Eli Roth is one of those filmmakers I really haven’t been impressed with and it’s mainly because he hasn’t done much to impress me. Cabin Fever and the first Hostel both had great ideas and premises but terrible executions if you’d forgive the pun. I don’t think anyone would understand why the kid with the mullet screaming “Pancakes!” and doing martial arts flips in Cabin Fever was a good idea. And Hostel was bogged down by bad acting and an uneven plot. Both movies didn’t know if it they wanted to be straight horror or dark comedy.
The sequel to Hostel was just as bad and had a sense of cruelty to it that made it hard to sit through. It could be why it took him six years to direct his next movie and that was The Green Inferno, which I really didn’t like. Roth said he made it as an ode to the cannibal horror movies but that subgenre was so small and forgotten the movie seemed to focus more on shock value than horror. It also spent two years trying to be released.
In 2015, Knock Knock was also released with Keanu Reeves in a lead role but I couldn’t get passed the first 10-15 minutes. Roth then did that Death Wish remake with Bruce Willis which seemed like a MAGA right-wing fantasy movie. Later that year in 2018, he directed and released The House with a Clock in its Walls that PG-rated and family friendly. It was also Roth’s biggest hit since Hostel. And that probably gave him the clout to finally make Thanksgiving, a good 16 years after the fake trailer appeared in Grindhouse.
There were so many ways Roth could’ve made this movie fail. Mainly, Roth turned over the screenwriting duties mostly to his long-time friend, Jeff Rendell. And there’s a great story that’s an ode to the true holiday slasher movies for the early 1980s when Roth and Rendell were kids. If there was one movie I think Roth was wanting to make, it’s this one. Unlike Green Inferno, he doesn’t act too pompous in the execution. Anyone can see where he’s coming from here. And maybe all those years directing movies, he’s finally learning his touch.
The opening begins on Thanksgiving evening in Plymouth, Mass. as local sheriff Eric Newlon (Patrick Dempsey) arrives to eat dinner with his middle-class friends, Mitch Collins (Ty Victor Olsson) and his wife, Amanda (Gina Gershon), and their family, which include Lynne Griffin in a small cameo. (Griffin appeared in the original 1974 version of Black Christmas. She also appeared in the slasher movie Curtains.) Across town, millionaire businessman Thomas Wright (Rick Hoffman) is getting ready to have dinner with his teenage daughter, Jessica (Nell Verlaque), and his wife, Kathleen (Karen Cliche) who is Jessica’s stepmother. The contrasting scenes between rich and working class are perfectly played.
Unfortunately, Mitch has to leave as he’s been called into work as he’s the manager of RightMart, owned by Thomas, as a Black Friday sales is set to start later that night. And outside the store, people are getting restless as only two security guards have been hired to handle the crowds. Amanda and Newlon come to the store as she brings her husband some food and Newlon is there for crowd control.
Jessica and her teenage friends, which include her boyfriend, Bobby (Jalen Thomas Brooks), sneak in through a back door. When the crowds see them already inside, Mitch tries to quell the crowd but they break through the guardrails and begin to press up against the locked glass doors. Eventually, they break the doors down trampling one of the guards in the process as the other ran off. A shopper is cut on a shard of glass and dies as someone grabs a waffle iron out of his hands.
Other shoppers begin to push and shove. Bobby’s wrist is injured. Amanda is knocked down and her head suffers blunt force trauma as it’s hit by two shopping carts. She dies almost instantly as Newlon fires off his service weapon to calm the crowd.
A year later, Mitch has quit RightMart and is vocal against Thomas for keeping the store open. Bobby, who was a prodigy baseball player before his injury, has left the town. Somehow security footage of the pandemonium turned up missing under mysterious circumstances. Plymouth is trying to get back to normal.
That is until dead bodies start piling up. A cranky waitress, Lizzy (Amanda Barker) gets cut in half and then Manny (Tim Dillon), the security guard who fled, is decapitated. Lizzy was one of the shoppers who led to Amanda’s death by ramming her shopping cart into her head. The kills are outrageous and over the top. But unlike previous Roth movies, it works with the tone. And the killer who is wearing a John Carver mask and pilgrim hat stops and feeds Manny’s cat before leaving. This is a hilarious joke on how pets usually meet horrible ends in slasher movies. But it also references how Kane Hodder refused to kick a dog playing Jason Vorhees in the eighth Friday the 13th. The killer pleasantly pets the cat before leaving.
Also, since the Internet and social media is so much in use these days, the killer posts their kills online tagging Jessica and others. Police are also alerted through the posts but can’t locate where it’s coming from. But who is the killer? Since it’s Plymouth, people have been passing out John Carver face masks, so the killer can be anyone, such as in Scream 2 where all the people at the movie theater are wearing Ghostface masks.
The plot also sets up a mystery of who could the killer be. Bobby returns to Plymouth saying he’s working with his uncle. Jessica has since begun dating a new boyfriend, Ryan (Milo Manheim). The sheriff’s office has a new deputy Bret Labelle (Jeff Trevainen) who doesn’t really care for all the Thanksgiving and pilgrim stuff. One of my main problems with Cabin Fever was how there were too many characters that you got lost in who’s who. Here, it works as a benefit because Roth and Rendell are doing how the old school slashers would give us many characters all with motives or suspicions.
And there are some really great tense sense. Roth has learned the difference between shock value and suspense. There is one scene where the killer is stalking Jessica through the halls of the high school and corners her in a home economics classroom that is very tense thanks to Verlaque’s acting. She’s only done a few roles prior and here she works well giving off a Nancy Drew vibe as she discovers the security footage on her father’s computer. Apparently, Kathleen deleted it from the store’s computer to avoid lawsuits and negative attention. But one of the jock friends of Jessica, Evan (Tomas Sanelli), live-stream what he could during the pandemonium.
Unlike Green Inferno, where Roth seemed to want to criticize the social justice warriors, here the topics are universal. The irony of people celebrating Thanksgiving by treating people terrible at a retail store is lost on modern-day consumerism. (In reality, it has changed since Covid as most stores are closed.) Also, he goes after the narcissism that exists in many people. Hoffman, who usually plays creeps, starts out like that but he becomes more sympathetic as Kathleen seems to be more selfish. There’s a little bit of hostility between Kathleen and Jessica at the beginning that gets lost as the movie goes on. Evan is also critical of when a rival from the nearby school is killed thus causing the big football game to be rescheduled at another time.
To make the movie after a long lapse between 2007 and 2023, Rendell decided to make Thanksgiving a reboot/remake in its own meta universe. Apparently, the 2007 trailer was to an obscure movie from the early 1980s that has been “lost.” There are some similar scenes such as the gruesome dinner sequence and the decapitation of the turkey character in the parade. However, the trampoline scene has been changed probably to get past the sensors and rating board.
And just like a lot of 1980s slashers, Thanksgiving was filmed in the tax shelter that is the Great White North. Filming was in Toronto and the nearby Ontario city of Hamilton. Also, much of the cast are Canadian actors including Griffin, Teravainen, Cliche (Yes, that’s her real name!) and Olsson. Canadian character actor Derek McGrath also pops up as the town’s mayor.
Thanksgiving might be Roth’s best movie or the best one I’ve been able to sit through. I feel that he really cared about this one while his previous movies were too busy winking at the audience. There’s a subtle nod to the genre without driving it home over and over like the sloppy Lisa Frankenstein. More importantly, Roth cares about his characters where in the past he seemed to just use them as meat for the meat grinder.
Thanksgiving is up there with Machete by taking a cheeky premise and expanding it into a feature movie. Roth and Rendell avoid what the filmmakers of Hobo With a Shotgun did by not going overboard. (Hobo was only used in the Canadian release of Grindhouse and the movie is mess of violence that thinks pedophilia and child murders are entertainment.) There are plans for a sequel. Hopefully, the novelty won’t wear out and we get the disappointment that was Machete Kills.
What do you think? Please comment.
Zane Says 