Director – Eli Roth, Screenplay – Jeff Rendell, Story – Jeff Rendell & Eli Roth, Producers – Roger Birnbaum, Jeff Rendell & Eli Roth, Photography – Milan Chadima, Music – Brandon Roberts, Visual Effects – Soho VFX (Supervisors – Berj Bannayan & Keith Sellers), Special Effects Supervisor – Andrew Verhoeven, Makeup Effects Design – Adrien Morot, Production Design – Peter Mihaichuk. Production Company – Dragonfly Entertainment/EMP Productions/TSG Entertainment.
Cast
Nell Verlaque (Jessica Wright), Patrick Dempsey (Sheriff Eric Newlon), Jalen Thomas Brooks (Bobby Di Stasi), Milo Manheim (Ryan Baker), Tomaso Sanelli (Evan Fletcher), Rick Hoffman (Thomas Wright), Gina Gershon (Amanda Collins), Gabriel Davenport (Claude ‘Scuba’ Dybing), Ty Victor Olsson (Mitch Collins), Joe Delfin (McCarthy), Jenna Warren (Yulia), Addison Rae (Gaby), Shailyn Griffin (Amy), Mika Amonson (Lonnie), Jordan Kyle Poole (Jacob), James Goldman (Scott), Amanda Barker (Lizzie McMullan), Tim Dillon (Manny), Russell Yuen (Detective Peter Chu), Jeff Teravainen (Deputy Bret Labelle), Derek McGrath (Mayor Cantin), Frank J. Zupancic (Yulia’s Dad), Karen Cliche (Kathleen)
Plot
It is Thanksgiving in the town of Plymouth, Massachusetts. Crowds are lined up for Black Friday sale at the Right Mart warehouse store. Jessica, the daughter of owner Thomas Wright, skips the crowds and goes in the employees’ entrance with several school friends. Seeing others flaunting their privilege inside causes a riot among the shoppers who stampede the store and break in. The ensuing chaos causes several deaths. One year later, it is nearing Thanksgiving again and Thomas Wright is preparing to open the store for Black Friday. The headless body of a woman who was one of the rioters is found placed atop the Right Mart sign. A figure dressed in a John Carver mask and costume then begins taunting the teenagers who were inside Right Mart with a video link as each of them is killed.
Eli Roth has been a consistent name at the forefront of the horror genre ever since appearing with Cabin Fever (2002), which gained a culty appeal for a time. What put Roth on the map was Hostel (2005), a film that pushed screen sadism and torture to the envelope and begat the Torture Porn phenomenon. Since then, Roth has made the likes of Hostel Part II (2007), The Green Inferno (2013), Knock Knock (2015), the remake of Death Wish (2018) and even a children’s films The House With a Clock in Its Walls (2018).
Thanksgiving is very much a homage to the 1980s Slasher Film. Thanksgiving is surprisingly one of the holiday titles that was never used back in the heyday amid the scramble to set a film on every single holiday date following Halloween (1978). We had Friday the 13th (1980), Mother’s Day (1980), Prom Night (1980), Graduation Day (1981), Happy Birthday to Me (1981), My Bloody Valentine (1981), New Year’s Evil (1981) and April Fool’s Day (1986). The nearest we came to this was Black Friday (2021), which is not precisely a Thanksgiving film but is set around the same Black Friday sale that Thanksgiving is and features shoppers turned into zombies. There had also been Amityville Thanksgiving (2022), which I haven’t seen.
Thanksgiving originally began as one of the fake trailers in Grindhouse (2007), a slasher parody made by Roth and his childhood friend Jeff Rendell, who also co-writes/co-produces the film here. A surprising number of the Grindhouse trailers have been subsequently made into feature films with Robert Rodrgguez’s Machete (2010) and Jason Eisner’s Hobo with a Shotgun (2011). The original trailer has no real plot but Roth retains some of the novelty deaths – the girl on the trampoline, the person dressed as a turkey mascot beheaded in the middle of a parade and the body served up on the Thanksgiving table. The original has been cleaned up somewhat and comes missing some of the trailer’s more memorable line “White meat, dark meat, all will be carved”, although does still retain the line “There will be no leftovers.”
John Carver sneaks up on Nell Verlaque
Still, Thanksgiving is still very much a work that draws on the 80s model of the slasher film, an era when Eli Roth was growing up. There’s the holiday title and the maniac killer in the trademark mask; there’s the line-up of teenagers being punished for the crime they conducted in the past; the killer with the traumatic event that proves their snapping point that pushes them to enact justice; as well as a line-up of novelty killings that all wind in some aspect of Thanksgiving. The identity of the killer is also one that floats around a number of possible suspects where Roth pulls off quite a decent surprise reveal.
Eli Roth’s films leave me fairly divided. Films like Hostel and Death Wish seem to have a desire to push on-screen sadism in often unpleasant ways, while The Green Inferno became overrun by Roth’s contempt for the liberal characters. Roth’s most unabashedly enjoyable film in many ways is still his first Cabin Fever, where he leavens his enthusiasm for gore with an undeniable sense of humour.
I had no idea which way Thanksgiving would go but I immediately began to get into it from the first twelve minutes during which Roth stages a Black Friday sale massacre with one victim getting their throat slit on the shattered glass of the front door, another getting their hand crushed and Karen Cliche being scalped after she is knocked over and her hair caught in the wheel of a shopping trolley. It is an entertainingly full tilt way to open a film.
The killer in the John Carver mask
Thereafter, Roth manages to contrive an entertaining series of novelty death despatches that rival the best of the 80s slasher heyday. Amanda Barker has her face placed on a hot stove and then against a freezer door tearing half her cheek off, before diving into a dumpster to flee the killer in a car only to have her body severed in two as the dumpster lid comes down on her. Jenna Warren has two corn skewers jabbed into her ears and is then thrown onto a buzzsaw to be gutted. Tomaso Sanelli gets his head bashed in with a meat tenderizer. Gina Gershon is placed in an oven with a meat thermometer in her side – later in one of the film’s most grotesque scenes a slice of meat from her body is served up to her husband (Rick Hoffman). In the most entertaining of these, Shailyn Griffin does acrobatics on a trampoline only to find that someone has placed knives underneath as she comes bouncing down on them.
Roth approaches the standard characters of the slasher film with a certain knowing cynicism and dark sense of humour that makes this a refreshing change from say the bland line-up of faces we get in say the most recent Scream films. Admittedly, the film’s Final Girl Nell Verlaque is a little deficient in the personality stakes but the film provides a solid and surprisingly enjoyable run through of the basics, which are well done on all counts.
Almost as soon as Thanksgiving was released, we saw a series of John Carver action figure also released, along with news that Eli Roth had signed on to make a sequel. All of which suggests we might be on the threshold of the new horror franchise for the 2020s.
