Is the mechanical killer monkey born to Stephen King and Anthony Perkins' son?

When, in one of the first scenes of The monkey, a voice-over refers to the burden of a terrifying paternal inheritance, it is almost impossible not to remember that we are watching the new film by Osgood Perkins, the son of Anthony Norman Bates Perkins. This extra-filmic reading is kept alive when, in their crusade against a mechanical monkey that reveals itself as a messenger of death, the father and son who star in the film visit a motel that recalls the one in Psychosis. Furthermore, it must be said that this plot full of family traumas consolidates the authorial (cult) status of Perkins-fill, who in the magnificent Longlegs He has already composed a satanic fresco marked by the figures of an absent father and a deranged mother.

The pity is that the promising ingredients of The monkey They do not quite take root in this adaptation of a Stephen King story that draws on the irony of The unknown dimension and whose main course is a set of grotesque deaths in the style of the saga of Final destinationMore effective as a black comedy than as a horror fable or family drama, The monkey ends up giving itself over to the formula of postmodern pastiche, with an overdose of nods to the world of the Coen brothers: pathetic deaths, ridiculous hairstyles, flowery monologues, cartoonish secondary characters and even some dreamlike and surreal escapes that invite us to return, once again, to the universe ofThe Big Lebowski.