Gabe Reviews Horror

October Holiday Horror Review #30 - Communion (1989) Watch it here on Tubi! The big list of holiday horror films on Wikipedia has this movie listed for Boxing Day (the day after Christmas); an important event in the story takes place on the day after Christmas, but it doesn't happen until about a third of the way into the film and it takes up very little runtime. (By comparison, a larger amount of time is spent on Halloween.) So I went about forty minutes of this thing wondering if this was another Arbor Demon situation, which it technically is not. After an entire month of mostly unfamiliar films I am thankful there was only one movie in my list that was completely devoid of holiday reference! Anyway, Communion stars Christopher Walken as Whitley Streiber, a writer who goes out to a rural cabin on vacation with his family when he has a strange experience. He is woken up in the middle of the night by bright lights, strange sounds, and nightmares- after some unexpected traumatic fl...

October 2025 Holiday Horror Review #29 - Hanukkah (2019) Watch it here on Tubi! Oh wow. This movie is... really something. I 100% guarantee the entire plot for this movie came about because the writer thought up a few Hanukkah-based puns and decided they could flesh out the script as they went. Hanukkah is about a group of friends who go out to a party and then get killed. That's really it. That's the whole plot. The IMDB plot synopsis suggests that they get killed for being "bad jews"- that is, for not following Judaic law- but there are several people who get killed in this movie for seemingly no reason, so although this is all clearly meant to be Hanukkah-themed, the theme doesn't really seem to go very far. This movie is a complete mess. Not just a mess, a boring mess. It is utterly incoherent from one scene to the next and despite feeling like I couldn't wait for it to end (not to mention I was watching this on Tubi where there are numerous commercial bre...

October 2025 Holiday Horror Review #28 - Thanksgiving (2023) [Unfortunately this movie does not appear to be streaming anywhere for free, but is included with many subscriptions to various services.] Thanksgiving is a story about a small town in Massachusetts that takes Thanksgiving very, very seriously. One year, a black Friday sale at the local Walmart stand-in turned fatal as several people were killed by the trampling crowd. A year later, a killer wearing a mask of John Carver, one of the pilgrims on the Mayflower, begins kidnapping and murdering the people responsible for the previous year's tragedy, and our protagonists- a group of high schoolers involved in provoking the incident- find themselves in the center of the killer's view. I love Thanksgiving (the holiday). It might be my favorite holiday, since I love to cook and I love to eat and I love having people over. This movie may not be perfect but it has a great cozy vibe to it, and I think it does a great job of main...

October 2025 Holiday Horror Review #27 - ThanksKilling (2010) Watch it here on Tubi! This movie begins with an extreme close-up shot of a woman's bare boob. We are then shown that this is apparently a pilgrim woman in the year 1621, but instead of the conservative outfit you would normally expect a pilgrim woman to be wearing, her chest is inexplicably bare so as to show off the aforementioned boob. She begins running through the woods in fear, and trips and falls. We then see a rubber puppet resembling the head of a turkey pop into frame and say "Nice tits, bitch!" before he kills her with an axe, cut to title card. Just so you know what kind of movie you're in for.  ThanksKilling is a low-budget, shot-on-video movie about a group of college kids who go on a camping trip for Thanksgiving break (as you do). Along the way one of them shares a folk tale about an evil turkey who rises from the dead every 505 years, and would you believe it, the evil turkey is back to tak...

October 2025 Holiday Horror Review #26 - The Purge: Election Year (2016) [I don't think this is streaming anywhere for free, but it is available for rental and purchase on most platforms.] So, I have an embarrassing story to tell: I tried watching this movie earlier today and I got about an hour in before I realized I wasn't watching The Purge: Election Year from 2016, I was just watching an average day's news coverage from 2025. (Ba-dum tiss.) Joking aside, I was really afraid this movie wasn't going to be enjoyable at all after the first portion of it focuses so much on the caricatures of how bad we thought politics could get ten years ago; it almost feels quaint at this point. But in the end I was pleasantly surprised, though I do have a lot to complain about. For the record, I don't think I've ever seen a Purge movie before; I checked to make sure whether this movie was a continuation of a previous movie and the consensus seemed to be that this series is mos...

October 2025 Holiday Horror Review #25 - Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark (2019) Watch it here on Tubi! Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark is a film adaptation of the children's horror book series of the same name. The film follows a group of four teens in a small town in 1968, who run afoul of some local bullies on Halloween night. After escaping the bullies, they decide to visit a local haunted house. According to legend, the young girl that lived in that house- Sarah Bellows- was a witch, who committed suicide after several children in town died mysteriously. In the house, the four protagonists find a book of scary stories written by Sarah, and to their horror more stories start getting magically penned in the book- and the stories start coming true. Can they stop Sarah's otherworldly presence before they all end up dead or missing like the children before? Or was Sarah a victim, just like everyone else? First things first: I'm not super familiar with the book series thi...