Main cast: Abe Vigoda (Dolan), John Bolger (William), Brad Greenquist (Kirby), and Zach Overton (Jeffrey McGregor)
Director: Jeffrey Wolf

Two men—Dolan and Kirby—kidnapped a wisecracking kid Jeffrey McGregor for ransom.

At first, it seems like the most troubling thing about this whole gig for the men is the kid having perpetual sarcasm that misses the mark more often than not. Then he befriends a… monster-man thing? Let’s just call it the Creature, which looks like an extra that accidentally roamed out of a Lucio Fulci movie.

The men shot the Creature and leave it for dead in the basement where they kept Jeffrey, and this lets the two become BFFs. Will the Creature and the brat be able to work together and free themselves?

Well, The Gift tries, I’d give it that at least. It presents a corny tale of bonding between what seems like a telepathic ape-man and an unrealistically precocious brat, only to try to pull the rug off the viewer with a twist that, given the length of this episode, feels more like a deliberate ass-pull than anything else.

I mean, at the surface, yes, the twist is a bummer, but thinking about it and re-watching the episode a few times to see if I can make more sense of this twist only makes me more frustrated with it.  This is because the run time prevents the twist from being more fully fleshed out and introduced in a better paced manner. It just happens and that’s it, the end.

Still, that aside, this episode is a pretty corny and even hackneyed kid and monster bonding movie that was big in family friendly channels in the 1980s and 1990s, completely with pretty cringe-inducing acting from a child actor. It’s really not my cup of tea; I’m too cynical to appreciate such wholesome kind of grimace-prompting fare.

Hence, even if the twist had been done better, I suspect I’d still be shuddering through this episode quite a bit!