by A.J.
Night 12: Holiday Horror Night
“This year there will be no leftovers.”
Eli Roth’s Thanksgiving began as one of the fake trailers that played in between features in the Robert Rodriguez and Quentin Tarantino double feature spectacular Grindhouse (2007). The Thanksgiving trailer was the best and funniest of the fake trailers (the others were Robert Rodriguez's Machete, Edgar Wright's Don’t, and Rob Zombie's Werewolf Women of the SS, all of which are pretty funny). After Robert Rodriguez made a full feature out of his fake trailer, Machete, it seemed that these comedic trailers only work as fake trailers. However, the feature length version of Eli Roth’s Thanksgiving is a solid movie and is easily Roth’s best film in a long time. The key to the success of the feature length version is the approach taken by Roth and screenwriter Jeff Rendell. Instead of making a parody, like the trailer, they took a serious approach to the material and the result is a great modern slasher movie.
Set in Plymouth, Massachusetts on, you guessed it, Thanksgiving, a prologue shows us a gruesome and deadly riot at Ritemart, a big box store, that happens after the obnoxious teenager friends of Jessica (Nell Verlaque), daughter of the store owner, who got in early, tease and taunt the massive crowd waiting outside. The crowd charges the store and mayhem and carnage ensue. One year later, the greedy store owner has decided to open his store on Thanksgiving night again but this time he will hire more than two security guards. Jessica and her friends are being tagged in cryptic social media posts. Her ex-boyfriend who mysteriously disappeared after his arm was mangled in the riot–ending his hopes of a baseball career–mysteriously returns, embittered loved ones of the people killed in the riot are protesting the store, a restaurant is handing out masks of John Carver, first governor of Plymouth, and the stage is set for a slasher movie.
If you guess who the killer is way ahead of the reveal, and you just might, that doesn’t spoil any of the fun. It makes sense narratively and Roth and Rendell are more concerned with crafting a good story and entertaining the audience instead of outsmarting them. This is a bloody, gruesome horror movie, so if the violence you see in the riot is too much, then find a different Shocktober movie because the violence only gets more graphic and over the top. This movie does not cut away for effect or leave things up to the viewer’s imagination. We see the gruesome elaborate kills start to finish. And the kills get quite elaborate. The killer dunks one victim in a restaurant sink then sticks her face to the door of the walk-in refrigerator and eventually ends up running her over in an alley so that she is bisected by a dumpster. Yet, Thanksgiving definitely does not have the atmosphere of doom and dread that were a major part of Roth’s Hostel movies and the love it or hate it Cabin Fever. This is like a rollercoaster or amusement park dark ride: the goal is to excite and thrill and even scare you and then deliver you back to the ground where you can laugh off the scares and enjoy the experience you just had.
Nell Verlaque as Jessica Wright is a good “final girl", without feeling like she has been constructed as such. Among the other teens, Tomaso Sanelli as the obnoxious jock Evan deserves recognition for playing a character so believably crass and hateable, but still you don’t really want him to die. Gabriel Davenport as Scuba is also another stand out because he is a hothead who even buys an illegal gun, but then doesn’t know what to do with it. Among the adults, Patrick Dempsey is the stand out and pretty much the star of the movie as the town sheriff. Rick Hoffman is great as the greedy store owner and his redemptive turn midway through the movie is believable. You end up not wanting him to die too–which is impressive since it’s clear he is to blame for the entire fiasco that spawned a revenge driven killing spree. There is a lot of death and a lot of blood but the body count is relatively low. Nothing feels like a foregone conclusion so you never feel like you’re just watching a line up of teenagers/victims die elaborately.
Slasher movies are simple and are something of an oddity as a subgenre. If they are done well they are effective and memorable horror cinema. If they are done poorly they can be just as entertaining, maybe even more so. Thanksgiving is not a parody or a copycat. It does not seek to transcend or redefine the genre, and this is a welcome thing. It is effective, thrilling, gory entertainment in its own right while also being an homage to the genre.
Thanksgiving is streaming on Netflix.
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