Gabe Reviews Horror

October 2025 Holiday Horror Review #31 - Y2K (2024) [Unfortunately this movie does not appear to be streaming anywhere for free, but it is included in several subscriptions on various platforms.] Happy Halloween, everyone! In retrospect I should have watched this movie at the start of the month; of all of the New Year's-themed movies I've seen this is the only one that spends the majority of its runtime actually on New Year's Day rather than Eve. But whatever, you live and you learn (unless you get killed by a Tamagotchi). Y2K starts off on the last day of 1999, right on the cusp of the year 2000- the day when (as people thought at the time) an unexpected programming error was likely to disrupt computers all over the world, potentially resulting in the fall of mankind. (As you have probably guessed by now, in real life we got through it with little to no issue, but the characters in this film are not quite so lucky.) Once the clock strikes midnight, technology everywhere st...

October Holiday Horror Review #30 - Communion (1989) Watch it here on Tubi! The big list of holiday horror films on Wikipedia has this movie listed for Boxing Day (the day after Christmas); an important event in the story takes place on the day after Christmas, but it doesn't happen until about a third of the way into the film and it takes up very little runtime. (By comparison, a larger amount of time is spent on Halloween.) So I went about forty minutes of this thing wondering if this was another Arbor Demon situation, which it technically is not. After an entire month of mostly unfamiliar films I am thankful there was only one movie in my list that was completely devoid of holiday reference! Anyway, Communion stars Christopher Walken as Whitley Streiber, a writer who goes out to a rural cabin on vacation with his family when he has a strange experience. He is woken up in the middle of the night by bright lights, strange sounds, and nightmares- after some unexpected traumatic fl...

October 2025 Holiday Horror Review #29 - Hanukkah (2019) Watch it here on Tubi! Oh wow. This movie is... really something. I 100% guarantee the entire plot for this movie came about because the writer thought up a few Hanukkah-based puns and decided they could flesh out the script as they went. Hanukkah is about a group of friends who go out to a party and then get killed. That's really it. That's the whole plot. The IMDB plot synopsis suggests that they get killed for being "bad jews"- that is, for not following Judaic law- but there are several people who get killed in this movie for seemingly no reason, so although this is all clearly meant to be Hanukkah-themed, the theme doesn't really seem to go very far. This movie is a complete mess. Not just a mess, a boring mess. It is utterly incoherent from one scene to the next and despite feeling like I couldn't wait for it to end (not to mention I was watching this on Tubi where there are numerous commercial bre...

October 2025 Holiday Horror Review #28 - Thanksgiving (2023) [Unfortunately this movie does not appear to be streaming anywhere for free, but is included with many subscriptions to various services.] Thanksgiving is a story about a small town in Massachusetts that takes Thanksgiving very, very seriously. One year, a black Friday sale at the local Walmart stand-in turned fatal as several people were killed by the trampling crowd. A year later, a killer wearing a mask of John Carver, one of the pilgrims on the Mayflower, begins kidnapping and murdering the people responsible for the previous year's tragedy, and our protagonists- a group of high schoolers involved in provoking the incident- find themselves in the center of the killer's view. I love Thanksgiving (the holiday). It might be my favorite holiday, since I love to cook and I love to eat and I love having people over. This movie may not be perfect but it has a great cozy vibe to it, and I think it does a great job of main...

October 2025 Holiday Horror Review #27 - ThanksKilling (2010) Watch it here on Tubi! This movie begins with an extreme close-up shot of a woman's bare boob. We are then shown that this is apparently a pilgrim woman in the year 1621, but instead of the conservative outfit you would normally expect a pilgrim woman to be wearing, her chest is inexplicably bare so as to show off the aforementioned boob. She begins running through the woods in fear, and trips and falls. We then see a rubber puppet resembling the head of a turkey pop into frame and say "Nice tits, bitch!" before he kills her with an axe, cut to title card. Just so you know what kind of movie you're in for.  ThanksKilling is a low-budget, shot-on-video movie about a group of college kids who go on a camping trip for Thanksgiving break (as you do). Along the way one of them shares a folk tale about an evil turkey who rises from the dead every 505 years, and would you believe it, the evil turkey is back to tak...

October 2025 Holiday Horror Review #26 - The Purge: Election Year (2016) [I don't think this is streaming anywhere for free, but it is available for rental and purchase on most platforms.] So, I have an embarrassing story to tell: I tried watching this movie earlier today and I got about an hour in before I realized I wasn't watching The Purge: Election Year from 2016, I was just watching an average day's news coverage from 2025. (Ba-dum tiss.) Joking aside, I was really afraid this movie wasn't going to be enjoyable at all after the first portion of it focuses so much on the caricatures of how bad we thought politics could get ten years ago; it almost feels quaint at this point. But in the end I was pleasantly surprised, though I do have a lot to complain about. For the record, I don't think I've ever seen a Purge movie before; I checked to make sure whether this movie was a continuation of a previous movie and the consensus seemed to be that this series is mos...

October 2025 Holiday Horror Review #25 - Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark (2019) Watch it here on Tubi! Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark is a film adaptation of the children's horror book series of the same name. The film follows a group of four teens in a small town in 1968, who run afoul of some local bullies on Halloween night. After escaping the bullies, they decide to visit a local haunted house. According to legend, the young girl that lived in that house- Sarah Bellows- was a witch, who committed suicide after several children in town died mysteriously. In the house, the four protagonists find a book of scary stories written by Sarah, and to their horror more stories start getting magically penned in the book- and the stories start coming true. Can they stop Sarah's otherworldly presence before they all end up dead or missing like the children before? Or was Sarah a victim, just like everyone else? First things first: I'm not super familiar with the book series thi...

October 2025 Holiday Horror Review #24 - The Halloween Tree (1993) [This does not appear to be streaming anywhere for free, which is a real shame. But it should be available for just a few dollars on various streaming services.] The Halloween Tree is an animated children's movie based on a novel by Ray Bradbury. It's about a group of four kids who find out their friend Pip has been taken to the hospital on Halloween night, and might die. But when they think they see him running through the woods near the old ravine, they assume this was all a Halloween prank- so they follow him to a creepy old mansion, where an enigmatic and creepy man named Mr. Moundshroud (voiced by Leonard Nimoy) has a tree with thousands of lit Jack-O-Lanterns hanging from its branches. But to their surprise, they see Pip- or, at least, a translucent form of Pip- climbing the tree to steal a pumpkin that looks just like his face, before he vanishes in a breeze. So Mr. Moundshroud takes the children on a whi...

October 2025 Holiday Horror Review #23 - Late Night with the Devil (2023) [Unfortunately this movie does not seem to be streaming for free anywhere, but it is included with many streaming subscriptions.] Late Night with the Devil is a film about a 70s-era late night TV host, Jack Delroy, who is back on the air after a year-long hiatus following his wife's unsuccessful battle with cancer. Taking place on Halloween night, the start of Sweeps Week on network television, Delroy's show is hoping to make quite a buzz by hosting a number of paranormal-themed guests including a psychic channeler, a magician whose goal is to debunk supernatural claims, and a girl who was rescued from a cult and who is said to be possessed by an evil spirit she calls "Mr. Wriggles". The night starts off as planned with a moderate ratings turnout, but when Jack agrees to interview "Mr. Wriggles" on-air, this broadcast begins to make every viewer question their beliefs about the natural...

October 2025 Holiday Horror Review #22 - The Crow (1994) Watch it here on PlutoTV! So, I'm stretching things a bit by calling this a horror film; originally I had a different movie in mind for Devil's Night but I couldn't find a free version of it anywhere so my wife suggested I just watch this instead. I'd only ever seen The Crow once before, about fifteen years ago, so it seemed like it was worth revisiting! The Crow follows a man named Eric Draven, who is killed after witnessing his fiancee being sexually assaulted and eventually killed the night before their wedding. A year later, Draven is reborn as some kind of a supernatural spirit of vengeance, and he goes on a rampage, methodically tracking down and killing all of the people responsible for his death. This film is the final acting role of its star, Brandon Lee, who was accidentally killed while filming (more on that at the end). First let me just take a moment and talk about Devil's Night as a holiday, sinc...

October 2025 Holiday Horror Review #21 - The Recall (2017) Watch it here on Amazon Prime Video! The Recall follows a group of friends on a trip out to a rented lake house for Labor Day weekend, when the world is approached by aliens intent on abducting and experimenting on as many humans as they can get their hands on. With the help of a hermit that turns out to be an ex-astronaut that dealt with the aliens before, these friends have to fight for survival- while also fighting against their personal demons. The Recall is... interesting, it really went some directions I didn't expect it to. It starts off like your typical horror film with some twenty-somethings going out to the woods, they run into a creepy hermit who you think is a bad guy but turns out to be a good guy, and then weird stuff starts happening. But the part that felt most like the typical "horror climax" of the film happens about thirty minutes in, and then it just keeps going. I guess let me use this opport...

October 2025 Holiday Horror Review #20 - I Know What You Did Last Summer (1997) Watch it here on Tubi! Remember when Hollywood was like, REALLY interested in urban legends for a few years? You've got the movie Urban Legend (and its multiple sequels), you've got movies like Campfire Stories that explore them in anthology format, and even just a few years later you've got the TV show Supernatural, which started out basing each episode off of some urban legend and going from there. I Know What You Did Last Summer doesn't do a LOT with urban legends, but I'm pretty confident the story of the hook-handed killer was a huge inspiration for this movie (and it gets brought up multiple times in the film). What a time to be alive. I Know... is a movie about a group of teens just out of high school, when a joyride through the hills turns tragic after they accidentally hit a pedestrian with their car. Rather than tell the authorities and take responsibility for their actions, th...

October 2025 Holiday Horror Review #19 - Frogs (1972) Watch it here on YouTube! I remember watching this film back in like 2006, after my wife and I started our weekly Bad Horror Movie Night. This was one of those movies that we'd seen sitting on the shelf at the local Blockbuster, and I thought, "A movie about frogs? That might be fun!" Spoilers: it wasn't. Frogs really has basically nothing to do with frogs (and there certainly is never a point where a person gets eaten by a giant frog, as seen in the poster). In Frogs, Sam Elliott plays Pickett Smith, a photojournalist who is out in a canoe taking photos of the local wildlife when a couple bumbling rich socialites nearly kill him with their speedboat. To apologize, they bring Smith back to their family's private island, where their maids and butlers are getting ready for the elderly patriarch's birthday celebration the next day (July 4th). The patriarch, Jason Crockett, is in a bad mood because he's bee...

October 2025 Holiday Horror Review #18 - Solstice (2008) Watch it here on Amazon Prime Video! Solstice follows a girl named Megan, as she and her friends go on a trip out to her family's summer home in the swamps of Louisiana a few months after Megan's twin sister, Sophie, committed suicide at a party. While on this trip, Megan starts seeing and hearing strange things- objects moved, lights turned on, shadowy figures lurking in the distance- and she begins to think that her dead sister is trying to communicate with her from beyond the grave. With some help from a local man with some experience in the occult, they delve into the mysteries of the unknown- and they find out that there's much more going on than just Sophie's death... Solstice was a pretty interesting film- on one hand it's an exploration of dealing with the loss of a close loved one, and the guilt that inevitably comes from that sort of grief. You start to blame yourself even when there's obviously ...

October 2025 Holiday Horror Review #17 - Knock Knock (2015) Watch it here on Plex! Knock Knock is a movie where America's sweetheart Keanu Reeves plays a husband and father left on his own while the family goes on vacation so he can stay home and get work done. But when two attractive young girls show up out of the blue and seduce him, he ultimately gives in, leading to these two girls blackmailing and torturing him in a deadly game of lies and lust. (There's going to be some spoilers in here but I don't think it's anything that will ruin the enjoyment of the movie; you kind of get what you expect with this kind of film so I'm using my best judgment.) It's going to be hard not to draw parallels between this movie and Funny Games (which I'm just now realizing I've never reviewed; stay tuned): both are stories about a pair of sociopaths weaseling their way into the lives of an unsuspecting family until they're so entrenched that the family has no choic...

October 2025 Holiday Horror Review #16 - The Blackening (2022) Watch it here on Netflix! Now THAT is a movie! (I really like this one so I'm only going to give some very light spoilers, fair warning.) The Blackening follows a group of friends (I think friends from back in college?) who have rented out a house for their first Juneteenth celebration in many years. They plan to hang out, party, do drugs, play games, and catch up- but when they find a mysterious (and incredibly racist-looking) board game that challenges them to name various black pop culture touchpoints or one of them will be killed, this friend reunion becomes a deadly game of cat and mouse. This movie is an utter delight. It's funny, it moves along at a nice clip, the dialogue and characters are written fantastically, and the plot has some great twists and turns I genuinely did not expect. It's serious at times, it's self-aware at times, it toys around with tropes while criticizing them at the same time, ...