A cymbalic film.

Today's Screaming Streaming is one that I was delighted to see online. It's a guilty pleasure and in a moment you'll see why I have a special connection with it.

Today's film is THE DEVIL'S GIFT.

And here is that very gift on YouTube.

Wow, where do I begin? How about the basic plot with a good picture to go with it?

This ugly fella is the star of our show. An old woman contacts the dead through a ouija board but an evil spirit comes through and causes lightning to strike her house, killing her. This little monkey survives the ordeal and doesn't burn with the house.

Later, a little boy named Michael receives the monkey as a birthday present from his dad's girlfriend, Susan. Susan bought it from an antique store shortly before.

What kind of kid wouldn't love a hideously ugly abomination like that? Anyways, a series of unfortunate accidents begin to happen, with houseplants and pets dying.

Michael's father brings in a fortune teller that informs him that evil has most likely possessed an object in the house. He figures out it's the monkey since every death occurs after the guy clashes his cymbals, which it does by itself.

So it's now a matter of man against monkey! So there you have it.

This movie is really, really dumb. It's serious cheese. But my natural fondness for cymbal monkeys is why I like the film. It's a rare movie that uses the ugly toy as the main instrument of evil. Later, this movie was edited and re-cut with another movie and repackaged as Merlin's Shop of Mystical Wonders, which got the MST3K treatment along the way. So you know what kind of a movie you're about to see.

Just a silly movie that happens to have similarities to the Stephen King story, The Monkey. BANG BANG!