Did Eli Roth prepare us a cornucopia of horror delights with Thanksgiving, or is he serving up an over-stuffed turkey?
One of my favorite in-theater experiences ever was going to see Grindhouse with my wife back in (good grief) 2007. The atmosphere was so electric and the material was so unpredictable, it was just about the most fun I’ve had going to the movies. If you are unaware, Grindhouse consisted of a Robert Rodriguez feature, Planet Terror, and a Quentin Tarantino feature, Death Proof, along with a handful of fake trailers that leaned into to the grindhouse aesthetic and bridged the two movies. After its theatrical run, the Weinstein Company inexplicably broke the experience apart and jettisoned the trailers, irrevocably destroying the magic that made that first viewing experience so memorable. One of those trailers was for Thanksgiving, directed by Eli Roth and meant to mimic a late seventies video nasty with a bit of tongue and cheek approach to excessive brutality. It was gross and funny in equal measure, definitely a stand-out moment from the evening. Little did we know that, sixteen years later, the director would resurrect the idea for a full-blown slasher flick that incorporates many of the concepts from the trailer.
Roth is a known horror junkie and historian, so it shouldn’t be a surprise that Thanksgiving does not feel like a modern horror flick. The current trends in the industry are thematically dense prestige horror, and glossy, halfway-neutered, PG-13 fright flicks with limited ambitions. This film is a complete throwback to the early 80’s, when the formula for hard-R slashers was followed to a tee. The action takes place in a small town across two consecutive Thanksgiving seasons. As is often the case with these types of movies, there is a tragedy that occurs in year one that must be avenged the following year by a mysterious assailant who could be pulled from among a variety of potentially affronted parties. There is a virtuous final girl who we are clearly meant to root for, a slew of assholes who exist to be punished for their various moral and ethical shortcomings, and a small group of ancillary characters that seem nice enough except for the fact that one of them will definitely end up being the killer. Roth didn’t need to burn any calories on the basic structure of the plot because it has existed for more than forty years. Instead, he gets to focus on the things he really cares about, which are seasonally-themed, grotesque kills. We get an over-the-top Black Friday riot set piece, and a destructive Thanksgiving parade set piece. We get a pilgrim-themed killer and, in the film’s piece de resistance, the most lunatic dinner table scene since The Texas Chainsaw Massacre.
I had a lot of fun with Thanksgiving. I was not terrified or challenged in any way, but I was fully engaged. Roth is not going to give you any dead space or subpar kills, so the movie moves briskly and has you anticipating what silly, gross, or wtf moment is going to come next. If I’m honest, I don’t think that Eli has turned into the horror visionary that he was touted as in the early 2000s when Hostel and Cabin Fever were highlights of a very down time for horror cinema, and I think that for all the effort that he puts into the murders in this movie, they are overall lacking in panache. Still, effort goes a long way in my book and it is easy to get absorbed in how much fun he is clearly having in the creation of all this mayhem. This is an easy one to throw on every couple of years, perhaps as a seasonally appropriate come-down from the flurry of October horror-watching. As sick as it may seem to some people, this type of movie can function as delightful background noise/comfort food for those of us who traffic in the genre as extensively as I do.
And the original:
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