Gabe Reviews Horror

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...

This review was originally written in October 2020. October Movie Review #24- Jeepers Creepers 3 I've spent the three hours since finishing this film trying to figure out where to even begin talking about it. Strap in, folks. This movie is... bad. It's very bad. It's so bad it retroactively makes the previous two movies worse, and I think I can say definitively that the world as a whole would have been better if this movie was not made at all. Now, is it the worst movie in the world? No. Is it the worst movie I've watched this month? No, that would absolutely be Hellraiser: Revelations. But this movie definitely marks the biggest gulf in quality between two successive entries in a series so far, and I find it remarkable that after fifteen years they mustered up the money and effort to make a follow-up to Jeepers Creepers 2 and they came up... with THIS. First I'll talk about the timeline. Rather than screw up the awesome ending from part 2 by either ignoring the fin...

This review was originally written in October 2020. October Movie Review #23- Jeepers Creepers 2 Another great movie from this franchise! I definitely didn't enjoy it as much as the first one, but it was still a competently made horror film with plenty of surprises and some really fun and badass moments. I think the majority of my (comparative) lack of enjoyment came from the fact that it's just kind of more of the same; even if the action itself was better than the previous movie (some of it was, some of it wasn't) it's a known entity at this point so it has less impact than it had the first time around. Where the first movie was a roller coaster of action, suspense, mystery, and intrigue, this one is basically just action and suspense; while those aren't bad, it did feel like this one was lacking something. Another thing that I think needs addressing is that this movie has some very bothersome homophobia and racism throughout. I know that the homophobia can be exp...

This review was originally written in October 2020. October Movie Review #22- Jeepers Creepers Hot dang, was this movie fantastic! Considering it was made at a time when so many others series (including ones I've reviewed....) were resorting to cheap schlock, I was incredibly surprised at how good this movie is right from the first minute. The action starts almost immediately (unlike so many other movies I've watched this month where it takes thirty or more minutes before anything happens) and it never lets up until the very end. There wasn't a dull moment in its entire runtime. And the monster. Oh man, the monster! I don't know how they managed to make this thing as terrifying as they did. Even the very first scene where it's basically just an aggressive driver in a truck, was shot so well and scored so appropriately that it was already scary even before anything happened. And then the event that gets the characters interested- the guy hiding bodies off the side of...

This review was originally written in October 2020. October Movie Review #21- Hellraiser: Judgment Well, this movie has one big plus going for it: It's not as bad as the last one! That being said, it's still terrible. When the movie began and it took TEN WHOLE MINUTES to get to the title screen, and instead we watched a cold open that was basically just gore and bad lighting and boobs, I had begun to wonder if that's all this movie was going to be. Mercifully that was not the case- we were eventually introduced to some characters, a pair of cops (that I didn't realize were brothers until the very end) following some serial killer with a hilariously generic name (that obviously ends up being a clue later on when someone finds a tenuously loose connection to that name). And then, for like fifty minutes of the film, there is nothing resembling the Hellraiser series on the screen. Every now and then they cut to a shot of pinhead (the same shot several times, of course, and ...

This review was originally written in October 2020. October Movie Review #20- Hellraiser: Revelations Yikes. What a mistake. I have no other way to start this review- this movie is terrible. Absolutely terrible. According to the IMDB trivia this one was made entirely because Dimension Films realized they would lose the rights to the Hellraiser series unless they made a film as soon as possible, so they churned this one out in three weeks. The only response I have to that is a sarcastic, "No, you don't say?" This FEELS like someone had to spit out a Hellraiser sequel in three weeks. The only sets consist of 1. Someone's House, 2. A Bathroom, and 3. Nothing Else. Nearly every scene is one person angrily reading off lines while everyone else sits and watches them. There is basically no story, and what story is there, is just a soulless rehash of the first movie (no pun intended). The sequence of events makes no sense, ALL of the makeup in this film is bordering on Spirit...

This review was originally written in October 2020. October Movie Review #19- Hellraiser: Hellworld Okay. Now I know why people keep talking about the Hellraiser movies being bad- it's because of entries like this. When I read the one-sentence blurb about this film I expected it to be about a haunted video game, complete with cheesy 2000-era CGI and maybe some 90s-holdover "hacking" scenes. I'm kind of disappointed we didn't get that, because if we had, at least it might have been a fun romp through some cheesy effects and maybe a self-aware joke or two. Unfortunately, that's not what we got. In fact, despite several sources seeming to market this movie as being about a Hellraiser video game, it isn't. There is nothing in this movie about a video game, except that the characters in the movie used to play a video game based on the Hellraiser mythos. (There really isn't any impact from this on the script- except that the characters have a few lines talki...

This review was originally written in October 2020. October Movie Review #18- Hellraiser: Deader Hmm. This one was... I don't really know. It started off great, very much like the last two, and I was intrigued and interested for about 60% of the film. But then the movie got really confusing, and unlike Hellseeker (which was also very confusing at times), this time around the confusion didn't go away and so the ending just kind of felt like a mess. So this movie follows a journalist, Amy, who gets a tip about this weird death cult (called "Deaders", hence the goofy title) that supposedly gets its members to show their dedication by committing suicide, at which point their enigmatic leader (a man named "Winter") is somehow able to bring them back from the dead. Amy goes to investigate, finds the puzzle box, and starts having weird visions/experiences where she thinks she's... already dead? Or undead? Or immortal? Or cursed? See, this is what's really c...

This review was originally written in October 2020. October Movie Review #17- Hellraiser: Hellseeker Are you kidding me? Two in a row? I'm beginning to think I was misled in regards to what to expect from this series, because like the previous entry, I thought this one was GREAT. I might even like this one better than the last one- I'm not sure. I feel like this one is not quite deserving of a perfect score- but I can't really put my finger on anything I disliked about it. Similar to Inferno, I love how this one is all about one man's inner demons, rather than literal demons that blow things up as you run away from them. It took me an embarrassingly long time to realize it, but I loved how this is a direct continuation of Kirsty's story from movies 1 & 2. Numerous times throughout this film I had moments where I would roll my eyes and say, "Oh, I know what's going on. This is pretty predictable." But then, even though I got small parts of it right,...

This review was originally written in October 2020. October Movie Review #16- Hellraiser: Inferno Holy cow, what is this movie doing here? In this series? It's actually GOOD. Like, REALLY good. To the point where I think I like it better than I liked the original and I would feel perfectly fine recommending this to anyone, even if they have no intention of watching any other Hellraiser movies. Like, I don't even know where to begin saying what it was I liked about this. I liked almost all of it. On one hand I want to praise this film for actually making the cenobites interesting AND scary, but I also want to point out that this movie used far less of them than any other in the series. There's so little distinct cenobite presence in this film that I almost feel like it was a separate movie that got shoehorned into the Hellraiser series at the last minute (hence why I'd recommend this to someone who hasn't seen any others). [End-of-Writing Edit: I just looked at the I...

This review was originally written in October 2020. October Movie Review #15- Hellraiser: Bloodline I'll say right out: This movie gave me a lot of hope for this series. Even if it wasn't great (still living in the pale shadow of #1) it was a marked improvement in tone and quality over #2 and #3. Similar to the last one this movie really had me interested for like the first half, then it kind of became a wet stain for the second half, with a neat ending that almost made up for the previous 45 minutes. I will admit, I was ready to write this film off entirely when the first scene starts and I saw that it took place in the future, on a space station. I know that a few franchises did space-themed movies around this time- Jason X was a few years after this, and Leprechaun 4 was around here too- so it didn't really surprise me. (The REALLY bad CGI thirty seconds in didn't do it any favors either.) But then, the movie got into the plot pretty quickly, and to be perfectly hone...

This review was originally written in October 2020. October Movie Review #14- Hellraiser III: Hell on Earth What can I say about this movie? It was... better than the previous one, in fact there were some parts of it that I really liked. But then, the rest of it was just... so, so bad. I honestly have no clue what direction this series is going in because each entry is nothing like the one before it, and neither of the two sequels I've watched so far seem to understand what was good about the first one. I was hoping that maybe #2 was going to be that weird fluke entry that shows up in a horror franchise (like Nightmare on Elm Street part 2, Halloween 3: Season of the Witch, etc.) but while this movie was totally different than its predecessor, it still made a lot of the same mistakes. In the first movie, the cenobites were TERRIFYING. They did so little, but what they did was mysterious and oppressive and you didn't even know if they were on the same time scale as humanity. The...

This review was originally written in October 2020. October Movie Review #13- Hellbound: Hellraiser II I went into this movie with very high hopes, as the first entry felt incredibly different than anything I'd seen before and left tons of unanswered questions that seemed like they would have interesting answers. In the most superficial sense this movie ticked a lot of the same boxes, but ultimately left me confused more than intrigued, and I honestly can't tell if the unanswered questions are what they are because the director wanted to keep us wanting more, or if there just wasn't a clear vision of what this movie wanted to be. This film has so much going on early in the story- Dr. Channard's got an entire plot involving the cenobites and resurrects Julia for some reason (which happens very easily and conveniently I guess), then their plan is to summon the cenobites because Julia wants to sacrifice the doctor to... a big crystal thing? Then the big crystal thing kills...

This review was originally written in October 2020. October Movie Review #12- Hellraiser This is the only one of the Hellraiser movies I've seen before; I saw it a few years ago but never followed up. I always assumed this was a long-running old-school horror franchise (like Nightmare on Elm Street, Halloween, Child's Play, etc.) but now that I'm actually getting into it I see that I was quite mistaken. The vast majority of the movies in this series have been within the last 20 years, with the most recent being in 2018 (!), so I guess what I'm getting at is that I have no idea what to expect in the entries to come. This film was incredibly enjoyable, if incredibly bizarre. Compared to your typical slashers (where some big killer guy just goes around killing unwary teens), this one follows no formula I've ever seen. The story explores the question of, what if there were a dimension of pain and pleasure so intense that it was worth having your body and soul torn apart...