Welcome to Late Night Retro Television Reviews, a feature where we review some of our favorite and least favorite shows of the past! On Wednesdays, I will be reviewing Monsters, which aired in syndication from 1988 to 1991. The entire series is streaming on YouTube.
This week, Abe Vigoda and Brad Greenquist star as two criminals who discover that they have an unexpected visitor in the basement of their cabin.
Episode 2.22 “The Gift”
(Dir by Jeffrey Wolf, originally aired on May 20th, 1990)
Two low-life criminals, Sid (Abe Vigoda) and his protege, Kirby (Brad Greenquist), show up at a cabin in the mountains. They have a rich kid named Jeffrey (Zach Overton) with them. They’ve kidnapped Jeffrey from his exclusive private school and they are planning to hold him until they get paid several million dollars.
Wanting to keep the kid comfortable, Sid tells Kirby to look in the basement for blankets. Kirby doesn’t find any blankets but he does a find a mysterious wolfman. Kirby shoots the wolfman twice but the wolfman survives. Kirby then chains up both Jeffrey and the Wolfman in the basement. Kirby thinks that it might be a good idea to forget about the whole kidnapping scheme but Sid is determined to get the money.
In the basement, Jeffrey discovers that the Wolfman can communicate with him through telepathy. The Wolfman introduces himself as being William (physically played by Carlos Lauchu, with a voice provided by John Michael Bolger). William explains that he’s not a monster. Instead, he’s just a man who, centuries ago, was granted magical abilities by an old traveler. Now, William is over 200 years old. He’s nearly immortal but he’s also lonely. Jeffrey is the first person who has been willing to listen to William in a long time.
Jeffrey and William bonding in the basement is undeniably sweet but Sid and Kirby are still holding Jeffrey hostage and, as time passes, it becomes obvious that they’re planning on killing both Jeffrey and his new friend. William explains that there is a way that he can ensure that Jeffrey will survive and that he’ll be able to defeat both Sid and Kirby. But it will involve Jeffrey making a huge sacrifice of his own….
This episode was fairly dull. When it started, I was hoping that the show would at least do a Ransom of Red Chief sort of thing and have Jeffrey turn out to be such a brat that absolutely no one would be willing to pay a cent to get him back. I think that would have been more interesting than what we ended up with, an episode in which Jeffrey awkwardly bonded with a werewolf who could only communicate through telepathy because moving his mouth probably would have made the actor’s mask look even cheaper than it already did. Abe Vigoda and Brad Greenquist were well-cast as the two criminals. Vigoda, in particular, did a good job of portraying Sid’s outwardly calm but still ruthless demeanor. Otherwise, this was a fairly dull episode that didn’t really do much with its potentially intriguing premise.
Through the Shattered Lens 