Everyone is ready to celebrate Thanksgiving!
At least, if you’re American, you are. I know Canadians have their own festivities. What do the Brits have? Is it Boxing Day? No, that’s Christmas. I don’t know.
What I do know is that Eli Roth finally made a good movie. I know; I’m just as shocked as you are.
I’ve pretty much hated everything he has written and directed. And I’m not just saying that because I’m envious of his friendship with Tarantino. When I heard he got the idea for a hostel while at the pool with Quentin Tarantino, I wanted to strangle the bastard. How dare you! That should be me!
Thanksgiving has been something Eli Roth has talked about doing a feature-length film about for years now, ever since the fake trailer played in between Grindhouse. Maybe even bore that, as this was an idea he and his childhood friend dreamed up when they were kids.
I remember seeing Grindhouse in theaters and the crowd losing their shit over the Thanksgiving trailer. If you walked away talking about anything from Grindhouse, it was usually the crazy-ass trailer for Thanksgiving.
So, did the feature-length film live up to the hype of the trailer we saw in Grindhouse? No. They tamed a lot of it down. Which is to be expected, as things in that trailer went pretty over the top.
That isn’t to say this movie wasn’t gory, because it was indeed a spectacular splatter fest with a ton of over-the-top kills. Just maybe not at the level we saw in that OG trailer.
One scene in particular that comes to mind is the death by trashcan scene, our first official slasher kill. It happened so quickly; however, I kind of missed it going down.
A waitress is fleeing the killer, who is in a car, and she runs to an opened trashcan to get away. As she hops in, she gets cut in two. I assume he rammed the trashcan, and the lid closed on her, slicing her in half. I just missed how it happened—a user error on my part, not the film.
After that, I made it a goal to pay attention to the screen. Which should be a given, but this was a new theater I was going to; it was old, and I hated it and the people seeing it. Apparently, a TikTok star is in this. That’s all I’m willing to say about that. But you can imagine the audience.
One thing I guess I can admire about Eli Roth is that the dude isn’t deep. Normally that would be a bad thing; however, I’ve seen enough “message” horror movies these days; it has gotten old. No, I do not want my Black Christmas remake to be a female empowerment girlboss movie about toxic masculinity in college fraternities.
Thanksgiving could have had a message about consumerism, but instead Eli Roth went for silly, dumb fun. This is not a film that takes itself seriously; thank God for that. I hate movies that are unaware of the tone they should take.
As for the characters, I can’t say I cared about anyone in the movie or remembered a single name. There’s one character, the baseball jock, who is our final girl’s boyfriend. I wasn’t even sure if we were meant to like him or not.
Because I can tell you, I did not. And when our lead gets a new boyfriend, I’m assuming we are made to like him more?
Or maybe, because we have seen Scream, he’s an obvious red herring? He kind of disappears halfway into the movie, and we are teamed up with our final girl and her baseball jock ex.
The funny thing is, in the OG trailer, this character gets his head cut off. No such luck in the movie, sadly.
This is one of those whodunit slashers, like Scream, so everyone we meet is meant to be a red herring. And if you know anything about movies like this, the boyfriend character is always the lead suspect.
I say red herring, but it is pretty obvious who the killer is. This isn’t a perfect film by any means. But it does a lot of things right.
It’s very reminiscent of other slashers. I mentioned Scream a few times, and I will say I enjoyed this a lot more than the newest entry, Scream 6. I think that movie actually kind of stinks, if I’m being honest.
The one film, however, that this shares the most similarities with is My Bloody Valentine. It’s almost the exact same movie, but it’s on Thanksgiving Day and maybe less Canadian.
If I had a complaint, I really wanted this to feel like the OG Thanksgiving trailer. Like a cult 80’s slasher film. I guess this is Eli Roth doing something like a modern remake of My Bloody Valentine, a great 80’s classic that has a modern remake. That is actually pretty good.
My other complaint is that Thanksgiving has the exact same damn ending as the remake of My Bloody Valentine. I will say that I enjoyed the hell out of the movie until the third act, and the ending is absolutely terrible.
This movie has two endings, both ripping off other movies. For some odd reason, Eli Roth ended this movie exactly as he ended the last movie he did, Green Inferno. There has to be an alternate ending somewhere on the cutting room floor because this ending stinks!
But before the ending, there is the beginning. And nothing says Thanksgiving like a Black Friday sale!
I actually found this part pretty funny because I’m currently thinking about getting a waffle maker, and the big setup for Thanksgiving is that a store is doing a give-away for free waffle makers on their Black Friday sale.
This is when we are introduced to our main characters, whose names I am going to need to look up because, like I said, I don’t remember a single one of them.
It’s set in Plymouth, Massachusetts, so everyone has that Massachusetts, Bostony accent. There’s a superstore called RightMart. Jessica, our lead, is the daughter of the store’s owner.
Jessica, her friends, and her boyfriend Bobby are sneaking away from a family Thanksgiving dinner to cut in line for the RightMart sale.
When the growing crowd outside sees them inside taking all the free waffle makers for themselves, they riot and push their way into the store, resulting in the deaths of the store manager’s wife, one of the security guards, and one of the shoppers who got his throat cut on some broken glass.
This is a great setup, by the way. The tension was building as the crowd outside got thirstier for free waffle makers, and the store employees were freaking out as the horde of shoppers were forcing their way in.
Then the chaos as they rampage through the store, stealing waffle makers from dying people… It’s the best thing I think Eli Roth has ever filmed, not counting the scene he did in Inglourious Basterds.
God, praising Eli Roth just feels icky.
This Black Friday disaster sets up the motivations for our killer, as it has now been a year and our group of teens are receiving bizarre texts from an unknown account.
Since the events, Jessica’s boyfriend Bobby left town after his arm was hilariously broken during the riot, ending his promising baseball career. I say hilariously because I dare you not to laugh at how comically broken it gets.
She is now dating Ryan, who we were introduced to earlier in the film and who clearly had a thing for Jess. This is also very reminiscent of My Bloody Valentine, as that film also featured the exact same love triangle, with an ex coming back to town to stir things up.
This film doesn’t really play around with slasher movie tropes; it just uses them in a way that is familiar. almost nostalgic about it. Think of Rogue One, where you just randomly bump into a character you remember from Star Wars. Hey, that’s that thing I know! But instead, it’s slasher tropes.
The first victim on the killer’s list is a waitress who works at the popular town diner that everyone seems to flock to, since this is a small town and this might be the only one there is.
Usually, I’d mock places like that in movies, but I recently moved, and there are absolutely no restaurants anywhere anymore and just one place that everyone frequents.
Lizzie, the waitress was at the riot and was the main cause of the manager’s wife dying as she ran her over with her shopping cart as she was arguing with another rioter about that damn waffle maker.
How the killer looks have also changed since the trailer, giving him a cheap plastic John Carver mask the restaurant has been handing out. Maybe it shows how ignorant I am about history, but I had no idea who John Carver was. I don’t recall ever learning a single thing about him in school.
The design of the killer in the trailer just had him dressed like a pilgrim, but his collar was up, obscuring his face.
I think he looked cooler in the trailer, but it does make a bit more sense to give him a mask. You can’t really do a slasher film these days and not give them a mask to wear.
There’s actually a lot of holiday-themed slasher films. The Christmas and Halloween ones are best known, but then there are the others. Like Tripper, a slasher film where the killer wears a Ronald Reagan mask and kills hippies in the woods. Which I thought was on President’s Day, but I guess not.
Which actually reminds me of the 90’s slasher Uncle Sam, a July 4th slasher film.
Another film that kind of shares some similarities with Thanksgiving would be the 2012 film Silent Night. Not really a remake of Silent Night, Deadly Night, as the name suggests.
Directed by Steven C. Miller, who had so much promise as a director, with The Aggression Scale being the best thing he has done, only to go downhill after that.
Silent Night isn’t too bad, better than the more recent Christmas slasher Christmas Bloody Christmas, where characters didn’t know when to shut the hell up.
Back to Thanksgiving, there really aren’t too many movies based on this holiday. Maybe it’s just too American, with others not really knowing what the hell it even is.
It would be like if England did a Pancake Day slasher film. Yes, I did google crazy British-only holidays. And this one seemed the best fit since this is Eli Roth we’re talking about.
After Lizzie, the waitress, is killed and strung up on the RightMart sign, Jess and her friends get more texts, offering them a seat at the table for Thanksgiving.
Jess goes to the sheriff for help, also hoping to help point out any more potential victims our killer might be after since she and her friends were there that night, filming everything on their phones.
In the trailer, the sheriff is played by Michael Biehn, which would have been so much cooler. I don’t really have anything against Patrick Dempsey; I’ve never watched a single episode of Grey’s Anatomy, so I can’t say I’m a fan. But man, I really wish Michael Biehn was in this.
The next on The Carver’s list, as they have started calling him, is the other security guard who took off when he saw things about to go south that night during the Black Friday riot.
After Carver cuts his head off, he goes after the couple we see in the trailer, which was taken from the film Cutting Class, an early Brad Pitt film.
In Cutting Class and the OG trailer, we see a cheerleader jumping on a trampoline, with the killer shoving something underneath as she does the splits right onto it.
Correction: In Cutting Class, it wasn’t a cheerleader but a fat guy.
In the trailer, it was a knife, and in Cutting Class, it was a flagpole.
Unfortunately, they changed what happens in the trailer. It was the part of the trailer that got the most reactions from people. Instead of landing on the blade while doing the splits, she just gets her foot stabbed. Booo! That part was very disappointing, like the ending. I’m hoping there’s an alternate take on the cutting room floor that will be included with an unrated Director’s Cut release.
Another big event from the trailer is the Thanksgiving Day parade. This part is a tiny bit more faithful to what we originally got, with the biggest change being that Carver is dressed as a clown this time around as he cuts the guy in the turkey costume’s head off.
Carver then kidnaps Jess and her friends and her dad, serving up Jessica’s stepmom as the turkey dinner. In the trailer, this was also another big, shocking, gross-out scene, as I believe it was the grandma, who had been roasted and stuffing shoved up her ass.
And as to be expected, this scene was also tamed down, as she’s still wearing clothes for some reason, and it just isn’t as gross-looking. And it goes without saying: no stuffing.
Jess manages to get away and teams back up with her ex, whom she suspects is the killer, but at this point, you should already know who the killer is.
I don’t think I’ll spoil it for you. I will say that the killer does survive at the end after getting blown up, just like at the end of My Bloody Valentine. He even escapes dressed as a fireman.
And then it ends with a dream faked out, like at the end of Green Inferno. Lame!
However, regardless of the bad ending, I still really enjoyed this movie. I think it’s the best thing Eli Roth has slapped his name on. The writing has also improved; however, that might be because this was co-written by Eli Roth’s friend. So, I’ll give him credit for the script, as I already know the quality Eli Roth has to offer.
The gore was nice, but sadly not as over the top as what the OG trailer showed. The plot is a bit generic, as it really is My Bloody Valentine, but on Thanksgiving.
I’m really struggling with a rating on this one. I know it isn’t for everybody, but you really don’t have many options when it comes to Thanksgiving-themed movies—not many slashers.
So, I think I’m going to give Thanksgiving a SEE IT.
Happy Thanksgiving, everyone! Let your gobble wabble!
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