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Thursday, June 05, 2025

Short Film: The Dark Gift - The Kevin Derrick Gentry Story


According to the Amazon page a 2023 film, directed by Ashei Khan and coming in at 34 minutes long, this is a bit of a mixed bag. Sometimes a tad experimental, sometimes with over-powered vampires, self-contradictory in places with a mixed bag of acting. But there is definitely a kernel here to work with.

After some level of voiceover with Vlad Ţepeş imagery (and bats) the film starts proper. Regarding a vampire called Kevin Derrick Gentry (himself), who we see very little of to be honest, the story begins with women waking naked on a bed unsure how they got there but we can see the bite marks on their necks and they all have a vague memory of being with Gentry. A woman, Sasha (Mushirah Hollins), comes in and explains that she is there to help with their transition.

Mushirah Hollins as Sasha

There is some protesting at that, one has a husband and another a fiancé but Sasha warns them to stay away from family and that a hunger is going to come over them. She takes them out (it is day but snowy – we don’t get a definitive on the daylight rule) and shows them how easy it is to mesmerise a person and make him (or her) their slave – she has a guy give her a watch, his wallet and then go with her to feed her. They are taken to a bar to practice.

bloodied

We get an aspect of the husband and fiancé meeting each other as they search for their vanished partners and a discovery that Gentry has (what sounds like) a motivational website that actually reveals his nature. I said there were contradictions and Sasha indicates that they (her and Gentry) are original vampires and he suggests he is 1000 years old but then we see a scene (albeit not well explained in a narrative sense) that seems to show Gentry being turned in 1819. I was particularly taken by the use of spoken word and music in the soundscape built for the film.

At the time of writing there was no IMDb page.

On Demand @ Amazon US

On Demand @ Amazon UK

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