The random southern accent girl in this is such a weird choice and everyone delivers their dialogue with thousand-yard stares lol. Her supervisor felt like he was in an entirely different movie Also, the dolls were memed with their eyes lit up as a cuck-chair type thing ("me when I see..." etc.)
All of Perkins' films (with the exception of The Blackcoat's Daughter) are insane and stupid, which works at times and others not so much, but tonally, The Monkey makes way more sense and definitely feels like a King adaptation to me. Good flick.
Keeper is...not good, but has kind of weirdly stuck with me in a way that I may find even more interesting than this film, which I also don't love (but definitely has the creepier/more iconic imagery). I don't like that Perkins' version of "bonkers horror" is like...wouldn't it be crazy if this thing happened?? And it has almost nothing to do with any of the other crazy things that happen in the film. Visually, he's a great director, but his films never seem to follow their own in-universe rules or logic or lore, which in turn makes each films' events feel kind of...unearned, I guess? The Monkey works for me because it mostly follows a formula and feels like a tongue-in-cheek Stephen King story, so third act aside, it largely avoids the #random vibes given off by Keeper and this film. Even if they're still dumb fun for what they are.
Thought Shipka was excellent in Blackcoat’s Daughter and I didn’t know that was him. That movie has the juice.