Reviewed: ‘The Monkey’ and ‘Elevation’ in theaters and streaming now
‘The Monkey’ (2025)
Osgood Perkins, a dead ringer for dad Anthony Perkins (“Psycho”), continues the family tradition from the other side of the lens with this spin on horror master Stephen King’s 1980 short story. The not-so-slow burn is set in Casco, Maine, where we open with Capt. Petey Shelborn (Adam Scott) walking into a pawn shop covered in blood to fix his windup mechanical monkey. After a flamethrower, a speargun and a rat enter the scene, we learn that the monkey is not a toy, a point hammered home regularly by those possessing it. It is something evil, if not death itself. Its victims of ghoulish, cartoonish circumstance are random – only the person winding up the monkey is safe. When the monkey plays its drum, anyone nearby is at risk. Petey’s twin sons Hal and Bill (both Christian Convery) later discover the monkey in a closet in their unhappy home; their dad is now a deadbeat, as their mom, Lois (Tatiana Maslany), tells us. A few cranks of the monkey’s key by the curious kids and mayhem ensues among mom, babysitter Annie Wilkes (Danica Dreyer) and Uncle Chip (Perkins), who moved in to care for the boys with his swinger wife, Aunt Ida (Sarah Levy). The twins behead the mechanical monkey, throw it in the trash and down a well, but it always returned. Flash forward 25 years, and Hal (now played by Theo James) works at a supermarket and visits his own son Petey (Colin O’Brien) once a year out of fear of cursing him. Hal, the film’s occasional narrator, tells us that he and his brother don’t get along. Bill is now totally unhinged and wants to bond with the windup wingding of disaster, with Petey and Hal looped in to his demented scheme as much of Casco gets sent to the great beyond in bloody ways. Part of the fun is Theo James’s yin-and-yang roles as the buttoned-up, protective and paranoid Hal and the delusional Bill, who sports a pseudo-mullet and “damn it all to hell” gusto. Elijah Wood (“Lord of the Rings”) pops in for a dark turn as dim-witted Ted, employed by Bill to retrieve the monkey. Levy’s Aunt Ida is unforgettable for all the wrong reasons, with an unsettling sexual aura and a plotline that’s a creepshow instant classic.
‘Elevation’ (2024)
Poor Anthony Mackie can’t buy a break. Between this, the Peacock ripoff of “The Last of Us” called “Twisted Metal” and “Captain America: Brave New World,” he should be on the horn telling his agent, “Get me a part in a film in which the target audience isn’t preteen boys obsessed with the end of the world by transmogrified berserkers.” The setup to “Elevation” is lazy and cheap: We’re three years into an alien invasion that has wiped out 95 percent of the world’s human population. Horses, buffalos, bees and all other life forms are spared. The agents of death are things called “reapers” that are a hybrid of the irradiated giant ants from “Them!” (1954), the voracious sound hunters in “A Quiet Place” (2018) and an old-school Hummer. The why is never really explained, nor is the fact that humans can survive if they are 8,000 feet above sea level. That’s right, like an invisible electric fence for dogs, if you have a beastie on your tail and get above the marker line, they just stop – you’re a QB out of bounds and off the menu. This makes Colorado and its Rocky Mountain high a good place to be (the Midwest and the plains are toast), and is where we catch up with Mackie’s Will and his son Hunter (Danny Boyd Jr.) in a small agrarian community a notch above the “murder bug” zone. Hunter has respiratory issues, and Will needs to go down to Boulder to get canisters of something or other to save him. To date, no human has been able to kill a reaper. To that end, Will pairs up with Nina (Morena Baccarin, who played an invader herself in the series “V”), a scientist and de facto reaper expert who wants to get material from her lab in Boulder that may give humans a fighting chance. Also in tow is Katie (Maddie Hasson), a gritty can-doer who’s got Will’s back and is pretty handy with a grenade launcher and other military munitions. For vague reasons (competing love interests?) Katie and the foul-mouthed Nina don’t get along, and at one point trade blows. It’s one of the film’s more sit-up-and-watch moments, and later we learn there’s something in the past about Nina perhaps being culpable for the death of Will’s wife. It grabs your attention for a nanosecond, but then, like in “The Gorge,” it’s reduced to disingenuous hand waving once the overstuffed, CGI-generated agents of death show up and the film becomes a repetitive, tedious video game in which thespian skills, character development and human connection are mere sprigs of parsley on a plate of reheated sci-fi mishmash.
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