Gabe Reviews Horror

October 2026 Horror Reviews #21 - Friday the 13th: The Final Chapter (1984) Watch it here on PlutoTV! Friday the 13th: The Final Chapter is the fourth of twelve movies in the Friday the 13th franchise, and marks a big turning point in the series (which will become relevant in the next couple entries, but I do have some things to say about it in this review). Like Part III, this movie begins pretty much immediately where the last one left off, with the hulking killer Jason waking up in the county morgue, killing a couple people, and then escaping. Meanwhile, a group of college students are heading out to a rented lakehouse near Crystal Lake, and befriend their neighbor Trish and her little brother Tommy. They throw a party, and wouldn't you know it- Jason shows up, as does Rob, a man seeking revenge after the death of his sister back in Part 2. Will this saga come to a close, with Jason's death at the hands of an unexpected hero? Or will they manage to find several more movies a...

October 2026 Horror Reviews #20 - Friday the 13th: Part III (1982) Watch it here on PlutoTV! Friday the 13th: Part III is the THREE-DIMENSIONAL third entry in the franchise revolving around Crystal Lake and the Voorhees family. It picks up (ostensibly) immediately after Part 2, but gives no resolution to any of those characters (apart from just slapping six full minutes of the previous movie into the beginning of this one). This one follows an entirely new group of teens going out to the Crystal Lake area, centering mostly around a woman named Chris, whose family owns a farm by the lake. But Chris hasn't been back in a long time, after she was "attacked" (she was clearly sexually assaulted, but the movie skirts around saying it directly) by a physically deformed stranger. Well, it turns out that stranger is named Jason Voorhees, and he's back to kill everyone he comes across, as is his wont. I've heard a lot of people say this is their favorite Friday film, and fr...

October 2026 Horror Reviews #19 - Friday the 13th: Part 2 (1981) Watch it here on PlutoTV!   Another franchise has been born! Friday the 13th: Part 2 picks up with Alice, the protagonist of the previous film, being murdered by an unseen assailant, apparently as revenge for killing Pamela Voorhees. We then cut over to a new group of prospective camp counselors traveling to the Crystal Lake area, this time to take part in a counselor training program. (Was that a real thing? I digress.) Once everyone has arrived, they're told a tale about Jason, the boy who drowned many years ago, and his mother, who took revenge. But rumors say Jason didn't actually die, and he's still out there- more monster than man- and he's going to kill anyone who goes near his home. (Or he might take a bus to wherever Alice was living, I'm not sure.) This is a very strange sequel, for a very strange series when you really think about it. We've now established, as early as the second movie, ...

October 2024 Horror Reviews #18 - Friday the 13th (1980) Watch it here on PlutoTV! Friday the 13th began life as a cheap knockoff of Halloween, which released two years previous. But over the years, as it grew and gained popularity, it truly became a tent pole for the entire genre- I honestly wonder what the horror landscape would look like if it weren't for this series. I'm not sure why I went this long without reviewing them (except for Jason Goes to Hell and Jason X, which I reviewed many years ago for some reason), but here we are! I first saw Friday the 13th in 2005 or 2006, after my wife and I started up a weekly horror movie night with our friends. I wanted to start off on a good note (and see a movie I had never really been exposed to growing up), so this was the first one we watched at our first gathering. It follows a group of teenagers who have been hired to help fix up and run a summer camp that's been out of commission for many years (after some suspicious deat...

October 2026 Horror Reviews #17 - Paranormal Activity: Next of Kin (2021) Paranormal Activity: Next of Kin is a direct-to-streaming entry in the series, that was made six years after The Ghost Dimension. It follows a girl named Margot who was abandoned by her mother as a baby, after she discovers her closest living relatives are members of an Amish community. With camera help from her friend Chris and an audio engineer they met online, they start making a documentary about the community her mother came from- but they quickly learn that this community has dark secrets, and connections to the occult. The first thing I should mention about this movie: as far as I can tell, it has no in-universe connection to the rest of the series. (I was looking pretty hard for any sort of easter egg that mentions any of the lore from other Paranormal Activity movies, and found nothing.) Not only that, but this movie seems to be found footage pretty much in name only- a lot of the movie is filmed with a ...

October 2026 Horror Reviews #16 - Paranormal Activity: The Ghost Dimension (2015) Paranormal Activity: The Ghost Dimension follows a new family living in an absurdly massive house, who discover a box of junk in their garage that contains a bunch of VHS tapes as well as an old video camera. The tapes turn out to have belonged to Katie and Kristi's family from Paranormal Activity 3 (including the tape that ostensibly contained that entire movie on it), and the house they are living in turns out to have been built on the land where Katie & Kristi lived when they were kids (before their house burned down after the events of that movie). The old video camera seems to be able to pick up ghosts and paranormal phenomena on film, which is convenient because the ghost/demon/whatever Toby shows up to befriend and eventually kidnap the family's daughter, Leila. Yadda yadda yadda, more of the same. Needless to say, I did not care for this movie. Like, at all. The quality of the writing ...