But the film’s scattershot writing leaves its punchlines hitting dead air before falling smack against the floor. For a movie that starts dying a slow, painful death from its first act ...

There's far less bloodshed (except for the hundreds of dead fish the waterlogged monkey claims as its victims), and it ends on a relatively happy note. The monkey is defeated! They're rid of it!

The Monkey pairs its macabre sense of humor with an unsettling takeaway.

wishes Hal dead even though he knows it won’t work and that the monkey will act on its own—as it does when it kills many of the people in the town around him. The consequences of one’s own ...

People just don’t drop dead in ‘The Monkey’; they explode, are eviscerated, incinerated, perforated, and mutilated in the kind of bizarre “accidental” deaths that make the famous kills ...