THANKSGIVING - Mark Reviews Movies

Thanksgiving, Sony Pictures Entertainment

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Review by Mark Dujsik | November 16, 2023

Thanksgiving is a much, much better movie than the fake trailer upon which it's based. That's not saying much, of course, since the short, which played as part of the Grindhouse compilation from 2007, was about two minutes long. It also showed director Eli Roth pretty much missing the joke of the material at every second (It was bad then, and the faux trailer's decided misogyny, which wasn't funny 16 years ago, has aged in an even worse manner through contemporary eyes).

Roth and screenwriter Jeff Rendell don't have much with which to work, in other words, so it's refreshing to see that the two have taken the gimmicky premise (What would it be like if an event-based slasher killed around a popular but horror-overlooked holiday?) and added some real substance to it. Obviously, the most important substance in the movie itself is blood, of which there is plenty, but it first spills during a prologue that gives one an idea of how both brutal and satirically minded the filmmakers want to be with the material.

Set on the eponymous holiday in the small town of Plymouth, Massachusetts (a real place for once in one of these movies, although the famous but underwhelming rock is nowhere to be seen), the introduction has a pair of families sitting down for a holiday meal and the rest of the town apparently preparing to storm the local big-box store for all of the pre-Black Friday deals. The impetus for the ensuing chaos and carnage is a free waffle iron, being given away to the first hundred customers, and the resulting sequence doesn't seem too far removed from the reality of past holiday sales, when brick-and-mortar retailers were still a viable thing.

A security guard is slowly crushed by a door knocked from its hinges. A fallen woman's head is bashed by a pair of shopping carts being pushed by aggressive customers, who don't notice and might not care if they did. One gruesomely funny punch line has a man accidentally cutting his throat on a shard of broken glass, stumbling through the crowd, and arriving at, naturally, the last remaining waffle iron from the giveaway pallet. That's a level of dedication that can only be created by an economy that made Black Friday horror stories a thing.

About a year later, the multiple injuries and deaths have been all but forgotten, although one woman is still irked at a group of teenagers were able to sneak into the store early. That group of friends revolves around Jessica (Neil Verlaque), the daughter of the store's owner Thomas Wright (Rick Hoffman). He has atoned by starting a charitable foundation and promising to hire additional security guards for this year's early Black Friday sale at the shop. Is it still satire if you're pretty confident a similar situation almost certainly happened in real life at some point or, if it didn't, that it definitely could?

The rest of the story, unfortunately, isn't nearly as clever as this setup. In terms of existing as a generic slasher story, though, Roth and Rendell ensure that the ensuing bloodletting winks and nudges with a similar sense of demented humor.

A vicious killer is on the loose in Plymouth—a fact made apparent when someone wearing a pilgrim outfit and donning a mask of colonial-era governor John Carver murders one of the more egregiously awful shoppers from the previous year's sale. Roth has one of the more twisted minds in horror filmmaking. He'll certainly take that as a compliment, even if the broader context is that his mindset usually comes across as too nihilistic and unnecessarily cruel for that to be a benefit to most of his work in the genre.

Here, though, we can clearly see a bit more playfulness to the horror sequences, such as how the first killing happens in a completely unexpected fashion after presenting plenty of earlier alternatives and an oddly considerate act on the part of the murderer toward a pet that has been left without an owner. There are some decent, more traditional tactics on display and mildly subverted, too, particularly a jump-scare that actually works, because Roth implements it just as the sequence seems to begin the process of building tension for one set of characters—only to transfer the suspense to a different one.

An attack at a parade in broad daylight gives us one of only two or three moments that are replicated from the original short (The other big one involves a trampoline, but thankfully, the filmmakers re-tool the scene so that it's not an alleged punch line of violent sexual assault), and it's fairly frightening. Some of this is a stretch to find amusing, simply because the thought of a woman being cooked alive in an oven, for example, is only slightly less disturbing than watching the process happen. Meanwhile, the plot is the typical slasher convention of a whodunit, with plenty of possible suspects and red herrings, played by Patrick Dempsey, Milo Manheim, Jalen Thomas Brooks, and any other actor in the supporting cast, really.

It's a shock that any of Thanksgiving functions, given its questionable source material, and it's a pleasant surprise that Roth's satirical aims are almost as sharp as his killer's various weapons. Once they're out of the way, though, the movie becomes a mixed bag of horror and comedy.

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