The initial Thanksgiving trailer seen in Robert Rodriguez and Quentin Tarantino’s Grindhouse is mean, grimy, gratuitous, and relentlessly exploitative. It was always supposed to be, paying homage to the cheap productions that filled those double features decades ago. Making an actual Thanksgiving feature film the exact same way it was depicted in that trailer was never going to work, but it also had to appease the fans that have been willing it into existence. Roth and co-writer Jeff Rendell find the perfect balance with the long-awaited Thanksgiving, pulling off the impossible task of creating a modern (and thoroughly entertaining) slasher with plenty of Grindhouse spirit.
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Thanksgiving begins with a Black Friday riot at a local Plymouth big box store, which results in the (incredibly violent, Final Destination-style) deaths of multiple people in town. One year later, as Plymouth tries to get the November holiday back to normal, a killer donning a mask of colony founder John Carver begins to murder those he feels are responsible for the riot. As Thanksgiving approaches, John Carver is setting his own table with the bodies of his victims, posting updates on social media and tagging a group of teenagers that accidentally incited the entire incident. It’s up to Jessica (Nell Verlaque), her friends, and Sheriff Newlon (Patrick Dempsey) to discover the killer behind the mask before they all end up dead.
While theming a slasher film after a holiday may seem gimmicky on the surface, Thanksgiving is anything but. This is a straight-up, tried and true slasher film, the likes of which we’ve largely been missing in recent years. There’s an element of camp to the whole thing — brilliantly established in the opening Black Friday sequence that sets a darkly fun and engaging tone — but that camp element never gives way to full-on comedy, as has been the case with so many contemporary slashers. Thanksgiving is able to slice through the gore and thrills with a bit of silliness and some laughs here and there, yet it always veers back towards the thrills and violence precisely when it needs to.
Roth became known early in his career for carnage and gore. The likes of Hostel and The Green Inferno put torture and excessive bloodshed front and center, making them hard to sit through for some. There’s only so much you can do with dark, gruesome violence before it all feels unnecessary, but Thanksgiving represents an evolution for Roth. The violence in this film pushes the boundaries of what we’re used to seeing lately, and it never shies away from its goriest bits. It can be absolutely gnarly at times, especially when it pulls from a couple of key scenes from the original Grindhouse trailer. But there’s a layer of excitable, demented glee laying over the entire film like a blanket. A particularly gruesome kill will make you squirm or grab the person sitting next to you, but we’re all in on the joke this time around. Instead of placing viewers in the room with victims, a la Hostel, Roth slyly pulls you behind the camera next to him, almost as if he’s nudging your ribs and leaning over to say, “Oh man, you’re gonna love this part.”
For fans of the original Thanksgiving trailer, you’re going to be satisfied by how the story is actually translated into a feature. It doesn’t have that exploitative tone, but it doesn’t hold itself back for the sake of a modern audience. It’s easy to tell just how big of an influence the original Scream was for Roth here. It’s not the instant all-timer, “reset the entire genre” type of movie that was, but it did learn all the right lessons; something so many Scream-copycats of the 2000s failed at.
There’s also a good dash of Final Destination sprinkled on top, which makes Thanksgiving even more of a romp that’s best enjoyed with as many people as you can pack into a room. We’ve all come to expect when a killer is about to do something crazy, but there are a few truly unhinged “accidents” in this movie that turn things all the way up to 11 and are sure to have at least a couple people in every theater shouting involuntarily at the screen. There’s a particular moment involving a parade float and a pickup truck that’s sure to be both a monumental crowd-pleaser and one of the biggest cover-your-eyes scenes of the year.
As for the murder mystery itself, there’s nothing incredibly surprising going on in Thanksgiving, but that’s never the focus. The killer is revealed —there’s a good chance you’ll see it coming — and they help deliver a great finale. An ax-wielding killer yelling “There will be no leftovers” in front of a giant inflatable turkey will never not be a fantastic time at the movies.
Thanksgiving is the best directorial effort of Eli Roth’s career, and I don’t think it’s particularly close. The thrills are good, the gore is great, and I’m thankful for the bountiful harvest of slasher goodness the film provides. At long last, another film finally gets to join Planes, Trains and Automobiles in the great Turkey Day film canon. As always, the greatest gifts come from the most unexpected places.
Rating: 4 out of 5
Thanksgiving arrives in theaters on November 17th.
