place in a sharply conceived universe a few degrees off from our own reality. But it fails in the most basic requirements of a horror-comedy. A few of the deaths are wince-inducing, but they’re never scary; the timing seems off, the CGI is often shoddy, and we don’t care about any of the characters who perish.

There are endless directors who can make you cackle at a ghoulish chain of events, but Perkins has a knack for a certain macabre weirdness. That’s what really separates him from other popcorn filmmakers: a cunning intellect that seeps and bubbles through every line of the script.