Thanksgiving is an odd film because it looks and feels like a decent budget was brought to bear a on a B-movie concept, yet $15 million is safely in the lower end of “mid-budget” if far from a student film. Eli Roth here adapts a fictional trailer he made for the Quentin Tarantino-Robert Rodriguez exploitation homage Grindhouse into a full-length high school slasher. It is an over-the-top horror comedy. The characters are believable if exaggerated. It’s a perfect movie for the moment, using contemporary technology apparently to ground the experience of the character without beign so intertwined as to make the film illegible to older audiences. It’s hardly essential, but it’s a good time.
Much of the conversation on Film Twitter and quite a bit on film podcasts and in film trade publications fixates on the hold superhero-based blockbusters, especially Disney’s, have on the motion picture industry box office. Some of that influence is clearly waning, with every month a new death knell. In the past few years we’ve also seen the reintroduction of broad teen comedies and, even more recently, nostalgia for older Gen Z and Younger Millennials is being targeted through the post-Harry Potter YA adaptations, starting with a Hunger Games prequel.
Thanksgiving steps into this arena as a sort of breath of fresh air, a movie for teens and adults that is enjoyable and creatively violent if not cinematically revolutionary. It is a competent work most experimental in the ways it exaggerates or loosens the laws of physics to maximize the bloody spectacle of its kills. It’s not quite Looney Tunes, but it’s safely beyond criticisms of being constrained by realism.
The film begins in a version of Plymouth, Massachusetts where the Thanksgiving holiday is all the rage because of cultural heritage. A local businessman, Rick Hoffman (Suits, Billions) as Thomas Wright, patron of Right Mart, is enjoying the holiday in his mansion while he dispatches employees like Ty Olsson’s Mitch Collins to begin Black Friday. At the Collins home, Gina Gershon (playing Mitch’s wife Amanda) presents to her family in another home a terrible-looking turkey. Patrick Dempsey (Lewiston, Maine native) appears as Sheriff Eric Newlon with a terrible Massachusetts accent. A riot breaks out at Right Mart after the main group of teens sneak in (privilege of relation to the business’s owner) and their most obnoxious member (Tomaso Sanelli as Evan) taunts the crowd. The understaffed security and clerks alongside shoppers are assaulted and, in some cases, killed, as the film introduces us to comically grotesque violence. The film picks up a year later after a video of the horror is put online before a spree killer begins a Thanksgiving-themed murder-revenge tour which continues the over-the-top blood-and-guts show as the teen protagonists search to find the killer.
Nell Verlaque plays Jessica, Wright family heiress, kindest human in her friend group, and focal point of a love triangle involving hometown baseball hero Bobby (Jalen Thomas Brooks) and intelligent asshole Ryan (Milo Manheim). TikTok star Addison Rae plays Evan’s girlfriend and Jessica’s bestie Gabby, Gabriel Davenport makes his theatrical debut as Evan’s best friend and fellow football star Scuba, Jenna Warren rounds-out the friend circle as Yulia, first-gen American and Scuba’s girlfriend. They’re all capable but none are so memorable I’m dying to see them in something else, though Sanelli and Manheim both succeed at being hateable on screen, which is a skill, and Verlaque could have a fun career as a scream queen. Suffice to say about the performances that they’re all good in relation to each other and I’d watch them in something again, but I’m not dying to line up for their next pictures. Much like the plot, this feels like an extension of old exploitation films – star power isn’t the point, spectacle is. The biggest names are obviously Dempsey (a key figure throughout the film) and Gershon (not in it nearly as long). The gorgeous Karen Clarke (Saw VI) plays Jessica’s greedy, meddlesome stepmother. The most memorable bit performance might be Joe Delfin as McCarty, a slightly-zany townie that throws an annual party for the local kids and tries to equip the youth to defend themselves from the killer. Everyone is capable, no one blows me away.
Still, the film is adequate, even above average. I’d certainly recommend it to anyone looking for a good scary time in the theaters. My main point of comparison is last year’s Smile, which is more self-serious, has worse dialog, and yet totally captivated me with its sense of dread, something this film does not quite do, or even really attempt, although its funnier mystery held my attention. This is a tighter film as far as its implications, a satire of American consumerism overtaking the familial and communal meanings of holidays. It’s a nice watch with last year’s Violent Night, though perhaps better fit together.
Three other films have been spin-offs of 2007’s Grindhouse – two Machete movies (2010 and 2013), plus Hobo with a Shotgun (2011). I don’t know why this one took sixteen years, but I’m glad it happened and I hope it encourages more wide-release lower-budget horror. It may awaken a love of horror, horror-comedy, slashers, or other exploitation and exploitation-derived cinema in its audience. It also would make a good double-feature with Bottoms. We can always be grateful for variety, though not everything enjoyable is a masterpiece. It’s more fun than I’ve had at the last several superhero movies I’ve seen, and I like it better than Fast X, if not near as much as the most recent Mission Impossible. It cost one-tenth of any of those films to produce and seems like a labor of love. That’s something, even if it isn’t everything. This hardly feels like an essential film, but I love to see more holiday horror.
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