The Doctor’s Diagnosis: B
It’s taken 16 years, but Thanksgiving is here at last. Eli Roth made the fake trailer for Thanksgiving as one of the trailers that played in the middle of the 2007 movie Grindhouse and he’s finally gotten around to making the full movie. I’m happy to report that, while it may be a bit anticlimactic after all this time, Thanksgiving is a solid holiday slasher that would fit in perfectly in a marathon of 80s slasher movies.
Similar to 80s flicks like Prom Night and Terror Train, Thanksgiving opens with a prologue explaining the motivation of the killer. On Thanksgiving night in Plymouth, Massachusetts, the locals are impatiently waiting for the local RightMart to open and begin Black Friday sales. Our lead is Jessica, whose father owns the store, and she makes the brilliant decision to let her friends into the store early. The idiot friends then proceed to shop in plain view of the increasingly agitated and mock them for being stuck outside. The mob breaks into the store and a riot ensues, resulting in multiple deaths. One year later, a killer in a John Carver mask starts carving up everyone involved in causing the riot, giving us a classic small-town, whodunit-style slasher movie.
I’m really happy to say that Eli Roth has finally made a good movie because the man knows his horror history and just seems like a genuinely good guy in interviews. I mean, the guy screened Mother’s Day for the guests at his Bar Mitzvah for fuck’s sake; now that’s a dude that I can hang out with. However, that passion for the horror genre hasn’t necessarily translated well to the screen. I can point to positives in Cabin Fever, Hostel and The Green Inferno, but I can’t call them good movies. With Thanksgiving, Roth seems to have found his sweet spot because this is a love letter to slasher movies, but not a self-aware tribute in the vein of Scream. Instead of that meta classic, Thanksgiving takes all of the tropes of 80s slashers and simply sets them in 2023. The result is a gloriously unpretentious film that would make for a great double feature with something like My Bloody Valentine.
One area where Roth has always delivered is in the gore department and you bet your ass that a Roth-directed slasher flick is going to deliver on the bloodshed. With the horror genre being dominated by glorified PG-level crap like Megan and Five Nights at Freddy’s, Thanksgiving is a refreshing gorefest. It may be set in 2023, but Thanksgiving is here to remind you how we did shit in the 80s. People are cut in half, disemboweled, decapitated and, in the film’s nastiest sequence, cooked alive as a human main course for Thanksgiving dinner. This movie has some of the most brutal and inventive kills in years and a few of them are definitely going to stick with me. If you were one of those kids screaming in the theater during Five Nights at Freddy’s and you are planning to see Thanksgiving, then take Deadpool’s advice and wear your brown pants for when you shit yourself.
The biggest problem with the movie, and this has been a perennial problem in Roth’s filmography, is that our main characters are all insufferable assholes. I compared the film’s prologue to Prom Night and Terror Train, but the characters are little kids in the inciting incident in Prom Night and the inciting incident in Terror Train was at least a prank gone horribly wrong. The characters in Thanksgiving are just straight-up pricks and I am absolutely siding with the killer here. This did dimmish the fright factor since I was actively rooting for our lead characters to die and, up until around the halfway point, was hampering my ability to enjoy the movie. But then I had a moment when I just fully committed to being on Team Killer here and that oddly made the movie much more fun and gratifying.
Although the characters are complete shitbags, they refreshingly aren’t that stupid. There isn’t an unnecessary period of skepticism about whether a killer is on the loose; everyone arrives to that obvious conclusion quite quickly. The teenagers actually go to the police and the police actually take them seriously. One guy even buys a gun, even though he doesn’t know how to use it. These people actually do the right things in response to being stalked by a killer. They still deserve what they get, but at least they aren’t as stupid as they are obnoxious.
The film isn’t without its flaws. Not to belabor the point, but the most empathetic character shouldn’t be the killer and the mystery isn’t hard to figure out. But the movie is still a damn good time. I won’t bother comparing it to all-time greats Halloween and Black Christmas; that is hallowed ground and it wouldn’t be fair to have expectations that high. But this fits nicely into the second tier of holiday slashers with My Bloody Valentine (1981) and Silent Night, Deadly Night. I’m writing this on Thanksgiving morning, so my advice is to take the whole family to the theater and see Thanksgiving after you finish dinner. Yes, take the little kids too. They may freak out and cry now, but you’ll thank me when they become teenagers. If we traumatize children with gore now, they won’t grow up to think that crap like Five Nights at Freddy’s is scary. Trust me, I’m a doctor.
Image By: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thanksgiving_(2023_film)#/media/File:Thanksgiving_poster_2023j.jpg
