Tag Archives: Theo James

Feb 19 2025
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Movie Reviews

Monkey See, Monkey Kill

The deep horror roots of the sinister simian wind-up toy in “The Monkey”

The Monkey
Starring Theo James, Tatiana Maslany, Colin O’Brien & Christian Convery
Directed by Osgood Perkins
Rated R

In theaters Friday, Feb. 21

As a horror flick, The Monkey certainly has its bona fides. It’s based on a 1980 short story by horror maestro Steven King, inspired by a much older classic creepy tale, The Monkey’s Paw, by British author W.W. Jacobs. One of the producers is James Wan, the creator of Saw, Insidious and The Conjuring franchises. The director, Osgood Perkins, made last year’s Longlegs, a wild ride of freakish serial-killer disturbia with Nicolas Cage and a demonic doll. And the director is the son of Anthony Perkins, forever enshrined in the halls of horror as the cray-cray, cross-dressing Norman Bates in Alfred Hitchcock’s classic Psycho.

Here, murder and mayhem swirl around a wind-up monkey “toy” that unleashes all kinds of hellzapoppin’ when someone turns the “key” on its back, making its mechanical arms start to bang on a drum. As a drummer myself, hey, I get it—some people don’t think much of drum solos. But at least no one’s ever died, as far as I know, because I dig into a roll or a few paradiddles.

Theo James (from the dystopian Divergent films, and season two of The White Lotus) plays double roles as the adult versions of twin brothers, Hal and Bill, who’ve grown up loathing each other. As kids (both effectively played by Christian Convery, from Netflix’s Sweet Tooth) rummaging through their dad’s collection of souvenir curios, they discover a box containing the monkey. “Turn the key and see what happens” is the instruction on a label on the monkey’s back.

What happens when the key gets turned is spectacularly bad news. People start to die, in twistedly inventive, Rube Goldberg-ian ways—decapitated by a flying knife at a Japanese steakhouse, trampled to death in a sleeping bag by wild horses, mangled by a lawnmower, beheaded by a cannonball, eviscerated with a speargun in a pawn shop. No one is safe when this monkey gets cranked.

Unlike some other evil “objects” or playthings (like the dolls in Chuckie, Anabelle, M3GAN or The Boy), the monkey doesn’t participate or engage in the mayhem. It doesn’t come alive and pick up a kitchen knife, like the South America voodoo doll in Trilogy of Terror, chasing Karen Black in the made-for-TV shocker back in 1975, or directly menace Telly Savalas like Talking Tina, the “Living Doll” on that 1963 episode of The Twilight Zone. This sinister simian is more a silent summoner of evil, an inscrutable avatar for the deep, dark pit of existential unknowable-ness, staring us down with a relentless, unsettling grin and a drumbeat heralding doom…for someone.

Elijah Wood (Frodo from The Hobbit-verse) has a scene as a gonzo parenting guru, and the director himself slips into the role of Hal and Bill’s swinger uncle.  

The movie, which often feels like a smart-ass comedic spoof and send-up of horror cliches, runs on gleeful, ghoulish humor and an embrace of its own wild, wooly weirdness—like the school cheerleaders who show up to rah-rah-sis-boom-bah at murder scenes. It’s also got a subtext about fathers and sons, deadbeat dads, the various toxicities that families “pass down” through generations, and the infallible truth that we’ll all inevitably meet our expiration date someday. The movie even literalizes a line from the Book or Revelation: “And I looked and beheld a pale horse. And his name that sat on him was Death.” Giddy-up!

“Everybody dies,” the boy’s mother (Tatiana Maslany) tells them, after the funeral of their babysitter. “That’s life.”

That’s certainly life with The Monkey, where a twist of its key always brings an insanely over-the-top, spectacularly splattery encounter with the grim reaper. Who’ll be next? How many more people will die? Is the Monkey the devil? Can it be stopped?

And can you ever hear the retro grooves of Sam Cooke’s “Twistin’ the Night Away” again without thinking of a grinning keyed-up monkey, lopped-off heads, killer bees, and how a cobra can leap out of a golf course hole and clamp down on your jugular?

—Neil Pond

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Mar 24 2015
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Movie Reviews, Movies, Pop Culture

Back to the Future

Hot youth reunite in grim dystopia for part two of ‘Divergent’ trilogy

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Insurgent

Starring Shailene Woodley, Ansel Elgort, Kate Winslet & Theo James

Directed by Robert Schwentke

PG-13

 

What’s in the box?

That’s the question that drives the plot of the second movie based on author Veronica Roth’s young-adult Divergent trilogy about love, loyalty, politics and identity in a futuristic, post-apocalyptic Chicago.

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Shailene Woodley, Theo James & Ansel Elgort

Shalene Woodley returns as Tris, a “Divergent” who doesn’t fit into any of the dystopian society’s other rigidly prescribed factions based on personality and aptitude: Abnegation (selflessness), Amity (peacefulness), Candor (honesty), Dauntless (bravery) and Erudite (intelligence). As the movie opens, the subdivided system has fallen apart, insurrection has swept across the land, and the ruthless Erudite overlord (Kate Winslet) blames it all on rebel Divergents.

Peace, we’re told, can only be obtained by opening a rune-covered, boxed-up do-dad containing a secret message “from the founders” of the long-ago, walled-in society that that has ultimately disintegrated into chaos and ruin. And the only person who can open the box—through a series of grueling, simulated tests, or “sims,” that are like wiring into a life-or-death computer game—is a Divergent.

Winslet’s icy CEO/empress orders her minions to round up Divergents until she finds one who can pass—survive—all five sims, each based on one of the factions. What’s in the box, that drives her to coldly sacrifice others to obtain it? The search is futile…until they find Tris, the purest, most “divergent” of all the Divergents.

Some viewers have faulted the Divergent series as being too derivative of The Hunger Games, which—fair enough—also featured great-looking, well-coiffed, repressed young people in a grim future world, fighting each other, held against their will and railing against an unjust, repressive, totalitarian regime. But every franchise of anything has its fans, and Roth’s trio of novels—like The Hunger Games—will also be stretched into four films before it finally wraps up in 2017.

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Octavia Spencer

Insurgent, in addition to Woodley, finds several other young actors returning to their roles, including hunks Theo James, Ansel Elgort and the series’ true secret weapon, Miles Teller, who provides much-needed levity—and what little real surprise there is to be found in the thin storyline. Octavia Spencer and Naomi Watts are newly aboard, and their relatively seasoned maturity frequently gives them the air of grownups navigating a bustling high school hallway.

The plot is convoluted and confusing, moving at a gloopy glacial pace punctuated by spasms and spurts of running, chasing, shooting and scuffling. The special effects, when Tris is hooked up to the sims contraption, are bombastic, jarring blowouts that pummel, rather than dazzle, the senses. Some of the large interior scenes seem designed, propped, costumed and photographed less like pieces of a dystopian drama and more like a Broadway musical—I halfway expected someone to break into a song called “Beyond the Wall” or “United We Diverge.”

What’s in the box? Oh, that: The setup for two more movies!

—Neil Pond, Parade Magazine

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Mar 25 2014
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Books, Movies, Pop Culture

Smells Like Teen Spirit

Young audiences can SO relate to the future-shock emotions of ‘Divergent’

 

DIVERGENT

Shailene Woodley and Theo James star in the first movie from author Veronica Roth’s futuristic trilogy.

Divergent

Starring Shailene Woodley, Theo James, Ashley Judd & Kate Winslet

Directed by Neal Burger

PG-13, 139 min.

 

This latest vision of a totalitarian, dystopian future comes by way of author Veronica Roth, whose popular young adult novels are now Hollywood’s latest hopes to cash in with the audience—and payday—of The Hunger Games and Twilight franchises.

Divergent, the first in Roth’s trilogy of best-sellers, centers on teenagers who are tested and sorted into one of five groups, or factions, when they turn 16. The classification locks them into irreversible courses to become selfless public servants; brainy scholars and scientists; pacifist farmers; warrior protectors; or truth-seeking lawmakers.

Born into the public-service group, Beatrice (Shailene Woodley) “tests” with evidence of more than one faction: Uh-oh, she’s a “divergent,” and being more than one thing is considered bad—and dangerous. She’s a mutation that threatens the social order.

DIVERGENT

Zoe Kravitz (left) and Shailene Woodley portray new initiates to the warrior-like Dauntless “faction” who begin their training with a bold leap from a moving train.

Beatrice bucks her test results, gives a parting glance to her crestfallen mom (Ashley Judd) and runs off (literally) to join the fearless “warrior” group, Dauntless. She shortens her name to Tris and falls for her mentor/instructor, Four (Theo James), who becomes her partner in uncovering a diabolical scheme by the cold, calculating head of the intellectual Erudite group (Kate Winslet) that could spell doom for Tris and her kind.

It’s easy to see how this story has a built-in appeal to young audiences. Teenagers can certainly relate to its young characters leaving home, trying to figure out who they are, facing major decisions about their futures, and rebelling against forces conspiring to steer them places they may not want to go.

The plot is rather dense, often clumsy and clunky, and the whole thing could stand to be about 25 minutes shorter. Director Neal Burger can’t quite seem to get out from under the long shadow of The Hunger Games, which looms large.

DIVERGENTBut Woodley is a delight to watch; her face can convey a spectrum of emotion—delight, bemusement, betrayal, regret—with only the slightest movement, a subtle shift in her eyes or a morph of her lips. She’s also now become a capable action-adventure star. The camera also loves James, and the romantic heat between the two of them will melt away a lot of the shortcomings in Divergent as far as its sizeable target audience is concerned.

“We need to keep moving,” says Four in the final scene, as he and Tris leap onto a speeding train, heading toward the sun and tomorrow. Keep moving, indeed, and all aboard: The Divergent sequel, Insurgent, begins production in May.

 

—Neil Pond, American Profile Magazine

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