Movie review - Thanksgiving

Thanksgiving **1/2 (out of 5) Back in 2007, Quentin Tarantino rounded up some pals for a release called Grindhouse, intended to re-create the experience of going to a drive-in for a schlocky double feature, complete with jingles for the snack bar and fake trailers for other movies. Funny thing about that.

The Grindhouse package did fairly well, but the trailers outstripped its performance buy a wide margin. Robert Rodriguez’ Machete clip turned into two wildly successful (okay, highly successful for most; wildly for me) comical gorefests, with a third on the way, and boosting Danny Trejo into the stratosphere of celebrity. Hobo with a Shotgun (great title; pretty entertaining movie) became a cultish outing for Rutger Hauer. Two other trailers stayed where they were – Edgar Wright’s Don’t, and Rob Zombie’s Werewolf Women of the S. S. Eli Roth’s Thanksgiving teaser preview is now the third of the quintet (Hobo wasn’t included in all of them) to spawn features.

In the others, much of what was in the trailers was repeated in the movies. Same for Thanksgiving, though the original was set in the 1970s, and this one is current. The family that owns a gig box store in Plymouth, MA, opens its Black Friday sale on Thursday night, causing anger among many, and a mob waiting to rush in for the bargains. When the owner’s teen daughter and some friends are seen jumping the gun, the crowd goes nuts and storms the store, killing and injuring quite a few of their fellow townsmen while fighting each other for the merch they crave.

Skip ahead a year. The disaster led to multiple lawsuits and claims by the victims, spurring gestures of atonement by the ownership that still left many grudges unmet. The town, as usual, celebrates its Pilgrim heritage with a parade, and many people donning those costumes, including masks of their first mayor, bearing a fortuitous (for the audience) resemblance to the face covering on the dude from V for Vendetta. Despite the previous disaster, they plan to open on Thanksgiving night again, but with more security in place. Many are displeased.

The early social satire about greed, consumerism and Black Friday feeding frenzies soon yields to standard slasher traditions, as a mayorally masked figure starts killing folks off in a variety of gruesome ways, with the owning family and those young friends primarily targeted. In a mashup of the Scream and Final Destination franchises, there’s suspense in “who was that masked man?”, and delightfully complex and graphic methods to racking up his (or possibly her) body count. The faint of heart should pick another movie.

Roth’s concept unfortunately outpaces its execution. The entire cast consists of all the standard types doing all the standard things in completely unmemorable ways. Some of it seems like an homage; at other times, a grimly amusing spoof of the genre. Also, most of the proceedings are severely underlit – presumably to ramp up the foreboding factor, but actually obscuring the action, leaving viewers less sure of who did what to whom in more than a few scenes. Given Roth’s solid horror credentials, including Cabin Fever and the Hostel series, one might reasonably expect a punchier finished product. Despite its shortcomings – including an odd ending - slasher fans will still find about as much carnage as they expected when they bought the tickets.

(Thanksgiving opens in theaters 11/17/23)