THANKSGIVING (2023)

 

DIRECTED by Eli Roth

SCREENPLAY by Jeff Rendell from a story by Eli Roth & Jeff Rendell, Based on Thanksgiving (Grindhouse fake trailer) by Eli Roth & Jeff Rendell.

STARRING - Patrick Dempsey as Sheriff Eric Newlon

Nell Verlaque as Jessica Wright

Addison Rae as Gaby

Jalen Thomas Brooks as Bobby

Milo Manheim as Ryan

Tomaso Sanelli as Evan

Gabriel Davenport as Scuba

Jenna Warren as Yulia

Ty Victor Olsson as Mitch Collins

Tim Dillon as Manny

Russell Yuen as Detective Peter Chu

Karen Cliche as Kathleen

Derek McGrath as Mayor Cantin

Joe Delfin as McCarty

Jeff Teravainen as Deputy Bret Labelle

Rick Hoffman as Thomas Wright

Gina Gershon as Amanda Collins

Alex Armbruster as the performer of John Carver

PLOT - One year ago, in the town of Plymouth Massachusetts a Black Friday sale went hideously wrong. A riot broke out in the local store and several people where killed.

A year later - on Thanksgiving - the survivors of the riot are being killed off one by one by a masked killer dressed as John Carver (one of the pilgrim founding fathers).

Who is the killer ? What grudge does he bear against the survivors and who will live to see Christmas begin ?

PERFORMANCES - Thanksgiving is a movie based upon one of the fake trailers seen in Quentin Tarantino and Robert Rodriguez's Grindhouse. It followed Machete and Hobo With A Shotgun into becoming a full length feature film in it's own right.

What we get is a fairly traditional slasher movie - done in an 80's style but set in the present day. As such all the characters follow the traditional slasher tropes. Our final girl is Jessica Wright (Nell Verlaque) who is the daughter of Thomas Wright (Rick Hoffman) - the owner of the superstore where the Black Friday riot (and deaths) took place. Thomas and his family are being targeted by the killer who appears to blame them for the deaths, in turn Jessica and her group of friends are the first ones to be threatened (it's pretty much guilt by association at this point).

Jessica has quite a few complex relationships in the movie. She has a strained relationship with her dad - he hasn't been around as much as she would have liked whilst growing up, busy as he was setting up his business empire. Interestingly, Thomas is never portrayed as a bad man - he's not the usual greedy capitalist scumbag that you normally get in this type of story, he's actually quite a sympathetic figure - he's just a weak, flawed man who isn't very good at relating to the people closest to him.

Jessica's love life is equally unstable - she's still friends with her ex - Bobby (Jalen Thomas Brooks) - who was with her the night of the riot. This severely pisses off her new boyfriend Ryan (Milo Manheim) who appears to be a bit of a control freak. Verlaque is pretty good as Jessica and makes for a sympathetic main protagonist.

As the killings continue and the body bags start to mount up we get several suspects that the script leads us to believe may well turn out to be the murderer. Is it Mitch (Ty Olsen) - the store manager who's pregnant wife was killed in the riot ? Could it be Bobby who's promising Baseball career was destroyed due to injuries he sustained in the tragedy? Or could it even be jealous Ryan just doing it for attention ? 

Town Sheriff Eric Newton (Patrick Dempsey - who's excellent in this) certainly has his work cut out for him as the suspects and eviscerated corpses mount up like frozen Turkeys in a supermarket's freezer aisle.

When the revelation of who the killer is arrives (and no, I'm not going to say who it is), it's both shocking and strangely satisfying. It's one of those moments where you suddenly think "oh Yeah - that's why he said that earlier on". The killer,once revealed, comes over as genuinely psycho, it's a very strong performance all round.

VIOLENCE - The kills and gore in this movie really are it's big selling point - they're INSANELY OTT (and darkly humerous too).

In the first few minutes we get the Black Friday riot - a security guard gets crushed to death when he gets caught under the feet of a mob of stampeding bargain hunters, a shopper slashes his throat by accident on a broken glass door (this still doesn't stop him from getting his new food mixer, even though he bleeds to death before he can pay for it) and a woman gets scalped by a shopping trolley...AND THIS IS JUST THE PROLOGUE !!!! Talk about starting as you mean to go on...

We then hop forward a year and the killings begin in earnest - a woman is cut in half by an unfortunate incident with a car and a metal bin, a young man's neck is broken when the killer twists his head around a full 360 degrees, a trampoline girl is stabbed from underneath the trampoline she's jumping on, a man is beheaded whilst wearing a Thanksgiving turkey outfit, a young girl's neck is punctured by a corkscrew and her blood is poured into a wine glass. This is a SERIOUSLY unhinged film

Most memorable of all though is when a woman is tied up, basted in cooking oil and thrown into an oven to be baked alive as a human turkey at a twisted Thanksgiving dinner. She's then fed to her husband (unsurprisingly he pukes at this). After watching this movie you'll never see cooked Turkey in the same light ever again.

SFX - All of the above is rendered lovingly in good old fashioned 80's style practical effects - and is all the better for it.

RATING - This is an extremely fun slasher movie, whilst it's not entirely original that's really not the point of this film - it's a festive themed slasher made by a big fan of the genre FOR fans of the genre.

The kills are great, probably the most inventive part of the movie,  gloriously funny and twisted.

The other thing I like about this film is it's atmosphere - it's a perfect late November horror film - you've still got all the Autumn colours and some left over Halloween decorations can be seen, but there's also that Christmas feeling there as well. Here in the UK we don't celebrate Thanksgiving but I think from now on watching this film in the last week of November is going to become a new yearly tradition for me.

5 human Turkeys out of 5.

A great way to end this year's Halloween/Autumn celebrations.