‘The Monkey’ is a fairly mechanical horror but with a sufficient degree of lunacy in its presentation of a demonic toy monkey who bangs a tin drum and, seemingly at random, a person connected to the individual who wound up the monkey in the first place dies a hideous death. Based on a Stephen King short story, this is the follow-up to Osgood Perkins’s ‘Longlegs’ which starred Nicolas Cage. Here, we have twin brothers who inherit the mechanical monkey from their errant father, who deserted the family when they were children, and can never escape its hideous impact.

No matter how far they go to banish the monkey – even dropping it down a large well shaft – it always manages to salvage itself and appear back in their lives. Whether this is a form of projection or a literally demonic threat, ‘The Monkey’ dabbles in the unconscious threat posed by a trauma, which could be from our childhood, that refuses to disappear, no matter how hard we may try.

And it is here that we enter ‘Final Destination’ territory in terms of how characters then start being dispatched but never in the order or the manner that we could anticipate, bringing a cosmic and supernatural dimension to the preposterous plot. And this is really the core of the problem. There is no real arc to this film which gives us a terrifying presence but doesn’t do anything with it other than give us repetitive variations of the same event, and it grows wearisome.

We see numerous violent deaths, including one entailing a swarm of malevolent wasps which burst through a hole in a car windscreen, enter the mouth of the driver and result in his entire body being consumed from within. This is a gimmick masquerading as a full length feature film, and while it may have worked well for a vignette, along the lines of the series of short horror movies in 1990’s ‘Tales from the Darkside’, this is too slender a premise to justify its running time.