Gabe Reviews Horror

Twelve More Slays of Christmas #2 - Christmas Evil (1980) Watch it here on Tubi! Christmas Evil is a film about a foreman of a toy factory named Harry, who has a complicated relationship with Christmas. When he was a child, he learned that Santa Claus wasn't real by watching a (presumably) lewd encounter between his parents while his father was dressed as Santa, and ever since then he has been obsessed with becoming- or at least acting as- Santa Claus. He's watching the local children and keeping tabs on which ones are naughty or nice, he's making his own high-quality Santa costume- he's even taking toys from his workplace and delivering them to local orphans. But when some people push him just a bit too hard, he pushes back- and Harry ends up putting himself on the Naughty List. I'll get this right out here: this was a fairly slow and dull movie. The first half moves at a glacial pace (no pun intended) and even once the action gets going, it still goes on for way l...

Twelve More Slays of Christmas #1 - Black Christmas (2019) [It does not appear that this movie is streaming for free anywhere; however, it can be found with a subscription on Hulu and... Disney+? Is that right?] Last year I watched both the original Black Christmas, as well as the 2006 remake- and if you recall (you can go back and read those reviews right now, I'll wait) I liked the original but the remake seemed to misunderstand everything that made the original good. So, only 13 years later, they decided to remake it again , so how does it stand up? Let's find out. (Fair warning, I'm going to be spoiling this movie. That usually means I don't think you should watch it.) Black Christmas (2019) follows a group of sorority girls staying on-campus over Christmas break, who get beset upon by one or more murderers. While that sounds similar to the other two, that's literally where the similarities end- instead of being a grounded (or even larger-than-life) story about ...

Ho ho ho, Merry Christmastime everyone! Just when I thought I was sick of holiday-themed horror films, I decided to shove twelve more down my throat! There was a positive-enough response to last year's Twelve Slays of Christmas that I felt it only appropriate to go ahead and to Twelve More Slays of Christmas. So here we are! Just a note: I may decide otherwise in eleven months but I'm pretty sure this is the last time I'll be doing twelve Christmas-themed horror films in December. There's still a huge list of them on Wikipedia , so like, it's definitely possible  to keep doing it, but the problem is that I basically already watched all of the ones I knew or cared about last year. (Most of the ones last year were hand-picked by me, specifically because I had already seen them and wanted to share them with others.) This time around, though, I was sifting exclusively through movies I'd never even heard of, so with one or two exceptions I knew nothing about any of t...

October 2025 Holiday Horror Review #31 - Y2K (2024) [Unfortunately this movie does not appear to be streaming anywhere for free, but it is included in several subscriptions on various platforms.] Happy Halloween, everyone! In retrospect I should have watched this movie at the start of the month; of all of the New Year's-themed movies I've seen this is the only one that spends the majority of its runtime actually on New Year's Day rather than Eve. But whatever, you live and you learn (unless you get killed by a Tamagotchi). Y2K starts off on the last day of 1999, right on the cusp of the year 2000- the day when (as people thought at the time) an unexpected programming error was likely to disrupt computers all over the world, potentially resulting in the fall of mankind. (As you have probably guessed by now, in real life we got through it with little to no issue, but the characters in this film are not quite so lucky.) Once the clock strikes midnight, technology everywhere st...

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...