FILM REVIEWS:
THE MONKEY (USA 2025)s**
Directed by Osgood Perkins
THE MONKEY comes with the accolade that it is based on a Stephen King short story, one that was nominated for a British Fantasy Award for Best Short Story in 1980. It is a 1980 horror short story by Stephen King featuring a cursed cymbal-banging monkey toy. There are two differences between the short story and the film already, One is that the characters in the film refuse to refer to the monkey as a toy, and in the film the monkey plays the drums instead of cymbals, The cymbals are surely scarier but the film’s director begs to differ. The other reason is that the monkey with the symbols is a Disney-patented toy. THE MONKEY also comes right after writer/director Perkins horror hit LONGLEGS.
After stumbling upon their father's vintage toy monkey in the attic, twin brothers Hal and Bill (both played by Theo James) witness a string of horrifying deaths unfolding around them. In an attempt to leave the haunting behind, the brothers discard the monkey and pursue separate paths over time. However, when the inexplicable deaths resurface, the brothers are compelled to reconcile and embark on a mission to eliminate the cursed toy permanently.
There are also major changes in the film. In the King’s story, the monkey in a flight bag is weighted with rocks and thrown to the deepest part of Crystal Lake. As the bag sinks, the faint sound of the monkey's cymbals clapping can be heard. During the disposal, the boat starts breaking up, but the Hal character manages to swim ashore safely to his son, Petey. The story ends with a newspaper clipping showing that hundreds of fish in the lake have died as a result.
This is a more subtle and scarier ending which the film dismisses.
THE MONKEY is nothing much more than a slew of very, very violent killings similar to the SAW horror franchise with the difference of the monkey doing the killing. The killings are all at random so director Perkins has more liberty for various ways to dispose of the victims. There is no subtlety here.
Perkins’ script has the main character Hal have an evil twin brother. The enmity between the two forms a main part of the story, The evil money in question is assumed by the evil twin to be able to cause damage as well as provide immortality. The immortality is never clearly explained and serves to cloud the situation.
THE MONKEY like the SAW franchise can be praised for the extreme violence and innovation of novel killings. Apart from that, nothing really new or exciting has been brought to the horror genre. Whether the changes from Stephen King’s short story improve the film’s story is questionable at best. The characters in the film are also too wishy-washy to be sympathetic. The MONKEY toy should have never been taken out from Hal's father’s closet and the script for THE MONKEY should be locked in one
THE MONKEY opens in theatres on February 21st. With its modest budget, the horror flick should bring in a tidy profit.
Trailer:
OKIKU AND THE WORLD (Japan 2023) ***½
Written & Directed by: Junji Sakamoto
Two Japanese films have emerged in 2023 about toilets and shit. One is the 2023 Oscar-nominated Best International Feature PERFECT DAYS from Wim Wenders about a public toilet cleaner employed in Tokyo who takes his job dead seriously. Yes, cleaning shit is a serious but dirty job. This film OKIKU AND THE WORLD is also about shit. But this is a black and white film, though it does break into colour at one point, a period piece set in Edo, Japan.
Edo-era Japan is remembered for many things — brutal nation building, isolationist foreign policies, and the last samurai. Leave it to veteran auteur Junji Sakamoto to remind audiences that it also marked the culmination of a truly sustainable ecosystem. OKIKU AND THE WORLD, tells the story of Yasuke (Sosuke Ikematsu), who makes a living out of selling human waste to farmers and persuades the young paper seller Chunji (Kanichiro Sato) to be his business partner. Like PERFECT DAYS, the director takes great pains to show how the work is done - in this case scooping shit from the outhouses and mansions carrying the buckets of waste out, often travelling by boat, and then selling their wares as fertilizer to the farmers. The film is shot in black and white so the waste looks even more real and gross. The scenes are indeed enough to stop your appetite.
While sheltering from a storm, the pair meet Okiku (Haru Kuroki), a young schoolteacher and daughter of a disgraced samurai (Koichi Sato). Okiky initially despises Yasuke but not Chunji who is at the time just selling newspapers, before being taken in as the shit apprentice. She is haughty and proud and like many others cannot stand the stink and look down on the trade. But things change after having Okie’s vocal cords severed during a brutal attack that also results in her father’s death and unlocks her new life, though she remains in her house for a long time, like a cocoon before coming out of her shell Okiku falls in love with Chunji–yet how can their love blossom given his low social status and her inability to speak?
The film looks simple and plain, but there is more emotion and drama than meets\ the eye. For one, it studies prejudice while showing a part of the period Japan Westerners are totally unfamiliar with. This is where the film succeeds in fascinating the audience with a story as strange as its setting.
Performances by relatively unknown Japanese actors are sincere and credible. The look of Edo with tis tenement row housing and countryside farming with the river as a backdrop all add to the authenticity of the story.
Sakamoto’s latest period drama is a groundbreaking, realist work that revolves around the themes of youth, love, and sustainability, interspersed with a good dose of toilet humour.
OKIKU AND THE WORLD makes its North American premiere on Film Movement Plus, the new streaming service also available in Canada on February 21, 2025.
Trailer:
PARTHENOPE (Italy/France 2024) ****
Directed by Paolo Sorrentino
The film begins in 1950. With the help of midwives, a baby girl is born in the sea of Naples that lies below her family’s wealthy home. She is named Parthenope, named for the mythological Greek siren who’s credited with founding ancient Naples by an elderly gent known as the Commander. This is the life story of Parthenope, right down to her in her old age.
From 1950, the film fast forwards. Now 18 years old, Parthenope (Celeste Dalla Porta) is again emerging from the sea, this time in a bikini (like the James Bond girls). Thus begins her journey through teenage summers and young adult years. Just about everyone is smitten with
Parthenope – playboys, strangers, her childhood friend (Dario Aita), and even her
brother (Daniele Rienzo) and a bishop (Peppe Lanzetta), neither of whom should be.
The film is set in the sunlit city of Naples. The smiling Parthenope recalls her childhood, in which her brother was obsessed with her. Her anthropology professor finds her a brilliant student. She considers becoming an actress but is not inspired by her eccentric acting coach. She wonders about becoming an aesthete and meets the drunken writer John Cheever (Gary Oldman), whose work she admires. Or perhaps she could have a romantic fling with the ugly bishop who attends the miracle of the dried blood that turns liquid each year, the phenomenon she is studying in anthropology.
Sorrentino’s Naples at times feels like a Federico Fellini movie for its excesses and indulgence. The films of both directors can be difficult to take but not without their rewards. Sorrentino’s PARTHENOPE, at least abstains from the ghastly and weird. For example in FELLINI’S SATYRICON, there is the chopping of a hand on stage for entertainment, or the farting of a performer wearing an animal costume with the tail lifting and falling as he farts on stage. Sorrentino, on the other hand, embellishes beauty,
And Sorrentino knows how to shoot beauty. This is evident in the film’s early scenes where he films beautiful young girls and men in colourful garments in slow-motion as they jump up and down or frolic in the open. He also films a very seductive sex scene between a nubile couple as watched by a live audience.
The supporting men in Parthenope’s life are more interesting than hers. The actors also outshine the actress’s performance, which can be described as forgettable as best. All Celeste Dalla Porta can do is look beautiful, which she does quite magnificently. The older Parthenope is portrayed by Stefania Sandrelli famous for her Pietro Germi’s 60 films like DIVORCE, ITALIAN STYLE and SEDUCED AND ABANDONED. She is one reason to see this film.
Parthenope is gifted with both beauty and talent. Yet her personality is clouded by her encounters. The drunken writer, her professor and her mentors all serve to upstage her. She meets her match when she meets the diva of divas who insults the entire Naples in her degrading speech to the city’s people
There is a good play with words in the film’s dialogue. Parthenope is great at rebuttal comebacks. “When chastised, she says at least it is original.” To which comes: “But it must be true.” Every character has a good line at one point or another from the bishop to the commander but none can match the lines of Parthenope.
PARTHENOPE is gorgeous, irrelevant and entertaining, there are adjectives that can be used to describe director Sorrentino’s film as well as his other films Despite the weak narrative, there is a story but it is the visuals and excesses that make the film. Be prepared to be astonished by the film that premiered at Cannes last year winning a reported 9-and-a-half-minute standing ovation.
Parthenope was selected to compete for the Palme d'Or at the 2024 Cannes Film Festival, where it had its world premiere on 21 May 2024, and opened in theatres on February 21st.
Trailer:
THE QUIET ONES (Norway 2024) ***
Directed by Frederik Louis Hviid
THE QUIET ONES is based on the true story of Denmark’s biggest-ever robbery in which $10 million US was taken and the 14 involved were caught and imprisoned.
THE QUIET ONES is a suspenseful action thriller depicting a team of ambitious and uncompromising criminals who all share the same goal: To achieve the impossible— despite great obstacles and personal costs.
Director Frederik Louis Hviid’s heist thriller is typical of the crime capers made in the 60’s and 70’s. It highlights the steely professionalism of men operating outside the law. The exciting and suspenseful film centres on a group of men from Denmark in 2008, when across Europe pulled off the biggest heist of all time on Danish soil. Kasper, a boxer with few chances left in life, is offered the opportunity to plan the robbery by its foreign initiators. At the risk of losing his family and everything that matters to him, he takes on the challenge in a bid to break all records and secure his place in the history books. As he plans the job alongside an enigmatic hard-core, Kasper displays the kind of exacting professionalism that might’ve taken him far in a more legitimate line of work. The little violence in the film is replaced by suspensful scenes. THE QUIET ONES open in theatres and on Demand on February 21st. The film premiered at TIFF last year.
Trailer:
LAS TRES SISTERS (USA/Mexico 2023) **
Directed by Mar Novo
Facing the realities of life’s ups and downs, three sisters reunite, after years of estrangement, to complete their beloved Grandmother’s pilgrimage through rural Mexico. One of the sisters is seeking a miracle, a cure for her terminal illness as she has been diagnosed with cancer. She keeps the illness from the sisters who think she is there to solve her marriage problems. With an old map, no hiking experience, and their lives unraveling around them, the sisters encounter what is hoped to be hilarious and touching experiences on the Talpa de Allende trail - that is until Kin, a local with a dark past, brings them together in order to reach the Miracle that awaits at the end of the trail.
Ted Lasso’s Cristo Fernandez who has a supporting role, as Ken, who has sex with one of the sisters. He also executively produced the film The sister who organizes the pilgrimage is Maria (Marta Mendez Cross (THE BOUNCE BACK) who believes in a miracle of healing. The loudest of the sisters Sofia (Virginia Novello) who if not drunk half the time, is making a fool of herself while flirting around at the same time. The third sister who cannot get along with Sofia is Lucia (Valeria Maldonado, COCO) the most anal-retentive of the sisters who has just walked out of the job because she cannot stand being unappreciated. She also looks after their mother and mothers her too much. The mother hires a nurse so that she can go with the sisters.
Though the film lists 4 writers in the credits, the story of three sisters and their journey that involves sorting out what might be considered incorrigible differences is hardly original. The humour is slight and the drama appears forced at times.
Three sisters mean that there needs to be three happy endings that the audience is forced to tolerate and sit through. The film gets too sappy at th end, complete with a sing-a-long Spanish song by the three sisters.
LAS TRES SISTERS opens in theatres on February 21st.
Trailer:
