Gabe Reviews Horror

Twelve More Slays of Christmas #12 - The Nightmare Before Christmas (1993) [This one does not appear to be streaming anywhere for free, but it's included in a subscription to Disney+.] Merry Christmas, everyone who celebrates! The Nightmare Before Christmas tells the story of Jack Skellington, a skeleton living in a place where everyone and everything is Halloween. Despite everyone else's love and excitement over another Halloween come and gone, Jack has grown dissatisfied- he wants something more. Something new. So when he stumbles across a mysterious grove of trees, each of which seems to serve as a portal to another place, each centered around a different  holiday- Jack immediately becomes smitten with the idea of Christmas, and sets out to create a Christmas of his own- even going so far as to have Santa Claus kidnapped so he can take the reins (no pun intended). But something tells me Christmas is going to be a bit different this year... I first saw this movie back when it...

Twelve More Slays of Christmas #11 - Better Watch Out (2016) Watch it here on Tubi! Wow. That's really all I can say right now- wow. This movie is fantastic. I'm hesitant to even give a plot synopsis because there's a significant bait-and-switch that really makes this movie into something special. The shift happens about thirty minutes in, so it's not really a HUGE spoiler to say what it is, but as far as I can tell, none of the official marketing gave it away (in fact, the red band trailer makes this look like a feel-good revenge flick with tons of laughs, which it VERY MUCH is not). I will do my best not to give away what's going on, but I urge you to go into this movie with an open mind. At its core, Better Watch Out is a home invasion movie. It follows Luke, a twelve-year-old whose parents are going out to a Christmas party, and Ashley, the babysitter he desperately has a massive crush on. He's got a whole plan to try and woo her (coordinated with his friend...

Twelve More Slays of Christmas #10 - Elves (1989) Watch it here on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dluvUGMCt5Y Before I get to the plot, I have to say: this is a WILD movie. I don't think I'm going to rate it super high but in some ways it might be the best movie I watched all year. There is a scene in this film where a goblin/troll/elf thing shoots a nazi with a gun . Have you ever seen that in a movie? I haven't! I don't think they intended anybody to jump up and cheer at that part but I really wanted to. Anyway. Elves is almost certainly a made-for-TV-movie, and if it isn't, it sure looks and sounds like one. (Considering the amount of T&A in here I would bet money it premiered on Cinemax.) The first half really failed to grab my interest, but the second half- hoo boy, the second half brought it right back around. Elves begins with our teenaged protagonist, Kirsten, taking some friends out to the woods in late December to try and perform a feminine-f...

Twelve More Slays of Christmas #9 - A Christmas Horror Story (2015) Watch it here on Philo! A Christmas Horror Story is (ironically) not one story, but five stories (some of which are intertwined with one another) centered around Christmas and various folklore. First, William Shatner plays a radio DJ who loves Christmas but is forced to report on an unfortunate killing spree at a local mall. Next, three college students break into a boarding school or something where a brutal murder took place on Christmas the year before to make a documentary on the killings, but find out that some of the horror has lingered. Then a mother, father, and son go out to someone's private property to cut down a Christmas tree- the son goes missing, they find him after a short while, but it soon becomes clear that the child they brought home is not quite the child they lost. Next, a family on Christmas vacation runs into some bad luck after their bratty kid disrespects Krampus, and they learn that the S...

Twelve More Slays of Christmas #8 - The Christmas Tapes (2022) Watch it here on Tubi! The Christmas Tapes is a low-budget found-footage horror anthology film starring Greg Sestero, of The Room  fame. The framing device starts off with a family celebrating Christmas Eve by having each member open one present first, and the daughter's gift- a video camera- comes in handy when a stranger knocks at the door after apparently having car trouble. The family invites him in to share the warmth and community, but this soon turns to fear and danger as he takes them all hostage and forces them to watch a series of short horror films centered around Christmastime. As each story comes and goes, the family has to grapple with whether the horrific events they saw- both mundane and supernatural- have any basis in reality, and whether any of them are going to make it out of this alive. Apart from the framing device, there are four stories told in this movie: 1. Travel Buggies- A couple of travel blo...

Twelve More Slays of Christmas #7 - Whoever Slew Auntie Roo? (1972) Watch it here on Tubi! Note: This is a small thing but IMDB and Wikipedia list the title as "Whoever" Slew Auntie Roo, but everywhere else I've found anything about it on the internet, it's simply "Who" Slew Auntie Roo. I don't know why this is, usually in the case where a movie has multiple similar titles IMDB has the official one and there's a little section for "Alternate Title", but this one has nothing of the sort. It's weird. Speaking of weird things about the title, though, what's the deal with that title? It makes this film sound like a whodunit murder mystery, which it very much is not. Auntie Roo (spoilers) dies at the very end of the film, and nobody is wondering who did it- it looks to the authorities like an accident, and the only people who suspect anything otherwise are the people responsible. In truth, this is a kidnapping movie, not unlike 1990'...

Twelve More Slays of Christmas #6 - Silent Night, Deadly Night 4: Initiation (1990) Watch it here on Tubi! At some point I feel like I need to sit down and have a good long think about "What is a sequel?" I already complained a few days ago about how Black Christmas (2019) is not actually a remake of Black Christmas, and in the same vein this movie really isn't a Silent Night, Deadly Night sequel. I know that there's already a tradition of various franchises having one entry that just randomly veers off in a new direction (Halloween 3: Season of the Witch being the common example) but this one needs to be right up there too. Unlike the previous entries in this series which are at least somewhat centered around one of two brothers that act out their trauma by murdering people around Christmas, Silent Night, Deadly Night 4: Initiation is a movie about Kim, an aspiring journalist who investigates a bizarre death (an apparent self-immolation regarded as a suicide) and end...

Twelve More Slays of Christmas #5 - Silent Night, Deadly Night 3: Better Watch Out! (1989) Watch it here on Tubi! I watched both of the two previous Silent Night, Deadly Night movies for the first time last year, and to put it mildly I was... unimpressed, particularly with the second. So I hope I'm not giving too much of a spoiler for this review, but when I put on the third entry in this series, my extremely low expectations were greatly exceeded! Does that mean this movie is "good"? I don't know! Let's find out together. (Note: While writing this review I just had to spend like five minutes cross-referencing a few things because something about this movie is confusing me. I'll explain what I mean in a moment.) A brief recap of the previous two films: a boy named Billy witnesses a man in a Santa Claus costume rape his mother and murder both of his parents. Billy and his little brother Ricky get put in an orphanage, where Billy is disciplined for witnessing fu...

Twelve More Slays of Christmas #4 - Jack Frost 2: Revenge of the Mutant Killer Snowman (2000) Watch it here on Tubi! Jack Frost 2: Revenge of the Mutant Killer Snowman follows Sam, the same protagonist from the first film, a year after he defeated the serial-killer-turned-mutant-snowman Jack Frost by melting him in a truck bed full of antifreeze. This time around Sam is off on a tropical vacation in the Bahamas or Jamaica or something, while unknown to him some government scientists have managed to get their hands on the dissolved remains of Jack Frost himself and have accidentally returned him to Snowmanhood so Jack somehow found his way (due to genetic engineering shenanigans) to Sam's island getaway so he can get his revenge. Nothing else really needs to be said (or even  can  be said)- that's basically it, Jack kills some people and Sam defeats him again. Yadda yadda yadda. The original Jack Frost was no masterpiece; in fact it was pretty terrible production-wise, but it h...

Twelve More Slays of Christmas #3 - Red Snow (2021) Watch it here on Tubi! Red Snow is the kind of movie where the premise is really all there is to it; once you know the premise the rest of the movie writes itself. This film follows a vampire romance novelist named Olivia living on her own when a wounded bat crashes into her window; she brings the bat in to nurse it back to health and bing bang boom, she's unknowingly befriended Luke, a real-life vampire on the run from some vampire hunters. You could probably jot down a few ideas of where the story goes from there and you would probably be right- Olivia tries to hide Luke's existence from one of the hunters, she develops a budding romance with him, she even gets some feedback on her novel from the subject matter incarnate- and of course, once Luke begins to fall for her, the rest of his vampire buddies show up and they're not happy with how he's gone soft. Unfortunately, I have to follow this up by saying that the whi...

Twelve More Slays of Christmas #2 - Christmas Evil (1980) Watch it here on Tubi! Christmas Evil is a film about a foreman of a toy factory named Harry, who has a complicated relationship with Christmas. When he was a child, he learned that Santa Claus wasn't real by watching a (presumably) lewd encounter between his parents while his father was dressed as Santa, and ever since then he has been obsessed with becoming- or at least acting as- Santa Claus. He's watching the local children and keeping tabs on which ones are naughty or nice, he's making his own high-quality Santa costume- he's even taking toys from his workplace and delivering them to local orphans. But when some people push him just a bit too hard, he pushes back- and Harry ends up putting himself on the Naughty List. I'll get this right out here: this was a fairly slow and dull movie. The first half moves at a glacial pace (no pun intended) and even once the action gets going, it still goes on for way l...

Twelve More Slays of Christmas #1 - Black Christmas (2019) [It does not appear that this movie is streaming for free anywhere; however, it can be found with a subscription on Hulu and... Disney+? Is that right?] Last year I watched both the original Black Christmas, as well as the 2006 remake- and if you recall (you can go back and read those reviews right now, I'll wait) I liked the original but the remake seemed to misunderstand everything that made the original good. So, only 13 years later, they decided to remake it again , so how does it stand up? Let's find out. (Fair warning, I'm going to be spoiling this movie. That usually means I don't think you should watch it.) Black Christmas (2019) follows a group of sorority girls staying on-campus over Christmas break, who get beset upon by one or more murderers. While that sounds similar to the other two, that's literally where the similarities end- instead of being a grounded (or even larger-than-life) story about ...

Ho ho ho, Merry Christmastime everyone! Just when I thought I was sick of holiday-themed horror films, I decided to shove twelve more down my throat! There was a positive-enough response to last year's Twelve Slays of Christmas that I felt it only appropriate to go ahead and to Twelve More Slays of Christmas. So here we are! Just a note: I may decide otherwise in eleven months but I'm pretty sure this is the last time I'll be doing twelve Christmas-themed horror films in December. There's still a huge list of them on Wikipedia , so like, it's definitely possible  to keep doing it, but the problem is that I basically already watched all of the ones I knew or cared about last year. (Most of the ones last year were hand-picked by me, specifically because I had already seen them and wanted to share them with others.) This time around, though, I was sifting exclusively through movies I'd never even heard of, so with one or two exceptions I knew nothing about any of t...

The Twelve Slays of Christmas #12 - Santa's Slay (2005) Watch it here on YouTube! [This video starts off with an ad for the uploader's Gofundme; it was the only free version I could find online, though this movie is also streamable with a subscription on multiple premium platforms.] Here we are, Merry Christmas everyone! It's been a roller coaster of a year, but we made it. I hope you're all safe and happy and comfortable, wherever you are. To celebrate the occasion, I bring to you a review of my all-time favorite Christmas Horror movie, and I hope you come out thinking of it the same way. Santa's Slay follows a teenager named Nicolas Yuleson who lives with his kooky inventor grandpa. His grandfather has never liked Christmas, and we find out why- he knows that Christmas wasn't always a time for joy. Until a thousand years ago, Santa Claus wasn't the jolly gift-giver we think of him as- he was the literal son of Satan, and spent one day every year spreading...

The Twelve Slays of Christmas #11 - Await Further Instructions (2018) Watch it here on Tubi! Await Further Instructions follows a dysfunctional family (no surprise there) who get together for Christmas, only to wake up in the morning and find all of the doors and windows barred and blocked, sealing them all inside. Soon after this discovery, a presumably governmental broadcast comes over the television telling them to stay calm and await further instructions. But the instructions become more and more questionable, and the family's paranoia causes more and more conflict- is this a terrorist attack? Does the government have their best interests at heart? Or... are these instructions even from the government at all? This movie ticks a lot of boxes for me- I love stories where the characters are trapped in one central location, and I like when the interpersonal issues between characters are the star of the show. But most importantly, I love when there's a seemingly normal situation...

The Twelve Slays of Christmas #10 - Black Christmas (2006) Watch it here on Tubi! I'll get the synopsis out of the way: the 2006 Black Christmas remake follows a group of sorority girls who get killed off one-by-one in contrived and inexplicably unnoticed ways by an unseen serial killer on Christmas Eve. There's a couple small subplots going on but that's pretty much it. This movie is, in a word, terrible. It does two things very, very wrong: it took a story about a mysterious killer with unknown motivations and a clever whodunit twist, and gave the killer a complicated and winding backstory about a boy who was born with a liver disease that turned his skin yellow and then his mother hated his father for some reason so she killed the father and locked the boy in the attic but then one day the mother had sex with her son and she got pregnant and gave birth to a daughter so she loved the son but then the son broke out of the attic and killed his mother and ripped out his daug...

The Twelve Slays of Christmas #9 - Black Christmas (1974) Watch it here on Tubi! Considered by many to be one of the first slasher films (and definitely the first slasher revolving around a holiday), Black Christmas follows a group of sorority girls at the start of Christmas break. First they start getting a series of disturbing phone calls, and then the girls start disappearing one by one. When it's finally confirmed that some sort of foul play is afoot, the police think they've figured out who the culprit is- but the calls might be coming from inside the house. I'd never seen this film before, though I had seen the 2006 remake (which I'll be reviewing tomorrow). Right off the bat it's pretty easy to see why this is considered one of the classics- the plot is good and moves at a nice clip, the characters are engaging and fleshed-out enough (and not too much, which is important), and there's just the right amount of tension and suspense. It's mind-boggling c...

The Twelve Slays of Christmas #8 - Terrifier 3 (2024) [This movie is fairly new and as such doesn't appear to be streaming anywhere for free, but you can purchase it on Amazon Prime Video, Fandango at Home, and Apple TV.] The first thing I want to say is that it's a rare move to have one entry in a film series be holiday-themed; I'm sure it's happened before but this is the only instance I can think of, especially for a horror series. So this one has the novelty of that going for it. I'm not going to try and summarize the plot very accurately; I'll just say that this movie takes place five years after Terrifier 2 (I reviewed 1 & 2 last year, so go back and read those if you want a recap) and it follows Sierra, the survivor of that film, as she and her remaining family are beset upon once again by Art the supernatural murderer clown. There's some Christmas-based hijinks in here but the majority of the action could be set whenever or wherever. I'll be ...

The Twelve Slays of Christmas #7 - It's A Wonderful Knife (2023) [This movie doesn't appear to be streaming anywhere for free; it's on most platforms with a subscription, so if you subscribe to Amazon Prime, Hulu, Roku, Philo, Disney+, or AMC+, it should be included in your subscription.] This movie came recommended from a source I respect very much; the concept drew me in instantly. However, as it went on I had some serious issues I'll need to address, and that means I'm going to need to spoil some (but not all) of the plot in the process. This is a relatively new film so fair warning, vague spoilers ahead. It's A Wonderful Knife follows the story of Winnie, a girl in a small town that gets beset upon by a serial killer on Christmas Eve. Winnie manages to kill the masked murderer, and a year later is still troubled by the loss of the people he killed. In a moment of anguish at how people treat her, she wishes she were never born- and she gets her wish, suddenly...

The Twelve Slays of Christmas #6 - Gremlins (1984) [This movie doesn't appear to be streaming anywhere for free; it's on most platforms with a subscription, and there's a few playlists on YouTube that look  like the full movie spread out over 30+ short videos, but I'm not about to test any of them to find out. If you subscribe to Amazon Prime, Hulu, Roku, Philo, or Max, it should be included in your subscription.] It's been a LONG time since I've seen this movie- maybe thirty years? Maybe longer. Gremlins is one of the films responsible for the creation of the PG-13 rating (along with Poltergeist and Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom) and I think the lack of a PG-13 rating at the time is a huge factor in why this movie so tightly straddles the line between horror and comedy. Does it succeed at both? I guess I'll get to that. Gremlins is a story about a teen named Billy whose eccentric father buys him a mysterious pet for Christmas- a mogwai named Gizmo. M...