The Devil’s Gift

There is a little toy monkey that becomes possessed. A young boy is given the monkey as a birthday gift. The monkey begins to systematically kill his way up the family food chain. Only Dad knows what’s going on. Only he can stop the evil of The Devil’s Gift.

The Devil’s Gift is a 90-minute movie and that is the entire plot. This would have made a decent half-hour or hour-long Twilight Zone episode. At its current length, all I can do is applaud the efforts of all involved. The film never lost me but it rarely grabbed me. It moves glacially from event to event. And I think the director knew it because he edited the film down quite a bit to make it the second half of his film Merlin’s Shop Of Mystical Wonders, with Ernest Borgnine.

The whole thing looks a lot like an after school special that never really found the issue it was after. There is a widowed dad raising a son in a lovely Don Dohler-esque suburb. He has a best friend next door who he pals around with all the time. Dad talks to his mother regularly and has a nice girlfriend. It all seems like it’s waiting for alcoholism or some such malady to rear its head. But instead, we get a possessed monkey toy.

Because it has that after school special feel and it never goes beyond PG scares, I believe my mother might like this movie. She likes to be scared but not too much. She’d have a lot to say about this film. She’d focus on how sweet the little boy is and the meanness of the monkey toy. Personally, I feel like I should say more, but my mind keeps spinning in circles. Try as I might, I have no strong opinions about The Devil’s Gift either way. I can see that it’s slow and goes on for far too long, but a part of me really liked it. However, I’m not sure I can use that criteria to send someone after a movie. Not when The Last Slumber Party remains unwatched by at least one person.