Gabe Reviews Horror

October 2024 Horror Origins Review #5 - Terror Toons 2 (2007) Watch it here on YouTube! While I saw the first Terror Toons around 2005 or so, it was quite some time (maybe ten years later?) before I ever saw the second. I'll get this right out at the top: Terror Toons 2 feels very much like a remake of Terror Toons 1, whether that was intended or not. (The plot is, beat-for-beat, identical.) All of the individual parts are better this time around- the budget is clearly higher, the special effects are better, there's a bigger and more established cast of characters, and it's obvious that more time was spent making this one than the weekend or whatever it took to make the first one. However, I can't honestly say the end result is any better as a whole. The movie starts off with a "cartoon" segment involving the two main antagonists (much like the start of the first film)- this time, it's intended to be a monster-ified version of Hansel and Gretel. We then ar

October 2024 Horror Origins Review #4 - Terror Toons (2002) Watch it here on YouTube! Here we are- the movie that started it all (according to me, anyway). And I'm covering it on my anniversary! Back in 2005, my then-girlfriend Lisa and I were on a date, and decided to go to the Blockbuster down the street from my house (which later became a Honeybaked Ham store, and is now just a deli) to pick out a movie to watch. The topic of horror films came up, and both of us admitted that we gravitated toward the low-budget, "bad" films that you can laugh at to hide the fact that you're getting scared. So when we were walking down the aisles and I saw this one sitting on the shelf- I'd seen the DVD box plenty of times, and always wondered- it was a foregone conclusion. Fast forward an hour and fifteen minutes and we'd just finished the most ridiculous, low-budget schlock either of us had ever seen, and would see for a long time. That's the story of the first time we

October 2024 Horror Origins Review #3 - Within the Woods (2005) Watch it here on EffedUpMovies.com! The third Camp Blood movie, and the final one I'll be covering this month. (No, this isn't the Sam Raimi short film "Within the Woods" that eventually became The Evil Dead- this is an entirely different movie with the same name.) It seems clear that the creator of this series really, really liked the name "Within the Woods"; it was the name of the "movie" being "made" in Camp Blood 2 about the events of Camp Blood 1. If CB2 had gone differently (read: actually had a coherent storyline) I think it would have been really clever to have this movie actually be the movie they were trying to make (kind of like if the Scream series included one of the Stab films as an actual film you could go see) but instead we get just another rehash of the same plot, but with a few more years' worth of pop culture and fashion sprinkled on top. Within the Wo

October 2024 Horror Origins Review #2 - Camp Blood 2 (2000) Watch it here on EffedUpMovies.com! Although Camp Blood was (possibly) the first bad horror movie Lisa and I watched together in 2005, it wasn't until 2010 or so that we learned it had multiple sequels. (At that time, it had only two- Camp Blood 2 and a movie called Within the Woods- so we bought a DVD advertising itself as the "Camp Blood Trilogy". Fast forward to the 2020s, and I come to find out there's more than a dozen of these things. Unfortunately I won't be covering anything beyond the "trilogy", but hey, maybe some day.) I honestly don't remember watching Camp Blood 2 more than once or twice, so I don't quite have as much of a nostalgic connection to this one. But boy, there was still some fun to be had! Camp Blood 2 picks up a year after the first film, with Tricia still as a mental patient and still suspected of killing nine people in Camp Blackwood. For some reason, the menta

October 2024 Horror Origins Review #1 - Camp Blood (2000) Watch it here on EffedUpMovies.com! Here we are, folks! Possibly the movie that started it all. When my wife Lisa and I first started dating, we began a weekly tradition of watching bad horror movies that persisted for several years. She and I disagree about which movie was our first- she says it was Camp Blood, I say it was Terror Toons. Out of respect for her (and because Terror Toons doesn't seem to be available online anymore and my physical copy hasn't arrived yet) I'm putting Camp Blood first. Camp Blood follows a group of young adults who go on a camping trip out to some wilderness area, where a crazy local tells them an urban legend of a clown-masked killer. When they reach their destination (Camp Blackwood, but the sign has been painted over to say "Camp Blood"), they meet their guide, an outdoorswoman named Harris, who tells them the origin of this mysterious clown-masked killer: 20 years ago, som

It's that time again! First and foremost, I want to mention that this is going to be the first October since I started this blog, so let me thank everyone who's come here and followed some or all of my reviews this year. (There's a few of you out there, and that's awesome!) I started this blog specifically so my wife would have somewhere to read my reviews without having to search through my Facebook, but it's definitely gotten some traffic since I started it so thank you for coming. Now, story time! I never really watched many horror films when I was young, though I did see bits and pieces of a few whenever my older siblings rented one and I was able to peek into the living room. I was always intrigued by the idea of horror, and perusing the horror aisle at our local Blockbuster Video always gave me the chills from the creepy box art. When my wife and I first started dating back in 2005, one day we decided to go to the rental place and pick out a horror movie- but