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    Like Us, Theo James Is Freaked Out by the Toy in ‘The Monkey’

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    In the warped new horror-comedy “The Monkey” (in theaters), Theo James plays Hal and Bill, estranged twin brothers who are besieged by a possessed music-making monkey toy they got under gruesome circumstances when they were boys. Once that little monkey starts a tinny rat-tat-tat on his drum, nobody’s safe.Based on a Stephen King short story, the gory film is the latest project from the writer-director Osgood Perkins, whose macabre filmography includes last year’s “Longlegs.”Earlier this month during a video interview, James said that the toy, which looks like a maniac and is known among collectors as a Jolly Chimp, was one of his frequent scene partners. Distancing himself from the chimp’s unnerving stare was a tough order.“It was creepy enough to the point where, with some of my daughter’s toys in her room, I’m like, is that thing looking at me?” James said, with an uneasy smile that suggested he wasn’t entirely joking.Theo James in “The Monkey.”NeonIf his literally-a-model looks are familiar, it may be because he has appeared across acting disciplines: the “Divergent” films; the second season of “The White Lotus” on HBO; the London stage. Down the road are roles in “The Hole,” a film from the director Kim Jee-Woon — “Misery” meets “Parasite” is how James described it — and the second season of “The Gentlemen,” Guy Ritchie’s Netflix series.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      ‘The Monkey’ Review: A Stephen King Story Adapted Into a Gory Farce

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      A gruesome horror comedy adapted from a Stephen King story mixes nihilism, fatherhood and carnage.Few things are creepier than a creepy toy, especially the kind that has those cold, dead fake eyes. They seem to harbor ill will, perhaps put there by some evil person or spirit, and look like they want to rip your guts out. Thus malevolent dolls stalk horror directors’ nightmares, from Chucky to Annabelle to M3gan. How lucky we are that they pass those torments along to us.Well, here comes another one. The menacing toy of “The Monkey” is right there in the title — more specifically, it’s a medium-sized circus monkey who, when wound up via a key in the back, beats his little drum and stares at the winder unblinkingly. As a fun addition, though, as the monkey plays, someone in the general vicinity dies gruesomely. Very gruesomely.The deaths are so grisly and sudden and weird that they end up being hilarious, like some demented mash-up of “Final Destination” and “Looney Tunes.” Indeed, “The Monkey” is a comedy, and possibly a satirical one. The titular killer is brought home from some travels by a pilot named Petey (Adam Scott) who skipped town soon after, leaving his twin sons to be raised by Lois (Tatiana Maslany), their mother. The boys, Bill and Hal (both played by Christian Convery), discover the monkey while rooting through a closet full of junk. They turn the crank. Death.Twenty-five years later, Hal (Theo James) is estranged from Bill and has his own son, named Petey, but only sees him once a year. Fearing that anyone he’s too close to will somehow become the monkey’s victim, Hal leads a lonely life. But you cannot outrun a curse like that one.Much of “The Monkey” hinges on James’s performance as older Hal, whom the people around him treat as a complete loser but who is likely the only one with a brain. It’s kind of a sustained joke, helped along by the fact that James looks like, well, a very handsome movie star, whereas everyone else in this town seems to have been left in the oven a little too long. Thus, while James’s performance is relatively unremarkable until near the end, it works: He’s just a guy who’s trying to live quietly, but life, and death, have other plans.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      How Osgood Perkins Gave a Jolt to ‘Longlegs’

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      The filmmaker, who is the son of the “Psycho” star Anthony Perkins, discusses horror inspirations, his father’s legacy, evil dolls and working with Nicolas Cage.Many directors fall in love with scary movies through late-night cable binges or with friends at a drive-in. Osgood Perkins had a leg up: His father was the actor Anthony Perkins, a Hollywood heavyweight and the star of “Psycho,” Alfred Hitchcock’s 1960 horror movie game changer.“My father was absent, more oblique and abstract but a movie star, a public figure, an icon,” said Perkins, 50, in a recent interview over video. “Something very big lived with me.”The younger Perkins said his father, who died of AIDS at 60 in 1992, was a spirit guide as he made his new horror movie “Longlegs,” starring Nicolas Cage as a fiendish clown-looking evildoer who vexes a green F.B.I. agent, played by Maika Monroe, via handmade evil-summoning dolls.What would Perkins’s father have thought of the film, now in theaters?“He probably would have really dug it,” he said.Perkins talked about what inspired “Longlegs” and working with the chameleonic Cage. The interview has been edited and condensed.Perkins, right, on the set of “Longlegs” with his cinematographer, Andres Arochi.Asterios Moutsokapas/Neon, via Associated PressWe are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      ‘Longlegs’ Review: Daddy Danger

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      Nicolas Cage plays the cheery evil entity behind multiple murders in this weakly plotted, strongly styled chiller.Any horror movie that opens, as “Longlegs” does, with a quotation from a British glam-rock hit of the 1970s, suggests a filmmaker with, at the very least, an offbeat sensibility. Even so, this latest feature from the abundantly talented writer and director Osgood Perkins is a puzzler: Stuffed to the rafters with serial-killer clichés — coded messages, creepy dolls, satanic symbols, an androgynous maniac — the plot plays like a sampler of many, more coherent precursors. There’s even a minion dressed as a nun.And that’s before we attempt to process Nicolas Cage (who else?) as the titular nut case. His appearances are brief, but resounding — and, as can happen with Cage, waver on the brink of parody. Much like the film itself, righted in part by the magnificently bleak mood and prickling sense of premonition that emerge from Andrés Arochi’s mold-colored images. This man can make a deserted, plastic-draped lair look as ominous as hell’s anteroom.Preparing to enter is Lee Harker (Maika Monroe), a rather green F.B.I. agent on the trail of a serial killer who somehow persuades fathers to slaughter their families and then commit suicide. Coded notes, signed “Longlegs,” are left at the crime scenes and law enforcement is stymied. But Lee, who had a disturbing encounter with Longlegs as a child, appears to have a psychic connection with the monster. So, too, does her mother (Alicia Witt), and the two’s haunted, wary relationship thrums with unspoken secrets.Set in Oregon in the 1990s, “Longlegs” wrestles to maintain its eerily menacing tone. The movie’s echoing spaces — a snowy landscape, Lee’s wondrously gloomy home — and wily performances (especially from Kiernan Shipka as an institutionalized survivor of the killings) are too often undercut by a strangely off-kilter comedy. Much of this resides in Longlegs himself, an apparent victim of botched plastic surgery whom Cage plays as a rhyming-and-singing lunatic beneath a frizzed gray wig. In one amusing scene, as Longlegs enters a hardware store sporting what appear to be slippers and a housedress, he resembles nothing so much as a bizarre amalgam of Buffalo Bill and Tootsie. He should have been a breeze to catch.Scenes like this one (which benefits from a dry cameo by the director’s daughter, Bea Perkins, as a spectacularly unfazed clerk), in common with random moments throughout the movie, have a dottiness that seems intentional and suggests that Perkins might be messing with us. As chilling and stylish as it is, “Longlegs” is a frustrating pleasure. In films like “I Am the Pretty Thing That Lives In the House” (2016) and “The Blackcoats Daughter” (2017), Perkins allowed his gift for ominousness and insinuation to take center stage. Here, we’re never quite sure if his tongue is in his cheek or his hand is on his heart.LonglegsRated R for malevolence, madness and mass murder. Running time: 1 hour 41 minutes. In theaters. More