To say you don’t like horror movies invites at the very least some qualification. It’s a big and popular genre. I have no use for those flicks that rely almost solely on sadistic violence, blood and gore.

Life’s too short. But there are less lazy sub-genres that get the job done. Best are the cerebral ones that eschew all that messy stuff and instead get inside your head and work from there. And a third type is the dark comedy slasher. Like the Final Destination franchise, in which a given group of people who have by chance cheated Death (missed a doomed flight, say) are slowly hunted down by some unseen evil and dispatched through highly creative Rube Goldberg machinations.

This one falls into the latter category. Osgood Perkins (Longlegs) starts with a straightforward short story by Stephen King and then weaves in a whole lot of very dark humor of his own. A pair of twins, one good and one evil, inherits one of those already creepy drum-banging wind-up monkey toys that happens to be murderously cursed. (Theo James brings off the Jekyll-Hyte twins capably but without great distinction.) The deal is that every time it’s wound up, someone dies, usually in an inventively gruesome
fashion. No motive is ever offered.

So, who’s going to like a movie with this high an ick-factor? You know who you are. It’s not particularly scary, but it’s well made and perhaps good for a cringy-fun date night. Being very drunk will probably help. (98 min)

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