Way back in 2007, when Quentin Tarantino and Robert Rodriguez teamed up for the epic shlockfest Grindhouse, they got some of their pals to produce fake, genre-perfect trailers to go along with their two features. A couple of these, Machete and Hobo with a Shotgun, have actually been made into real movies since, but the one that fans have been clamoring to be produced is Eli Roth’s Thanksgiving. Finally, more than 15 years later, Roth has given the people what they want. Thanksgiving is here.
Set in the town of Plymouth, Massachusetts, Thanksgiving opens up with a riot at a Right-Mart Black Friday sale that, as all good Black Friday sales do, begins at 6:00pm on Thanksgiving Day. Lives are lost and lawsuits are settled, and one year later, everything is back to normal.
Well, not really. Much of the town is still up in arms about the callous way that Right-Mart dealt with the carnage. One person in particular is upset enough to dress up as the town’s founder, a Pilgrim named John Carver (get it?), to stalk and kill those who were somehow connected to the riot.
As one might expect, Thanksgiving is a sendup of holiday-themed slashers like Halloween, Black Christmas, and My Bloody Valentine. Also as one might expect, it’s a formula slasher, with the masked killer slicing and dicing his way through his victims.
However, Roth does not stick to the grindhouse aesthetic of his trailer, instead deciding to modernize the look and feel of the story. This makes the movie more of a tribute of sorts to second-generation slashers like Scream or I Know What You Did Last Summer. Which makes it self-referential enough for the typical slasher tropes to be hysterical without the whole thing feeling too much like a comedy. Of course, it’s hilarious, but there’s no mistaking that Thanksgiving is a horror movie.
There’s also no mistaking that it’s made by Eli Roth, the director who brought us Hostel and The Green Inferno. It’s a brutally violent movie, full of blood, guts, and gore. And, like all of the best slashers, the kills are as creative as they are graphic. One can almost taste the entrails and smell the burnt flesh as John Carver vengefully works his way through his carefully curated list of targets. In typical slasher fashion, the viewer cheers for the villain just as much as they cheer for the heroes.
There’s a mystery at the heart of Thanksgiving, the solving of which becomes more and more crucial as the body count grows higher and higher. But the answer to the question of who is doing the killing isn’t nearly as important to the audience as it is to the characters. The identity of John Carver doesn’t matter. It’s all about the carving itself.
Horror has always been somewhat political, and Thanksgiving does make a few valid social observations about greed and capitalism. None of this gets in the way of the movie’s true calling, though. It just serves to broaden the eventual suspect (and victim) pool. The point of Thanksgiving is to watch people die in horrible ways. And it gets to that point early and often.
Audiences know exactly what movie they’re getting before they go into Thanksgiving. But Thanksgiving also knows exactly what kind of movie its audience wants, and it delivers that movie. There’s nothing new there, but it’s wildly entertaining and insanely fun. And that makes it well worth the wait.
Grade: B+
MPAA Rating: R for some sexual material, pervasive language, gore, and strong bloody horror violence
Release Date: November 17, 2023
Running Time: 1 hour 47 minutes
This post was last modified on June 16, 2024 9:53 pm