Few films are able to conjure a wide evil grin in its audience quite like Osgood Perkins’ The Monkey, an adaptation of Stephen King’s 1980 short story of the same name. Armed with a hilariously gory and absorbing central premise—in which a drumming toy monkey manifests gruesome deaths out of thin air à la Final Destination—Perkins’ film seats us on pins and needles, eagerly awaiting the next beat of the drum to usher in another wildly concocted kill. As the slayings pile up, the film’s simian harbinger of death becomes a sort-of twisted best friend, wowing us with freak deaths and arterial spray that would make even Rube Goldberg shudder.

The Monkey’s tale of family curses centres on the Shelburn family. After twin brothers Hal and Bill (Christian Convery) discover a toy monkey in their truant father’s private stash in 1999, a string of disturbing deaths tears their family apart. The two decide to bury the cursed toy to spare themselves further tragedy. Twenty-five years later, Hal (Theo James), now estranged from his brother and an absent father to his teenage son, is embroiled in another streak of freak fatalities in his small Maine town when he receives a strange call from Bill with a plan to dispatch the primate for good.

Perkins’ film is at its best when it obsesses over staging riotous, over-the-top ways to separate people from their mortal coils. From meat-rending shotgun blasts to signpost impalings to hibachi mishaps, The Monkey relishes every facet of its hysterical, gory composition.  The design of the titular monkey serves as the film’s greatest creative peak, with those dark, gaping maws for eyes and toothy grin primed to appear in audiences’ dreams for an ungodly amount of time.

The Monkey exists in an exaggerated world, where characters feel like glorified caricatures than real people. It’s an effect that actively works in the film’s favour, setting up a mad stage for even madder massacres. But it also woefully underserves the film’s attempts at family drama. As the film enters its more character-driven second half, it eases up on the throttle to manifest as an underbaked look at generational trauma. While Perkins’ personal family history—being the eldest son of closeted Hollywood Icon Anthony Perkins who died of AIDS and actress Berry Berenson who expired aboard American Airlines Flight 11 during the September 11 2001 terrorist attacks—lends weight to the film’s dramatic moments, they feel gravely undercut by an adherence to cartoonish humour and dialogue.

The result is an experience consistently at odds with itself, eventually losing the precarious edge that made it so arresting. While Perkins’ film is half-great, it’s a half that needs to be seen to be believed.

The Monkey is in theatres February 21.