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!

Perkins’s follow-up, The Monkey, revolves around a pair of twins ... always sound like they’ve hustled up to you in the last, dead hours of a city bar, with a can of beer in hand and a tale ...