Gabe Reviews Horror

This review was originally written in October 2021. October 2021 Horror Movie Review #17- Resident Evil: Afterlife Ah, another Resident Evil film, another movie that cares so little about its characters. This one at least has the benefit of having a setting and story that are actually kind of interesting- I like the idea of a safe haven being broadcast that turns out to actually be a trap set by the people who created the zombies, and the prison is actually pretty cool of a location (even if it's absurd how many torches these people keep lit, I mean come on people, you're using like twenty times as many torches as you have people). But again, all of the characters are just generic-person-with-generic-wardrobe and I'm expected to not only tell them apart, but also care about them. The only character I cared remotely about was Chris Redfield (again, another holdover from the games but with no explanation of why he's here or what his place is in this story, he's just..

This review was originally written in October 2021. October 2021 Horror Movie Review #16- Resident Evil: Extinction (2007) Filmmakers everywhere, I want you to repeat after me:  Being   British   Doesn't   Make   Someone   Scary. It wasn't true in the first one, and it certainly isn't true now. After the first film dealt with the inciting incident of the zombie apocalypse, and then the second dealt with the immediate aftermath and development of that apocalypse, this one decided to just go ahead and skip... well, literally everything interesting about dealing with a zombie apocalypse, as well as skipping forward several years to the point where everyone is out in the desert and everyone is dirty (except for the bad guys, who are inexplicably still wearing suits and ties despite the breakdown of society). I honestly don't know if that alone is a problem, or if several movies I've watched this month just do it really poorly? This one also has the ever-growing problem

This review was originally written in October 2021. October 2021 Horror Movie Review #15- Resident Evil: Apocalypse (2004) Normally, I would try not to compare a movie to the game it was based on- I would try to just judge it on its own merits, provided the film itself was trying to be judged as such. When the first movie came out, I understood that it wasn't trying to recreate the exact plot and characters of the game: it was instead trying to create a new story that involved a lot of the same elements as the game, that evoked the experience of the game without actually BEING the game. (Whether it accomplished this is up for debate.) The most noteworthy part being that the movie did not involve any of the main characters- no Chris Redfield, no Jill Valentine, not even an Albert Wesker to be seen. Instead we had Milla Jovovich's Alice character (who I swear never said her actual name in the movie; maybe I just always missed it but both today and when I watched this movie back i

This review was originally written in October 2021. October 2021 Horror Movie Review #14- Resident Evil (2002) I saw this movie back when it came out; I also saw the sequel, but I haven't seen any others, nor have I revisited the ones I have seen, until today. I remember being disappointed by this movie originally, as it didn't feel very close to the source material (I've always been a big fan of the video game series) but I'm trying to view the movies as a different beast entirely. We'll see if that continues as I go on with each entry. I think this movie does a lot of good stuff- the beginning five minutes and the ending five minutes are incredibly evocative, incredibly interesting, and I really like where they were going. Give me an amnesiac who wakes up in a spooky mansion any day, or someone who wakes up on a hospital bed and the entire world around them is destroyed! I even liked the part where the employees in the facility at the beginning were all dealing wi

This review was originally written in October 2021. October 2021 Horror Movie Review #13- Mulva: Zombie Ass Kicker (2001) Alright... a few disclaimers before I really get into this. First, I've seen this movie before, many many times. I've shown it to people many many times. I probably didn't need to watch it again, since I know it so well. Also, the two hardest parts of this review are going to be deciding how insulting I want to be (and who I want those insults to be aimed at), and whether my personal rating system allows for a zero, or if one is the lowest it can go. I'll waste no more time: this is a bad movie. Like, it's terrible. It's so bad it seriously makes me question the integrity of literally every person involved in making it. The reason I've shown this movie to so many people is that for many years, it was the prime example of how bad a movie can be while still being called a movie (edging out Carnage: The Legend of Quiltface for worst movie I

This review was originally written in October 2021. October 2021 Horror Movie Review #12- Shaun of the Dead (2004) So obviously, this movie was a delight. I had definitely seen it before, but it was a long time ago- it's especially odd because I love horror and I've seen the other two Cornetto movies a million times, so why hadn't I ever revisited this one? I don't know, your guess is as good as mine. But now that I've watched Night, Dawn, Day, Land, Diary, Survival, Army, and Return 1-3, I have way more context for these types of movies than I did back in 2004. And this movie totally still holds up! I do think it's worthwhile to mention that this is (arguably) a romantic comedy and not a horror movie, as the main driving force of the film is Shaun's relationships with his girlfriend, his mother, and his roommate. The zombie stuff is a big part of it too, but it's a solid thirty minutes before the protagonists directly encounter a zombie, so if it is jus

This review was originally written in October 2021. October 2021 Horror Movie Review #11- Army of the Dead (2021) Holy crap. Ho lee crap. You're telling me I watched Land of the Dead, Diary of the Dead, and Survival of the Dead- when I could have been watching THIS? I don't want to spoil my opinion completely just yet, but if I get to the end of this review and I haven't convinced myself to give this film an 11/10, I'm going to be mad at myself. This movie was INCREDIBLE. I tried putting it on a few weeks ago while I was doing some other stuff around the house, and I dunno what was wrong with me, but it just didn't grab me at all. (I think part of it was that I didn't know if this was part of an ongoing series, so after a few minutes I didn't know who I was or wasn't supposed to know, I didn't pay attention to the setting so I wasn't sure if I was plopped in the middle of something- really, it came down to me just not paying attention and sufferi

This review was originally written in October 2021. October 2021 Horror Movie Review #10- Survival of the Dead (2009) Remember a couple days ago when I complained that Land of the Dead was boring? Hoo boy, what a sweet summer child I was. Land was boring, Survival is boooooooring. I went through this entire movie without caring AT ALL about ANY of the characters. The closest I came to caring whatsoever was for the "main character" (if he can even be called that) of Sarge, simply because he was the least caught up in his own nonsense. I'm a little bit confused as to why they thought it important to tie him in to the previous movie (maybe they just happened to cast him in this movie after he played the super-duper important role of "army guy who shows up for ten seconds and tells them to turn off the camera" in Diary, but the idea that they took that nothing-character and spun him off into his own film about a bunch of rednecks arguing over who-knows-what is just

This review was originally written in October 2021. October 2021 Horror Movie Review #9- Diary of the Dead (2007) Okay, real talk for a moment: What are the odds that this was made to be intentionally bad? Because it's bad. It's REALLY bad. It's ticking every single box for bad horror cliches, bad found-footage cliches, and just bad movie cliches. It's amateurish in every way, from the writing to the acting to the cinematography to the basic freaking logistics of one scene leading into another, everything about this movie feels like it was made by someone making their first movie after watching The Blair Witch Project and not understanding what makes it good. BUT IT WAS WRITTEN AND DIRECTED BY GEORGE ROMERO, so either he's had a serious decline in ability since Day of the Dead (which wouldn't surprise me, with how lackluster Land was), or he was intentionally trying to lampoon found-footage horror by making the worst one he possibly could. I'll get this rig

This review was originally written in October 2021. October 2021 Horror Movie Review #8- Land of the Dead (2005) I... did not like this movie. This was probably the most uninteresting and boring movie that I've watched this month, and I'm including the original Night of the Living Dead. At one point I asked myself, "How did they manage to make a zombie movie this boring?" and the answer was, of course, obvious: Just take out the zombies. Because really, this isn't a zombie movie. Yes there's the backdrop of a zombie apocalypse, and there's a couple plot points that involve zombies, but by and large, for the majority of its runtime, this is a movie about class warfare in a post-society setting. It's a story about the fat cats living in luxury while the working class keep everything running, and the people who get beaten down and dream about seeing how the other half lives. You could replace "zombie apocalypse" with any kind of post-catastrophe

This review was originally written in October 2021. October 2021 Horror Movie Review #7- Dawn of the Dead (2004) Hey, y'all remember when everyone unanimously stood up and said, "Let's make all of our movies GREEN"? Well, it was certainly in full swing in 2004! It's like they made an entire movie, that looked like any other movie, and then just made 100% of the visible colors into a shade of green. Seriously, it's all green. All of it. Even the parts that don't look green are still green. In all seriousness though, I had to open this up with a joke about the green color because otherwise this was a fantastic movie with very little to complain about. We've gotten into the modern era of big-budget blockbuster horror films, so this film has plenty of action, a quick pace to keep it from getting stale, and loads of fully-realized characters that all pull their weight, narratively speaking. I saw this movie back when it first released (if I recall, my best

This review was originally written in October 2021. October 2021 Horror Movie Review #6- Return of the Living Dead III Alright, finally we've gotten a Return of the Living Dead sequel that neither has the exact same plot as the first one, nor uses the same actors in identical roles. I guess this movie has that going for it. However, it doesn't have much else. This film follows a bumbling government agency trying to find some way to harness/contain the power of the zombies they've created, and one of the higher-ups' idiot son who ruins everything. I'll just get this out there: I HATE Curt, the main character of this film, and his character arc makes me angry. From minute one he is causing problems everywhere he goes, hurting everyone around him, and at no point- no point whatsoever- does he get anything resembling a comeuppance. His girlfriend (of a couple months maximum) dies and he breaks into the ineptly-guarded army base to use this zombie-creating gas on her, pu

This review was originally written in October 2021. October 2021 Horror Movie Review #5- Return of the Living Dead II (1988) I am utterly baffled by this film. At first my reaction was "This really seems like the creators looked at The Return of the Living Dead, and just like... did that, again." However, the more I looked into it, I realized THAT IS EXACTLY WHAT THEY DID. The basic plot of the movie is the same as the previous film: the army improperly handled some chemicals that create zombies, and those chemicals get unleashed on an unsuspecting small town. Two bumbling jokers get infected and eventually turn to zombies, and in the meantime the chemicals seep into a nearby graveyard and cause the corpses to rise up. In the end, the army is contacted and they take care of the situation with lethal force. That alone makes it worth a raised eyebrow, but the whole time I was also thinking "Gosh, the two bumbling jokers that get slowly turned to zombies in the second movie

This review was originally written in October 2021. October 2021 Horror Movie Review #4- The Return of the Living Dead (1985) Hooooooly crap I was not expecting this film. I've read about how John Russo and George Romero decided to create two different sequels to Night of the Living Dead, with Romero creating Dawn of the Dead and Russo creating The Return of the Living Dead. After watching Dawn and Day and seeing how so much of modern zombie lore stems from them, I assumed this movie would be a similarly-paced, similarly-themed movie (just with different lore or rules or whatever). Boy was I wrong. Return is big, it's bombastic, it's fast-paced, and it's unabashedly silly. Where Dawn and Day had moments of quiet introspection, and really dealt with the ramifications of living in a world where humanity is slowly being eaten alive (literally) by a mindless untiring threat, Return has a bunch of teens dancing naked in a graveyard while skeletons pop up out of the ground an

This review was originally written in October 2021. October 2021 Horror Movie Review #3- Day of the Dead (1985) After having such a great time with Dawn of the Dead, I was certain there was going to be an immediate drop in quality. (After all, I've heard people reference Dawn of the Dead loads of times, and only heard this movie mentioned a couple times in my life. Though that's more than I can say about the next few movies....) However, I was pleasantly surprised with Day of the Dead! Just as how I was very happy with how much the previous movie dealt with the quietude and the introspection that comes from living in the midst of a zombie apocalypse, Day really shows how the prolonged calamity takes a toll on the survivors. I could tell all of the characters were barely hanging on, trying to make the best of the world they've got left, and the different ways their frustrations came out throughout the film really made them all feel like fully-realized characters. Granted, I

This review was originally written in October 2021. October 2021 Horror Movie #2- Dawn of the Dead Although I'd never seen this movie (I'd seen the 2004 remake, but I'll get to THAT in a few days) I definitely felt like I knew more about this one going in than the previous film, since this one really set a framework that a ton of other media would go on to copy for the next four decades. First things first: this was a HUGE improvement over Night of the Living Dead. Where Night was slow, quiet, and relatively plot-free, Dawn has lots of dialogue, plenty of characters, events after events after events, and explores so many different concepts (whereas Night was basically just one). But Dawn also had lots of quiet moments too- the runtime was almost double that of Night so there was plenty of time to develop the characters and add some introspection- and I was struck by how much I felt like the characters were all fully-realized, three-dimensional people. I don't know how m

This review was originally written in October 2021. October 2021 Movie Review #1- Night of the Living Dead (1968) Full disclosure: I have never seen any of the Living Dead movies before. Or any of the Dead movies, except for the 2004 remake of Dawn of the Dead. All I've seen are movies that parody it, mimic it, or reference it. I've heard quotes from this film all over the place, I've seen references, and I thought I had a pretty good idea what I was going to be seeing before I went in. However, I can't say it was what I expected! The first thing I want to say is that the beginning of this movie definitely got things going way faster than I thought it would. If you cut out the five minutes of a car driving (as is common in much older films, so they could get all of the credits out before the action started) there's something like two minutes of screen time before the first zombie shows up. It happened so fast, I thought it was a joke (as a modern movie would do, pla

Once more, I subjected myself to 31 horror films in 31 days! As usual, I considered not doing it in 2021 but as usual, I had several friends tell me they love reading my reviews so I went ahead. I didn't come up with a theme until literally halfway through October 1st, and it took some time to finalize a list (several of the films I originally wanted to cover weren't easily watchable so I had to swap them out) but in the end I decided that 2021 would be the year where I watch 31 zombie movies. (As it turned out, I'd only ever seen a small handful, and certainly none of the classics!) There was a brief period where I was traveling and so I couldn't watch the movies I had planned (hence why two of the movies are decidedly NOT zombie films) but overall I covered a huge portion of the spectrum of what a zombie film could be. (Also, I honestly don't think I realized that I had already reviewed Pontypool; as a result, this is a completely new review. Fair warning, there w

This review was originally written in October 2020. October Movie Review #31- Wes Craven's New Nightmare Happy Halloween, everyone! This was a fun month and I'm glad I got to watch these series in their entirety- I definitely feel like I missed a cultural phenomenon earlier in my life and now I'm as caught up as I can be. So thanks to everyone who followed along! I hope you had fun too. On to today's movie. Overall, I thought this movie had a lot of great ideas and there isn't really anything specific I can point to as being bad (except for a couple moments of special effects). However, ultimately I came out fairly lukewarm on it- I don't know if it's because the movie was lacking, or my horror fatigue from watching 31 movies in 31 days, or maybe I was just in a bad mood. I feel like it dragged a bit in the middle, and maybe near the end, but like I said there was a lot of good stuff in here too. I really liked the plot- Heather Langenkamp (the actress) is s

This review was originally written in October 2020. October Movie Review #30- Freddy's Dead: The Final Nightmare I'm surprised at how much I didn't hate this movie. Like, I can't really say I thought it was "good", and there's definitely a LOT of bad in there, and it's still intent on taking the series in a trajectory I don't care for, but the content that is in there isn't the worst, and it's competently done at least. (I was far less bored by this movie than I was by Freddy's Revenge, for example.) This movie had some sequences that I thought were pulled off really well. The bit at the beginning where John Doe wakes up from his falling-from-the-sky nightmare, and he goes to open the window only to realize that his house is also falling from the sky, was a great moment. (I'm a sucker for a dream-within-a-dream, what can I say?) There was also another dream where Carlos is unfolding a map and it just keeps unfolding and unfolding- t

This review was originally written in October 2020. October Movie Review #29- A Nightmare on Elm Street 5: The Dream Child This movie started out with a really good horror sequence, with Alice taking a shower and the shower starts filling up with water and it threatens to drown her. It was very well-shot, it felt very believable as a dream, and genuinely felt creepy. However, it went downhill very soon after and never really recovered. This movie seems to have completely lost sight of what this series was about or what made it good. The connection to previous entries is not even tenuous (I'll get to that in a moment), it forgets any rules it previously established (I'll get to that too) and it shoehorns in a bunch of canon that serves only to cheapen the series as a whole (you guessed it). Remember when this story was about a guy who was haunting the children of the people that killed him? Yeah, I remember that- it ended at a distinct point in the previous film. The only reason

This review was originally written in October 2020. October Movie Review #28- A Nightmare on Elm Street 4: The Dream Master In every way this movie felt like a tacked-on sequel to a series that was already finished. I can't really call it BAD, exactly, but it's a very bizarre movie with some really weird writing choices, and nothing about it is consistent from scene to scene. The characters are all really bland and annoying when they do stand out, and it was hard to feel excited about anything in the movie because I could never quite grasp how any of the mechanics worked. I liked the idea of a person being able to take on the traits and abilities of people that Freddy killed, but it felt like it was designed for a completely different movie and outside of a short action sequence at the end of this one it didn't even come into play in a meaningful way except to cue to the audience "It's okay, there will be stakes now". Also, the big climax comes from showing Fr

This review was originally written in October 2020. October Movie Review #27- A Nightmare on Elm Street 3: Dream Warriors I definitely remembered this one as being my favorite in the series, but in the days leading up to it I was afraid it wasn't going to live up to that memory for whatever reason. But I can confidently say that this might be the best movie I've seen all month- there were some other surprises, of course, but this one is just a home run from beginning to end. I don't know if I quite got across the feeling in the last two movies, but I think the dream sequences in this series are the best part, and every single one of them in this film are top-notch. They're creepy, they're tense, they twist your mind in ways you didn't expect, and the practical effects in every one are fantastic. This is the movie that has the marionette dream, the "Prime Time, Bitch" dream, Freddy's fingers turning into heroin needles, the kids using their dream po

This review was originally written in October 2020. October Movie Review #26- A Nightmare on Elm Street 2: Freddy's Revenge It's been a long time since I'd seen this movie, though I've heard plenty of podcasts and reviews of it in recent years. (I think Mark Patton recently released a documentary about his experience with the fandom surrounding this film?) The thing that struck me most was how... aggressively mediocre this movie is. Like, it has a lot of the charm and clout that the rest of the series has to keep it afloat, but when it came down to it I just didn't really feel nearly as captivated as I've been with most other movies I've watched this month. (It wasn't bad, so I couldn't even latch on to how angry it made me or whatever, it was just... lackluster.) Part of this might be my prior knowledge of how the rest of the series kind of forgets this one and divorces it from any of the rest of the canon, but aside from a few great effects and som

This review was originally written in October 2020. October Movie Review #25- A Nightmare on Elm Street I've seen most of this series at some point or another; the only one I can definitely say that I've never seen was Wes Craven's New Nightmare. However, for most of the entries in this series it's been about ten years since I watched them, so I was happy to make my way through them again. Starting us off is the original, and despite some flaws I think this movie still holds up today. The dialogue isn't great, much of the acting is pretty bad (Heather Langenkamp's in particular leaves a LOT to be desired), but the practical effects are top-notch, and the dream sequences in this movie are legit some of the most horrifying images ever put to film. (The body bag in the school hallway, the bladed glove in the bathtub- those sequences are just so mind-blowingly good that you have to give it credit.) I was also astounded by how quickly this film gets right into the go