Although it'd be neat if he wants to hang out sometime since he seems like a rad dude (just saying) I don't personally know Osgood Perkins, sometimes actor, son of
Psycho star Anthony, and the quickly-becoming-his-own-brand horror director of
The Blackcoat's Daughter,
Longlegs, and my til-now-favorite
Gretel & Hansel. And yet it's impossible to not think while watching his latest movie, the Stephen King adpatation
The Monkey, that this feels like an extraordinarily personal movie for the man.
Like I said -- I don't know him. And yet knowing what I do -- having watched him speak eloquently in Bryan Fuller's horror doc Queer For Fear about his closeted father's tumultuous relationship with the character of Norman Bates and his death from AIDS, and also knowing that Osgood's mother, the actress Berry Berenson, was killed in one of the planes that crashed into the World Trade Center on 9/11 -- the thematic threads of cursed familial chaos passed down patriarchally that thrum though The Monkey feel, you know, fairly pointed! Notable. Of note. Resonant. And then when planes on fire start falling out of the sky? Can you blame me? These thoughts are right there for the taking.
The Monkey also feels the closest Oz has gotten to date to his father's wild late career work -- the absurdly nasty black humor on display here is very close to the Tony-directed Psycho III, or to his father's oh let's say lurid performance in Ken Russell's Crimes of Passion. This movie is bleak and pitch-black hearted and finds the absurd pointlessness of human existence to be a ribald punchline. It's of a piece with the Final Destination movies, but if they were less Rube Goldberg and more Albert Camus on acid.
It also might be, all due apologies to Gretel, my new favorite movie of Oz's. It'll definitely take a second viewing to decide that because The Monkey is so tonally erratic and balls deep wackadoo that it's hard to decide from moment to moment if this shit's anarchic genius or gallumphing mess. Hell maybe it's both! But in a world of so much personality-free I.P.-driven "content", The Monkey feels so bloody particular, so preposterously gonzo, that I must slow-clap it for audacity alone. (If you liked last year's Cuckoo, which I've come to appreciate more and more with distance for how by-its-own-rules it flew, this should also be your cuppa.)
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