Thanksgiving review
Hello everyone and welcome to my blog. For those who know me you know about my love for horror films so once a month I’m going to review and discuss a scary flick. We’ll look at the classics, some new films, and I want your suggestions on what I should review. I’ll do my best to cover all the different genres within the genre – slashers, ghosts, monsters, etc.
SPOILER ALERT! – These will be reviews so if you haven’t seen the movie you’ll want to watch it first before you read this. Let’s do this.
thanksgiving
There will be no leftovers… You were waiting for this, weren’t you? Ever since you saw the faux trailer back in 2007 during Grindhouse. Well, at least I was! As I’ve written about before when reviewing Cabin Fever – which is a film I love – I am quite the fan of one Mr. Eli Roth and his work, so you know I was ready to see this. Soon after that trailer delighted audiences, it became known that this would indeed become a feature film. We had to wait quite a while, but here we are.
Who isn’t terrified of Black Friday shopping, right? This film begins with a serious tongue-in-cheek scene of a store in Plymouth, Massachusetts getting ready to open on Thanksgiving evening and is eventually overrun by deal-driven psychotic shoppers – which to my delight include great Boston accents - who trample each other. During all of this, we meet the teenage group who snuck into the store early and quite frankly caused the stampede. One dude gets his neck cut by glass in the door but must get that waffle iron! It all ends after the Sheriff fires his gun in a moment of crowd control. One year later we are back with our teenage group as turkey day approaches and the Black Friday deals are ready to happen again even after the previous year’s massacre. The group all gets tagged on a mysterious photo on Instagram of a Thanksgiving table set up with their names. Soon people who were involved in the Black Friday riot begin to get murdered including some of the teens by someone in a pilgrim outfit and a John Carver mask (yes, he was a real pilgrim on the Mayflower) There is an already scheduled Thanksgiving parade where they want to lure the killer out but that does not go well. Carver kidnaps the remaining people from last year’s riot and creates a truly twisted Thanksgiving table spread. He ties up and seasons the store owner’s wife and cooks her in a giant oven and serves her as a turkey at the table. No holding back on that scene of her burning to death in an oven. Oh, man! Everyone is tied up but the store owner’s daughter Jessica and another friend escape through the woods. The sheriff finally meets up with her, but she notices he has prickers from the woods on his shoes and realizes he is Carver. While she was waiting for him, she found a smartphone in an evidence bag and is now live streaming him confessing to what he did. She and her friend finally manage to kill Carver, but she is haunted by his burning body in a nice little scare at the very end.
So, I’m into Eli Roth’s take on the slasher film. No matter what horror subgenre he does he always tries to honor the films before him. It has all the things you’d want including gory deaths and of course, some good laughs. While the oven scene might take the cake, there is a woman who gets decapitated by a dumpster, a girl who gets torn apart by a table saw, numerous decapitations, and a cheerleader landing on a trampoline with knives sticking out of it. I thought the first two acts were good enough and enjoyed the final third of the film. It became a whodunit almost as there was plenty of misdirection throughout the film. You needed to pay attention as it’s not just blood and guts. It almost felt like an action film during the parade scene when Carver kidnaps the rest of the group. The Thanksgiving table scene was pretty brutal with the cooked woman dressed out like a turkey and one of the kids getting his heads smashed.
Aside from the usual formula of slasher film, this movie was a good social commentary. That opening black Friday scene was great. Thanksgiving is supposed to be a holiday but all we care about is getting a deal on some stupid appliance we don’t need and going to any length to get it. Great satirization. This movie really takes place in the Gen Z world. The kids getting tagged on Instagram as one of the main drivers and their responses and DM’s to the situation. The Thanksgiving table scene and Jessica getting the confession are both live streamed on their phones. Anyone can now literally livestream anything and the scary thing is people have streamed horrible things. I believe someone who shot a news reporter some years ago did so while streaming it on his phone. You could go and make a standard slasher film that could take place anywhere and anytime, but I like that this is relevant to the here and now.
This is certainly not at Cabin Fever heights for me, but I did enjoy this. Way more meat to it than a pedestrian slasher. Will it make money and become a cult classic because it’s called Thanksgiving? Yeah, probably. But what’s wrong with that? Halloween is the king of holiday-themed horror and now we have a prince for Thanksgiving. All were carved!!
Enjoy the trailer - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RvNA1hnqIZU