Gabe Reviews Horror

This review was originally written in 2022. Gabe's 100 Bucket List Horror Films Review #56: Bone Tomahawk (2015) First things first, the obligatory "But is this really a horror movie?" discussion. This is a Western. It's a posse film. It's a revenge movie. It's a period drama about life on the frontier. The last thirty minutes fit as horror, sure, but this is a long film (2 hours 15) and so much of it simply isn't horror. That's not to say it isn't good- I think this is a fantastic film. Just, if you're going to watch it for the first time, know that you're going in for a movie about a bunch of men traveling through the Old West and dealing with bandits and gangrene, with a segment near the end that's truly horrific. I've basically already said what the plot of this movie is: A bandit attracts the attention of some sort of half-human/half-caveman Native Americans, who in turn kidnap a couple people from a frontier town. So the sheri...

This review was originally written in 2022. Gabe's 100 Bucket List Horror Films Review #55: The Babadook (2014) I would be lying if I said The Babadook was a bad  movie. Because it really isn't. It was super popular on the internet back when it came out, and rightfully so. It's got a freaking 98% on Rotten Tomatoes for crying out loud (at least, that's what its Tomatometer rating is, I don't know how Rotten Tomatoes works) so obviously it's a good movie. It's creepy, it's tense, there's a strong sense of dread pervading the entire film- but while I would be lying if I said it was a bad movie, I would also be lying if I said I was ever excited about watching again. The Babadook follows an Australian widow and her monster-obsessed child, and the plethora of difficulties the two of them face on a daily basis. This all gets exacerbated when they discover a horrific children's book in their home that seems to attract the attention of some kind of unse...

This review was originally written in 2022. Gabe's 100 Bucket List Horror Films Review #54: What Ever Happened to Baby Jane? (1962) What Ever Happened to Baby Jane? follows two aged Hollywood starlet sisters, Jane and Blanche, who have begrudgingly lived together for many years after a car accident left Blanche confined to a wheelchair. Both sisters hate one another, and their deep-seated hatred has begun to hit a breaking point as Jane struggles to hold a tight grip on a world that no longer remembers her. My thoughts on this movie itself are pretty simple: This is a long film (2 hours 15) that really didn't need to be that long, and it's a pretty slow burn. The tension is there, you really feel the fear and paranoia you're meant to feel, so it's not a bad time, I just really think it could have been tightened up (either in the script phase or the editing phase) to cut off like a solid half an hour. Then again, movies were just slower back then, I guess. I apprecia...

This review was originally written in 2022. Gabe's 100 Bucket List Horror Films Review #53: The Wicker Man (1973) I'd only seen the 2006 remake before, so I went in with a little bit of apprehension when watching the original. I'll briefly touch on the comparison of the two later, but right now I'll start off by just saying: This is a really charming film, and a great example of the Folk Horror subgenre. For anyone not familiar with The Wicker Man, it follows a police officer who travels to a remote island community when given a tip that a young girl has gone missing. After getting stonewalled and lied to by the xenophobic townsfolk, he finds clue after clue leading him to believe the girl has been hidden away, in preparation for her to be sacrificed to appease the community's pagan gods and to grant them a bountiful harvest. And so he takes it upon himself to find and rescue her, no matter the cost. I really love this movie's portrayal of the townsfolk and thei...

This review was originally written in 2022. Gabe's 100 Bucket List Horror Films Review #52: Young Frankenstein (1974) I've seen this film before, but it was about twenty years ago. I remember thinking it was hilarious, I've heard other people talking about how funny it is (even very recently, since it was Gene Wilder's birthday a couple weeks ago), and I was fully prepared to gloss over the fact that this is yet another non-horror film on this bucket list of horror films, because hey, this one isn't really trying to be a horror film, it's obviously a comedy, just one styled after a classic horror film. But the problem is... I really didn't find this movie funny. Like, at all. Every single joke I saw coming from a mile away, and half of the time they commented on the joke right afterward or did a victory lap to make sure the audience knew there was a joke there. In my opinion it would have been so much funnier if Igor's hump changed sides once in a while,...

This review was originally written in 2022. Gabe's 100 Bucket List Horror Films Review #51: Hush (2016) I was kind of dreading watching this movie, to be perfectly honest. I've seen it before, a few years ago. I was dreading it because while I remembered it being very good, I remembered it being TERRIFYING. And it 100% was terrifying on this re-watch. Hush is a movie by Mike Flannigan, who's made several other fantastic horror films (including Oculus, one of my top ten horror films of all time). It's about a woman named Maddie who gets stalked and attacked by a masked serial killer, with the encounter made all the more difficult by the fact that Maddie is deaf and mute. As such, this film is almost entirely without dialogue- there's apparently only fifteen minutes of it in the entire film- and several scenes are without any soundtrack or ambient noise as well, imparting the experience of Maddie's lack of hearing onto the viewer. (I will say, I think it's int...

This review was originally written in 2022. Gabe's 100 Bucket List Horror Films Review #50: The Host (2006) Writer/Director Bong Joon-ho has expressed frustration with people's reactions when making this film, as they seemed to think that making a "monster movie" was beneath him. While I can definitely attest that Bong Joon-ho is a fantastic director (I highly, highly recommend Parasite, another movie of his that unfortunately isn't on this list), I feel that looking back, this is a peculiar movie to make people feel that way about him. Because ultimately, I don't think this IS a monster movie. I mean, it is, but it isn't. The Host is a Korean film that was so popular that approximately twenty percent of the entire country bought tickets to see it. It follows the story of a family whose daughter is kidnapped during a viral outbreak, and they go through hell and high water to get her back (but at what cost...). There's also a monster in there. But that...