Gabe Reviews Horror

October 2026 Horror Reviews #24 - Friday the 13th Part VII: The New Blood (1988) Watch it here on PlutoTV! Allegedly starting in the writer's room with the premise "What if Jason fought Carrie", Friday the 13th Part VII: The New Blood takes place... some indeterminate amount of time after the previous movie (more on that in a bit) and follows Tina, a teenage girl with psychokinetic powers who accidentally killed her abusive father out on the edge of Crystal Lake when she was a young girl. Her psychiatrist, Dr. Crews, takes her and her mother back out to the lake house under the premise of helping Tina work through her guilt and trauma- but in truth, he's trying to force her into a heightened emotional state so that he can study her powers. While in one of these heightened emotional states, Tina accidentally awakens the trapped zombie Jason Voorhees, who escapes from the lake and goes on a killing spree. Will she be able to learn to use her powers and send Jason whence...

October 2026 Horror Reviews #23 - Friday the 13th Part VI: Jason Lives (1986) Watch it here on PlutoTV! Just when you thought the movie series was going to leave Jason behind and move on with Tommy Jarvis as the next slasher (as the last movie all but promised), this one goes right back to the familiar well! It starts off with Tommy and a friend going to dig up Jason's (now un-cremated) corpse to destroy it and give Tommy some closure after all these years. But since we all know that in the 1980s lightning was literally magic, Jason's decomposed corpse gets hit by a bolt of magic from the sky and what do you know, he's back and stronger than ever. Tommy tries to get help from the police, the sheriff's daughter gets really hot for him instead, and Jason kills a bunch of people before Tommy finds a way to trap him under the lake. And then the movie ends. I don't think this is a bad  movie exactly, but it really doesn't stand out much in my mind (which is crazy bec...

October 2026 Horror Reviews #22 - Friday the 13th: A New Beginning (1985) Watch it here on PlutoTV! Taking place five years after the apparent death of Jason Voorhees in The Final Chapter, Friday the 13th: A New Beginning starts with a sequence where little Tommy Jarvis sees a couple of cowboys (?) dig up Jason's corpse, and he comes back to life and kills them both. This is a dream sequence of course, because this series would never do something as silly as have someone dig up Jason and watch him reanimate as a zombie, right? (Right?) So we cut to the present, where Tommy is a troubled teen suffering from horrible PTSD and has been shuffled from mental institute to mental institute. In this film he arrives at Pinehurst, a halfway house where everyone hates everyone else. Shortly after he arrives, one of the teen residents kills another, and soon people all over the area start getting murdered in ways that seem shockingly similar to the modus operandi of the presumed-cremated Jason...

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, ...