Gabe Reviews Horror

October 2026 Horror Reviews #26 - Freddy vs. Jason (2003) After yesterday's review of Friday the 13th Part VIII: Jason Takes Manhattan, I'm skipping the next two Friday movies (Jason Goes To Hell: The Final Friday and Jason X) because I've already reviewed those, several years ago. For anyone who might be following along (but unwilling to read those two reviews), I'll give a quick summary: in Jason Goes to Hell, Jason does not go to hell, he is instead revealed to be a body-hopping magic slug and he's trying to find a blood relative of his original body for some reason, until the final scene when he gets stabbed by a magic dagger and then Freddy Krueger's glove inexplicably pulls Jason's mask into the ground. And in Jason X, we skip forward several hundred years, when Jason's cryogenically frozen body gets taken to a space research station, and his body gets rebuilt by nanobots to make him a half-mechanical super soldier just in time for a fight scene wi...

October 2026 Horror Reviews #25 - Friday the 13th Part VIII: Jason Takes Manhattan (1989) Watch it here on PlutoTV! The misleadingly-titled Friday the 13th Part VIII: Jason Takes Manhattan follows a group of high school seniors taking a "cruise" from the Crystal Lake area (presumably in New Jersey) to Manhattan, as part of an end-of-year trip before graduation. But wouldn't you know it, Jason Voorhees has been reawakened once again, and for some reason he decides to hitch a ride on the "cruise ship" (that looks more like a naval vessel than an actual cruise ship) so he can wreak havoc on these unsuspecting teens. Eventually, once two-thirds of the movie have passed, Jason (and the surviving protagonists) arrive in Manhattan, at which point Jason proceeds to "take" it (if you can call it that, he kills like four people) before getting swept up in a wave of toxic sewer sludge that (perhaps metaphorically) turns him back into a living child. Or something....

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...