A horror movie from Eli Roth is something of a nightmare, but is it a nightmare for the right reasons?
Based on a fake trailer from the same Grindhouse movies that spawned Hobo with a Shotgun, and Machete, this is bold and over the top in fitting with the trailer that inspired it. Does that make for a whole film that is worth seeing? The answer is yes and no.
If you’ve seen the fake trailer for the movie, you’ll know that they stayed faithful to include many of the ideas shown in the trailer from 17 years before the actual film came out. This includes the way several characters get killed. It’s a nice idea to retain all these, but the problem is that these ideas were simply just ‘ideas’ and don’t really fit into the film they’ve made here otherwise. Some of the ideas such as the death of a man dressed as a turkey, or serving a body up like a turkey may have made for a cool trailer, but they feel really over the top in what is others a reasonably grounded slasher.
When I first started watching the film I was worried that it was just going to be a commentary on consumerism and be quite preachy about the madness of black Friday. The opening scenes show a riot in a supermarket break out which leads to a few deaths. Then it skips forward a year to show that someone wearing a pilgrim mask is taking revenge on those they felt was responsible for the riot.
The film is called Thanksgiving, and it could be seen as an opportunity to cash in with a movie themed after a holiday just as Halloween was. I mention this because it has a beat for beat recreation of Halloween’s famous moment where a female character looks out a window and sees a masked figure stood across the street. Distracted she then does a double take to see that the masked man is gone.
The killer in this film wears a pilgrim themed mask – or at least that’s what I think is going on here. As I’m English, my knowledge of thanksgiving stuff is limited to what I know from episodes of Friends.
The film has a fairly substantial cast including Patrick Dempsey, Rick Hoffman and Nell Verlaque and the younger teenage cast give the whole thing the feeling of an American Pie movie. None of them are instantly likeable and as the killer started to hunt them I was somewhat rooting for the killer to get them.
As the film progresses there are moments where things feel a bit more grounded, but like all horror movies where characters know there is a killer on the loose, there are tons of things the characters do that don’t make sense. They split up, and they stay in the area where they know there is danger. They also don’t take that there are actual murders happening as enough reason to stop their normal lives and run away.
The film does manage to draw you in and what feels fairly over the top and silly in the first few minutes get progressively more serious and grounded. Then it has the aforementioned fake trailer moments which are jarring in their over the top-ness.
I’ll avoid the spoiler here, but it was fairly obvious who the killer was from the beginning. When you think about it there was only ever really one logical suspect if you’ve watched even a few horror movies before.
Conclusion
The film is certainly worth a watch, but it is probably something better saved for seeing when it’s on streaming or on DVD rather than rush to see it at the cinema. It’s good, but not great. But there is the chance that it will grow on me with repeat viewings.
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