christian convery

The Monkey (2025)

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I was looking forward to The Monkey with great anticipation. Longlegs was one of my favorite movies of last year, and although I’m colder on The Blackcoat’s Daughter than Brandon is, I’m mostly positive about Osgood Perkins’s overall body of work, so it’s unfortunate that The Monkey didn’t live up to my expectations. Extrapolated from a Stephen King short story about a toy monkey who visits unexplained and supernatural death whenever he clangs his cymbals together, Perkins has reworked the story into one about twin brothers (Christian Convery in the past and Theo James in the present) who find among their long-disappeared father’s belongings a “like life” toy organ grinder monkey. All too quickly, they learn that winding the monkey up by turning its key sets in motion its little drum routine (the cymbal monkey is now under copyright to Disney, for Toy Story reasons), and when it plays its final drumbeat, someone dies. When their mother dies as a result of the monkey’s machinations, they resolve to get rid of it by throwing it down an abandoned well, only for it to resurface twenty-five years later and start to kill the innocent again. 

There’s a lot to like here. This is the first of Perkins’s works to fully commit to being funny for most of its run time, and when it is funny, it’s hilarious. The deaths here are as comically over the top as they come, and not without a bit of Final Destination-esque Rube Goldbergian overdesign that lends them even more humor. The death of Sarah Levy’s character Aunt Ida is a particularly gratuitous one, as she first falls through the basement stairs and gets a face full of fishing hooks for her trouble; but after she painstakingly removes the tackle and sanitizes the wounds with rubbing alcohol, she accidentally lights her face on fire, which sends her running screaming into the night and impaling her head on the real estate post outside of her house. It’s slapstick horror comedy at its best, and when the film focuses on comedic violence, it shines. A woman dives into a swimming pool that has been electrified by a fallen air conditioning unit and, instead of simply being shocked or fried by the current, completely explodes like a water balloon full of human viscera; Uncle Chip gets reduced to little more than ground meat when he’s trampled to death in his sleeping bed by a stampede while out camping. And it’s a delight! 

What doesn’t work and what ends up dragging the film down is the semblance of narrative consistency that it tries to maintain. Adult Hal (the nerdy one) is now divorced and working in a supermarket, and he only sees his son once a year on the kid’s birthday. Upon arriving at the home of his ex-wife’s much more successful new husband, parenthood advice author Ted (Elijah Wood), he learns that Ted plans to adopt Hal’s son Petey (Colin O’Brien) outright, and Hal will lose all custody and visitation rites. His attempts to give his son one last fond memory by taking him to a horror theme park go awry when he learns of the death of his Aunt Ida, who took the boys in as children when their mother (Tatiana Maslany) was killed by the monkey. Believing that the monkey has returned, he goes back to the home and tries to find the monkey so that he can keep it out of the hands of anyone who would use it maliciously, and hilarity ensues as people continue to die—gloriously and gorily—all around him, while he works to keep his son safe from what he believes to be the family’s curse. Elsewhere, Adult Bill (who was the worst kind of piece of shit as a kid) is up to his own schemes, which include seeking the monkey through his own means, including a longstanding reward on the thing, which is claimed by local punk Ricky (Rohan Campbell), who develops his own fascination with the object. 

This is a film that’s front-loaded with all of the best parts, as its opening, set in 1999, follows Bill and Hal as kids and their relationship with their single mother. In the prologue, we learn that their father (Adam Scott) had attempted to return the monkey to a pawn shop, only for the monkey to start its drumbeat, with disastrous results. He does see a flamethrower in the store, however, and uses it on the monkey; this is the last that we see of him, and when the kids ask about their father, their mother reveals that he literally went out for the proverbial pack of smokes and never returned. The relationship between the boys and their mother is a fun one, and while Theo James is a fine enough actor, he cannot help but be unfavorably compared to Maslany, who imbues every one of her Act I scenes with enough charisma, charm, and comedic timing to fill most films. She’s a delight here, especially playing off of Convery, who effectively conveys two very different boys who happened to have shared a womb. Even with a general lack of comedic violence in that opening, there’s still a warmth and a charm that Maslany brings to life (her constant reference to Annie the babysitter as “Babysitter Annie” as if that were her full name is particularly cute). Young Bill is effective as an unrepentant bully who makes Hal’s life hell at home and in school, as he shares embarrassing details about Hal with a gaggle of mean girls that leads to them stealing his pants and pelting him with bananas (because of the monkey). 

Once we move into the present day, things get off to a pretty strong start. I mentioned Aunt Ida’s ignominious death above, and it turns out that the monkey is currently working overtime as the residents of his old hometown are dropping left and right in horrible accidents: real estate agents blown to bolognese bits by poorly maintained firearms, guys falling victim to their own lawn mowers (a possible reference to King’s Maximum Overdrive, as the film is peppered with others, like the fact that Babysitter Annie’s full name is Annie Wilkes), that sort of thing. Where the whole thing falls apart is when it attempts to be sincere, or (more charitably) when its mockery of sincerity is insufficiently dissimilar from the real thing. The relationship between Hal and Petey is one that we have very little investment in, as it’s clear that Hal is all but completely absent from his son’s life, and although it’s made clear that Ted is a strange man, there’s no reason to think that this change in the legal structure of Petey’s family will have much of an impact on him (or Hal) at all. Hal’s constant monologued fears about the potential for the monkey to be a curse on his bloodline didn’t stop him from getting married and having a son in the first place, and that even further precludes us from thinking that he cares about Petey all that much. I’m even less invested in the relationship between the estranged adults Bill and Hal, especially as the more antagonistic of the pair is played much more broadly than the other; it should be either campier or reined in a bit to better match Hal’s energy. Even if the film is trying to mock these relationships, the way that it attempts to rationalize and figure out rules for how the monkey works ground everything to a halt for me, after I was riding pretty high on the comedy of the first half. It’s not that the back half is without its fun moments. An earlier reference to skydiving weddings pays off hilariously and gruesomely in the climax, and the last minute before the credits roll provides another fun payoff that feels like something out of the VHS horror comedy era, and I got a kick out of both. It’s just too uneven and the back half too dull to live up to my expectations. When it’s funny, it’s wickedly funny, but when it’s not, it drags. 

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond

Cocaine Bear (2023)

/ swampflix / 7 Comments

I’m not sure how I didn’t recognize from promotional materials that Scott Seiss, best known online for his character of a retail employee who responds to F.A.C.s (that’s an acronym I just made up for “Frequent Asshole Comments”) the way that every retail employee wishes that they could, was the male paramedic in Cocaine Bear. He’s in pretty much every trailer! Further, I have no idea how I still didn’t put that together after seeing this video, in which he hypes Cocaine Bear in the same manner, noting that you don’t have to have done homework before seeing the movie and that there won’t be a dozen thinkpieces exploring the possible meanings behind the film’s ending. There’s no long-beloved intellectual property of which this is an adaptation (unless you count the actual 1985 events which very loosely inspired the plot), no secret clues about who’s going to be the villain in the next MCU feature, nothing to inspire a MatPat Film Theory video. Cocaine Bear is just a comedy-horror-thriller about a bear who does cocaine, and the people who find themselves caught in its freakout. And it’s a delight. 

Multiple story threads find themselves woven together from their disparate origins in the opening act of the film, as disparate parties are drawn together to Blood Mountain, a Georgia peak located in the Chattahoochee National Forest. After a drug drop goes south due to the delivery man bashing his skull on an airplane bulkhead while attempting to exit and parachute, a number of interested people become invested in trying to find the drugs that are missing on the mountain, as well as the law enforcement in pursuit of the traffickers. Kingpin Syd (Ray Liotta) sends his lieutenant Daveed (O’Shea Jackson, Jr.) to the national park to find and recover the duffel bags, and tells him to bring along Eddie (Alden Ehrenreich), Syd’s son who left the family business at the urging of his recently deceased wife Joanie, which the sociopathic Syd thinks means that his boy will be ready to get back into the trade. In Tennessee where the dead parachuter’s body has landed, Detective Bob (Isiah Whitlock Jr. of The Wire) leaves his new dog with Deputy Reba (Ayoola Smart) as he travels across state lines and out of his jurisdiction in pursuit of Syd, who he’s been chasing for years. Local middle schooler Dee Dee (Brooklynn Prince) and her friend Henry (Christian Convery) skip school so that she can paint a picture of the park’s Secret Falls, an outing she was supposed to take with her mother Sari (Keri Russell) but which has been postponed due to Sari’s boyfriend inviting the two of them to Nashville for the weekend instead. At the park itself, Ranger Liz (character actress Margo Martindale) is preparing for a park inspection by Peter (Jesse Tyler Ferguson), on whom she has a crush. And, of course, deep in the woods, there’s a mama bear who’s developing a taste for nose candy. 

As I was leaving the auditorium after the screening, a woman behind me declared, “Well, that sucked.” My viewing companion was also less than enthused on our drive away from the theater, although he was bemused by my passionate defense of the film. I’ve seen and heard criticism of the story, and while I wouldn’t exactly call the film’s composition an elegant puzzle box, it was very fun and moved at a great pace; I was never bored, and there was never a prolonged period of time between laughs. Not every joke landed for everyone in the audience, but there were some jokes that didn’t provoke a laugh from me while others produced a laugh only from me, and that’s a good balance for a comedy to strike. Maybe in future viewings I’ll find that some of the punchlines that didn’t land this time will land the next time, and I can say definitively that this is a comedy that I will watch again, which isn’t something that I say very often. I’ve long been a fan of campy, self-aware horror comedies, and long been opposed to movies that attempt to ape that specific genre and do it poorly; Cocaine Bear manages to walk that tightrope deftly, mostly by not calling attention to itself. 

I’ve lost count of how many movies and TV shows of the past decade attempted to cash in on nostalgia for the 1980s, but this film manages to capture the quintessence of movies from that era and combine it with the modern cinematic eye in a way that doesn’t call attention to itself. With a 1985 setting, a lazier filmmaker would fill the soundtrack with songs from that year specifically and exclusively, but there’s greater verisimilitude in the text by including music that was recent and not just current. The film starts out with the Jefferson Starship track “Jane” (1979) and includes the 1984 track “The Warrior” by Scandal and featuring Patty Smyth, 1978’s “Too Hot ta Trot” by the Commodores, and even “On the Wings of Love” by Jeffrey Osborne (1982), which is plot-relevant in the scene in which it appears. It’s a small thing, but I appreciate it and the way that it evokes and inscribes its time period without worshipping it, like IT or Stranger Things. We’re not presented with an endless parade of 1980s pop culture or media—Remember Ghostbusters? Remember Nightmare on Elm Street? Remember G.I. Joe?—and, in fact, there’s very little reference to the media of the time at all. Outside of the use of actual contemporary media footage taken when Andrew Thornton landed, parachute undeployed, in an old man’s driveway and the appearance of a few of the era’s anti-drug PSAs, the only material reference to contemporary events comes in the form of the delivery of a new-and-improved Smokey the Bear stand-up to the ranger station. You’re not taken out of the reality of the moment because the period elements draw attention to themselves; you just exist there. There’s something that’s just so true about Keri Russell’s pink jumpsuit and the way that her purse strap has a big knot tied in it to shorten it; I don’t know what’s not to love. It’s grisly, fun, and campy, and I loved it. 

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond