Main cast: Jason Armstrong (Kool Kid), Jamieson Boulanger (Lewis), Robbie Budd (Kingpin), Christopher Redman (Rockman), and John Kassir (The Crypt Keeper)
Director: Laura Shepherd

Quick, guess which popular trope that Gorilla’s Paw is based on! That’s right, every horror anthology needs to have an episode that echoes WW Jacobs’s The Monkey’s Paw even at the most superficial “be careful what you wish for” level, for some reason, perhaps because if they didn’t, the soul of WW Jacobs himself will emerge from the mists and jump-scares everyone to death.

Fatty Lewis really wants to belong to the cool kids, but these cool kids—who call themselves things like Kingpin, Kool Kid, and Rockman—have nothing but disdain for him. The only time they pay him any heed is when they feel like bullying him or ordering him around to do things for them.

Still, things may be looking up for the fatty when he discovers a store, The Crypt of Curios, that is filled with mysterious and possibly magical goodies. He is taken with a gorilla’s paw, said to be able to grant wishes, and is dared by the other three to steal it. So he does, much to the glee of the storekeeper…

While I do understand a kid’s pathological need to belong to a clique, it’s hard for me to sympathize with Lewis because he really comes off as a pathetic doormat that keeps coming back for more punishment. What little sympathy I have for him evaporates completely when he starts using the paw to grant the wishes of those three losers. Lewis is dumb; let’s just write him off as a Darwinian accident.

Sure, in the end he decides he’s better off being all by himself than to be part of the “club”, but seriously? This fellow has a gorilla’s paw that works, and he squanders all those wishes in order to learn a lesson about himself? Please just put him down, because this fatty is a waste of genetic material.