It turns out that a toy monkey is the most malevolent movie villain we've seen in years. Horror fans are going to want to see "The Monkey."

Few filmmakers have successfully adapted Stephen King's work for the screen, and even fewer have found a way to stay true to his material while simultaneously putting their own spin on it. Osgood Perkins, however, does just that with The Monkey, a film based on King's 1980 short story (from his Skeleton Crew anthology) that both maintains the existential dread of the tale and reconfigures it for gory, over-the-top comedy.

Expertly melding its conflicting tones so that its ridiculousness and despair feel like natural bedfellows, it's a unique saga of fathers, sons, and brothers, of fate, vengeance, and survival, and of a wind-up simian toy that just might be the Grim Reaper.

In a pawn shop, a harried pilot (Adam Scott) asks the establishment's owner to take his giant monkey doll, which wears a red vest and has a drum between its legs that it beats with the drumsticks clenched in its paws. Noting that the airman is covered in blood (not his own, he notes), the proprietor says no deal.

Before they can settle this potential transaction, the monkey begins playing circus music, spreads its wide lips to reveal a row of perfectly corresponding teeth fixed in a grim pseudo-grin, raises its right arm, twirls its stick, and begins pounding its instrument. The result is a death of gruesome dimensions, motivating the pilot to take it outside and melt it with a flamethrower.

This would be the end of The Monkey if not for the fact that the title character is indestructible and eternal. In 1999, the pilot's twin sons Hal and Bill (both played by Christian Convery) -- the latter claiming to be older because he exited their mom Lois (Tatiana Maslany) three minutes earlier and ate most of her placenta -- are still coping with the realization that their pop, per Lois, "made like an egg and scrambled."

In a closet full of the knickknacks their father brought back from his many trips, Hal and Bill discover a giant box labeled "Organ Grinder Monkey: 'Like Life.'" Inside is the plaything that Scott's paterfamilias supposedly torched, and its tag reads, "Turn the key and see what happens." They comply, and shortly thereafter at a hibachi restaurant, their babysitter Annie Wilkes (Danica Dreyer) -- her name a nod to King's murderous Misery superfan -- meets a sudden, gory end.

At the funeral, a goofy priest flails about in search of profundity, musing, "Everything for a reason -- yeah, totally." Afterwards over ice cream cones in the cemetery, Lois candidly explains that "everybody dies" and makes clear that the best one can do in the face of this inevitability is to dance. Although they temporarily ease their troubles by boogie-woogieing in the living room, their grief remains, as does Hal's torment at the hands of his sibling.

Bill is a prick who habitually refers to his brother as "dumb shit," and at school, he and a group of female bullies make his life miserable. Convinced that the ever-present monkey magically kills when he performs his single mechanized routine, Hal turns its key and asks the inanimate object to dispatch the insufferable Bill. This is not, however, how this trick works, and in the wake of another impromptu demise, they move in with swingers Uncle Chip (Perkins) and Aunt Ida (Sarah Levy) in Maine, as does the monkey -- this despite Hal having chopped it into pieces and thrown it in the garbage.

The Monkey is grisly business and yet as conducted by Perkins with over-the-top flair and sharp edits that drolly cut off people's exclamations, the film exhibits an amusingly bleak sense of humor.

Twenty-five years after seemingly ridding themselves of this curse by tossing the monkey into a deep, dark well, Hal (Theo James) is happily estranged from Bill (James) and keeps everyone else at a significant distance. That includes his teenage son Petey (Colin O'Brien), who lives with his mother (Laura Mennell) and her parenting-guru husband (Elijah Wood), whose primary interest is in stealing Hal's energy and appropriating his position as the boy's father.

During his last week with Petey before he loses custody of the boy for good, Hal takes him on a road trip, refusing along the way to provide any familial details for the kid's family-tree project. The past, however, isn't easily hidden or escaped, and following another relative's fire-and-impalement passing, the monkey reappears, carrying out its mission with its usual rat-a-tat-tat malevolence.

If Perkins' Longlegs was a film about twisted mothers, The Monkey is a saga about "deadbeat" dads and their kids' efforts to deal with their failings. It's also about the bitterness, resentment, and hate often shared between brothers, with Hal striving to keep Petey safe from their clan's curse at the same time that Bill gets back in touch after years of radio silence.

Fiendish Grand Guignol mayhem is the destiny of these characters, all of whom are preyed upon by a monkey that Hal and Bill agree isn't a "toy" but, instead, "evil" and "the Devil." Perkins never underlines whether the inorganic primate is the embodiment of Hal and Bill's hang-ups, Death itself -- taking out whomever it wants without ostensible rhyme or reason -- or some combination of the two. Yet via the sort of expert visual framing that's become one of his trademarks, he does make it a memorably macabre agent of destruction.

The Monkey is a sick joke and it gets more hideously funny as it approaches Hal and Bill's final confrontation with each other and the drumming curio they can't discard or destroy. In dual roles, James is just the right amount of cartoonish, and if O'Brien's performance is the film's nominal weak link -- his sarcastic frustration with his weirdo dad failing to generate real laughs -- it's not enough to tarnish the action's lunacy.

With his latest, Perkins shouts out to more than a few illustrious predecessors (including, in at least one striking shot, his dad Anthony's legendary Psycho), honors King's original, and warps and reshapes everything into a highly personal nightmare of growing up in the shadow of paternal abandonment. In the process, he reconfirms his status as one of genre cinema's most unnervingly inventive directors, embracing, tweaking, and upending formulas with imaginative insanity.