Warning! This article contains major spoilers for The Monkey. If you’ve yet to see the movie, and don’t want to know anything that happens, turn back now!
Osgood Perkins’ The Monkey essentially asks ‘what if the Final Destination franchise had jokes?’, which is a roundabout way of saying that it’s full to the brim with gags and grisly deaths. Based on the short story by Stephen King, the horror comedy follow twins Hal and Bill, who are haunted by a cursed toy from their past that has a penchant for picking off those in close proximity to them at random. With that, and as the poster and trailer claims, “everybody dies”.
Well, not everyone , but the vast majority of the film’s characters don’t make it to the end credits, including Hal and Bill’s mother Lois, their Uncle Chip and Aunt Ida, a real-estate agent, a local skater kid, and a pawn shop owner. Bill, himself, is another of the monkey’s unfortunate victims, too, though it’s the circumstances of his death that make it really shocking…
In the movie’s final act (which you can read more about with our The Monkey ending explained guide), it’s revealed that Bill, having never processed losing his mom when he was a youngster, has been causing the monkey’s latest batch of kills. He’s been using the toy – though it’s ill-advised to describe it as such – in the hope of it murdering his brother Hal, who he blames for Lois’s passing. You see, Bill worked out that Hal had turned the monkey’s key back when they were teenagers, but in his attempt to get it to dispose of his snide sibling, he inadvertently got it to target Lois instead.
There’s one fatal flaw in Bill’s vengeful plan, though, and that’s that the monkey famously “doesn’t take requests”. Frustrated by his inability to influence its selections, Bill throttles the toy and threatens it, before being violently interrupted by a booby trap of his that goes off and sees Lois’s old customized bowling ball strike his head clean off his shoulders.
“There’s something funny about her popping up at that moment – the senselessness of it,” actor Tatiana Maslany, who plays Lois, tells GamesRadar+ of the scene. “It’s, like, this idea of the heavy weight of the things that we carry with us. Lois was such a weight on Bill in all of the ways. She embodied everything that he missed and lost and everything. So it makes sense that… yeah, like, it’s not a revenge, it’s just… inevitability, maybe?
“And it’s like an object and it’s like ‘a perfect score’,” she laughs, miming bowling a ball towards some pins. “There’s something about all of those things that is so wrong. It’s so wrong, and I think that’s why it’s so right.”
The Monkey is in cinemas now. For more, check out our picks of the most exciting upcoming horror movies heading our way.
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