Movie Review: ‘Thanksgiving’

Director: Eli Roth

Cast: Patrick Dempsey, Addison Rae, Milo Manheim, Jalen Thomas Brooks, Nell Verlaque, Rick Hoffman, Gina Gershon, Tim Dillon

Plot: A masked killer is stalking victims in the town of Plymouth in the days before Thanksgiving. He’s targeting those involved in a Black Friday riot that turned fatal the previous year.

Review: Eli Roth has always felt like a bit of an odd duck to me. At the turn of the century he was hailed as one of the next great voices in horror cinema. His high impact splatter films Cabin Fever and Hostel pushed boundaries and took the latter certainly did something new in the genre, but we never got saw him deliver the goods that his reputation promised. For the most part he’s been popping up in cameos and acting in a producer role, with most of his efforts as director being remakes of niche horror and action from the 70s.

Thanksgiving is his latest work as a director, and come out of Tarantino and Rodriguez’s Grindhouse experiment. This retro double-feature, which came out in 2007, was a tribute to schlock cinema of the 1970s and it included a number of fake trailers made by Rob Zombie, Edgar Wright and Eli Roth. Some of these trailers – Hobo With a Shotgun and Machete – did get developed into full films, with Roth’s Thanksgiving being the latest. It has been in development one and off since then, which goes some way to explain why it feels like many of its ideas have been done already.

We open on Thanksgiving dinner being interrupted by various people’s connection to the upcoming Black Friday sale. This weird annual sale seems to be a big aspect of the USA holiday season, and we get presented with an angry mob of shoppers waiting to storm the big-box store to get the heavily discounted goods. Due to everyone being generally shitty, the crowd gets out of control and breaks through the barriers with several people getting killed in the process. Jump forward a year and victim’s families are protesting the store, videos of the riot went viral online and everyone else is going about their business as usual with another Black Friday sale coming up.

Amid all this Thanksgiving stuff, a killer dressed as a pilgrim with a mask of historical figure John Carver is hunting down people involved in the riot. He’s also been harassing a group of teens online, sending them pictures of a table set-up for Thanksgiving dinner. This group of school students, who filmed the video that went viral and includes the store owner’s daughter, are at the centre of this psychopaths plan to host a deranged holiday celebration.

On the surface, this is a pretty enjoyable slasher movie that is happy to push the boundaries of taste a bit further than past films in the sub-genre. Scream and the like tend to keep the rating low enough to keep a teenaged audience, but Thanksgiving splashes around much more gore and organs that expected. It’s earned itself an R18+ here in Australia, and it’s well deserved for the messy kills. It feels like a fun throwback to the era of the original Scream, with the masked, themed killer, the murder mystery subplot, the cast of stereotypical and obnoxious characters. It’s highly evocative of that particular decade of slasher flicks and we’re here for it.

If that sounds good, then you’ll have a fun time with this one. Unfortunately, it doesn’t bring anything new to the dinner table. It’s a bit of a shame that it stayed in development for so long that movies like Pilgrim and Black Friday have covered such similar ground already. It doesn’t help that Roth sticks with the idea that horror movie characters need to be annoying, gross and downright crappy people so we want to see them killed off. I feel like people have moved away from this concept in recent years, with sympathetic or grounded characters being at the foreground. Seeing shitty people get what’s coming to them does produce some catharthis but we’re still stuck with them for an entire movie.

The Final Girl is played by Addison Rae, who’s best known for her work on Tiktok and appearing on various Kardashian reality shows and she certainly embodies the main group of characters in that she’s bland, wooden and not someone you’d generally want to spend time with. The town is filled with oddball characters firing blunderbusses in the air, or providing crap diner service, acting as a junior bouncer for a house party and other weirdness, but we’re stuck with a couple of teen jocks whose first idea in any situation is getting in a fight. A killer putting this kind of effort into his murder spree deserves better victims.

While we enjoy the set-up and delivery of the slasher tropes, the final ‘twist’ reveal is not only pointless but actively takes away from the message of the movie. Somebody having dealt with the insanity of Black Friday and how this lunacy clashes with the meaning of Thanksgiving (as I understand it) feels like enough of a motivation. Instead there’s another reason chucked in at the last minute that just isn’t necessary.

This is one of the meanest things I think I’ve said in a review, but Roth’s horror movies always give me the feeling of being self-satisfied, like they’re convinced they’re taking the genre in bold new directions, and it’s never felt earned. As a throwback to a few decades earlier, a tribute to the slasher genre, it’s a fun time. It’s not going to be a break-out hit though.

Rating: SIX out of TEN