Genre Comedy

Subway Monkey Hour (2002)

Item: Subway Monkey Hour
Rating: 2.0
Author: Ross McLaren

★★ — Subway Monkey Hour (2002)

There's a specific kind of comedy that absolutely slaps when you're ten years old and becomes considerably harder to defend when you're a grown adult sitting there trying to work out why you're not laughing anymore. Subway Monkey Hour is that kind of comedy. I remember finding it genuinely, breathlessly hilarious as a kid. Watching it again now? It's fine. Just fine. A bit like finding an old joke book down the back of the sofa. A few gags still land, most of them don't, and you're mostly just holding the thing wondering why you ever treasured it so much.

For the uninitiated, this is Japanese hidden camera and prank comedy television condensed into a feature-length film, the sort of thing where ordinary members of the public are ambushed by bizarre situations and filmed reacting. The concept isn't a million miles from the candid camera format that's existed in various forms for decades across the world. But there's a particular flavour to Japanese prank comedy of this era, a willingness to go further, to be weirder, to push past discomfort into something almost surreal. And when it works, it really works. A few sequences here made me properly laugh out loud, the kind of thing where the commitment of everyone involved is so total that you can't help but get swept along.

But here's the honest truth: a lot of it is just being annoying to people. And that's the tension at the heart of this kind of comedy, isn't it. There's a line between a genuinely crafted prank with a brilliant payoff and just making someone's day worse for the camera. Subway Monkey Hour crosses that line more often than I'd like. Some of these bits aren't really jokes so much as they are inconveniences. Someone is bothered, they react, everyone laughs. When you're young you don't clock that distinction. You just see the funny reaction. As an adult, I kept finding myself on the side of the poor sod being messed about, which is not where you want to be when you're supposed to be having a good time.

It's not without charm. There's an energy to the whole thing that keeps it moving, and the best moments have a real inventiveness to them. The people behind it clearly had genuine comic imagination on their better days. I'm not going to sit here and pretend it's completely without merit, because that would be unfair. Some of this stuff is inspired. I just wish the ratio of inspired to irritating was a bit more generous.

I think what this really is, more than anything, is a nostalgia trap. The two-star rating isn't a harsh verdict on what it was trying to be, it's an honest assessment of how it actually holds up. If I could bottle the feeling of watching this as a child, cackling on the living room floor, it would probably get four stars on memory alone. But I can't review the memory. I can only review what I actually watched, and what I actually watched was a mixed bag that outstays its welcome and mistakes nuisance for wit more than a few times.

Worth a watch if you grew up with it and want a hit of nostalgia, or if you're curious about this corner of early 2000s Japanese comedy culture. Just don't go in expecting consistent brilliance. Some of it will make you laugh. Some of it will make you wince. And some of it will make you feel a bit sorry for the people on the receiving end. Which is, I suppose, the eternal risk of prank comedy as a format.

Two stars. Funny to ten-year-old me. Less so to the bloke writing this now.

Rating: ★★ | Year: 2002 | Watched: 2025-07-20

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