I confess that I have never been much of a fan of Eli Roth, the man behind such over-the-top barf bag movies as the first two Hostel films and The Green Inferno. Although he does have an encyclopedic knowledge of the most outré corners of horror cinema and an undisguised zeal to create the wildest and most audacious examples of the genre imaginable—the kind that actually live up to the promises of the lurid posters, trailers and titles—the films themselves have tended to be little more than collections of barf bag brutality barely held together by narratives and characters that are flat and unconvincing even by the standards of the films he is trying to evoke. Watching them is like sitting down to dinner next to a 12-year-old describing every grisly photo in the latest issue of Fangoria with such hyped-up eagerness that their chewed-up food is on constant display during their monologuing—while the sheer enthusiasm can be entertaining for a few minutes, it just becomes exhausting and nauseating (and not in a good way) after a while.
This might be why the best thing that he has done as a filmmaker was his contribution to the fake trailers that made up the midsection of Grindhouse, a deliriously demented preview for a super-sleazy holiday-themed slasher film by the name of Thanksgiving in which a character dressed as a Pilgrim went around carving unsuspecting people (including one notorious shot involving a horny cheerleader and a knife sticking up from the trampoline on which she was jumping and doing the splits) building up to a final image that somehow evoked the finales of both The Texas Chain Saw Massacre and The Cook, the Thief, His Wife and Her Lover. For those with a working knowledge of the avalanche of cheapo horror films that were ground out in the early 80s in an attempt to cash in on the startling success of Halloween and Friday the 13th, it was a perfect distillation of both those films and the lengths that distributors would go to in order to lure viewers in. More importantly, because the whole thing clocked in at about 2 minutes total, it meant that Roth could get straight to the Good Parts without having to deal the stuff that dragged his features down, such as the shabby plotting, the clunky characters and the occasional hints of rabid xenophobia.
Now, following in the footsteps of Robert Rodriguez, who transformed his Grindhouse trailer contribution Machete into a brief action franchise, Roth has expanded Thanksgiving into a full feature film that tries to bring the charms, such as they were, of the slasher movies of old into a contemporary setting in a relatively straightforward, albeit heightened, manner that eschews the ironic meta-movie approach utilized by the likes of Scream and its imitators. To give Roth credit, he and co-writer Jeff Randell have constructed a film that the aforementioned 12-year-old would be able to dine out on for weeks on its goopy excesses. That said, your mileage may vary depending on your tolerance for such things. Put it this way—if you read the first paragraph of this review and found yourself unable to place the name Fangoria, you might as well check out now because this film is definitely not for you.
Like many films of this type, it begins with a traumatic past event that will prove to be the inspiration for the kill spree to come. This one involves the tragic events one Thanksgiving when the Black Friday sale at a big box store in Plymouth, Massachusetts in which the giant crowd yearning to get their hands on cheap waffle irons devolved into a stampede and riot that left several people dead or badly injured. Among those in the store at the time is Jessica (Nell Verlaque), the sweet daughter of the store owner (Rick Hoffman), who slipped in with some friends through the employee entrance in a move that helped spark the riot in the first place and whose boyfriend, ace athlete Bobby (Jalen Thomas Brooks), who suffered a career-ending injury in the chaos.
The film then picks up one year later as Jessica’s father and loathsome stepmother (Karen Cliche) are making plans to have yet another Black Friday sale, despite the protestations of many locals, who feel that the family literally got away with murder—the security tapes of that horrible incident went missing and allowed them to escape prosecution. Jessica is not thrilled by this and wants to just get through the holiday with her friends and new nice guy boyfriend Ryan (Milo Manheim)—Bobby vanished after getting hurt and hasn’t been seen since—but that becomes impossible once those security tapes starting popping up on line with her and her pals being tagged on them. This is unsettling enough but quickly gets worse once someone wearing a tacky plastic Pilgrim mask starts killing involved with the riot in a number of gruesome ways. As the body count quickly rises and the affable town sheriff (Patrick Dempsey) tries to keep the peace, Jessica and her friend try (and largely fail) to avoid getting slaughtered themselves while trying to figure out who the killer could be, a suspect list that increases with the discovery that Bobby has suddenly returned to town.
Outside of the stuff involving the Black Friday riot and the viral videos (which become a key aspect of the plotting as it goes on), Thanksgiving is an old-fashioned slasher film through and through, albeit one produced in a more elaborate and heightened manner than its antecedents. (Many viewers may find themselves wishing that Roth had utilized the grainy, grimy look of the trailer instead of the slick, contemporary visual style employed here.) The problem is that the film is so meticulous in its replication of this particular cinematic style that it winds up evoking the flaws that made the majority of those films such a chore to watch for anyone looking for something more than excessive gore and bits of nudity. Most of the characters are either boring or actively annoying, which means that the scenes in which they are stalked and killed aren’t particularly suspenseful because we frankly don’t care if they live or die. The mystery aspect is also kind of a dud because, despite the large number of red herrings on display throughout, most viewers should be able to figure out the identity of the killer fairly early on. Although the film is certainly bloody—very, very bloody—Roth never really generates any legitimate suspense and his eagerness to jam as much mayhem into the proceedings means that the film gets a bit exhausting at times.
And yet, despite the occasional cloddishness, Thanksgiving does have its undeniable mutant charms. As the eventual Final Girl, Verlaque has a nice low-key presence that serves as an effective counterbalance for the mayhem surrounding her. As for the gory set pieces—which will presumably be the key selling point for most potential viewers—they certainly icky enough and some of them do demonstrate a certain fiendish invention. (That said, the previously cited trampoline sequence, which is replicated here, is still the high or low point, depending on your perspective.) There are a couple of moments demonstrating genuine wit and flair in the dialogue, including an especially amusing moment in which a character delivers a hilariously impassioned speech about Black Sabbath that end with a perfect punchline. Perhaps most significantly, Roth has managed to somewhat tamp down the obnoxious frat-boy-with-a-DGA-card attitude that has permeated most of his earlier films, especially in regards to his depiction of anyone he doesn’t see as 100% All-American, though given the premise and the facade of the killer, I suppose that was inevitable.
To tell the truth, my immediate reaction to Thanksgiving was not particularly favorable—although vastly preferable to the majority of Roth’s filmography, it was still basically a clone of a form of filmmaking that wasn’t exactly high on the artistic scale to begin with. After thinking about it for a little bit, however, I find my thoughts towards it mellowing to some extent. Yes, it is a dumb and super-gory slasher movie but, outside of the social satire underlining the whole Black Friday sequence, it isn’t really trying to do anything more than that and while its goals may be modest, at least it achieves them, which is more than I can say for the pair of catastrophically bad bits of overblown Oscar bait that I happened to see just before it. If you have made it to this point in this review, you might find yourself embracing its cornucopia of gruesomeness as well—just don’t make any post-screening dinner plans.