Thanksgiving opens in theaters Friday, November 17.
It’s with a knowing wink that Eli Roth kicks off his new parade of amused, amusing depravity, Thanksgiving. The camera hovers unsteadily, landing on the front door of a suburban mansion. We’ve adopted the leering POV of a killer plotting his next home invasion. Or have we? This opening shot is a fake out – a false alarm of danger before the danger begins – but it’s also a way for Roth to pay playful tribute to the voyeuristic beginnings of Halloween and Black Christmas. Somewhere between homage and parody lies his flamboyantly gross, tongue-in-cheek addition to the holiday-horror calendar.
Roth staked a similar middle ground with his first go at this premise, one of the mock trailers wedged between the Robert Rodriguez and Quentin Tarantino halves of the 2007 double feature Grindhouse. In miniature, Thanksgiving was a spot-on spoof of the slasher programmers of the early ’80s – the kind of grimy, crass junk that Halloween and Black Christmas inspired. Sixteen years later, that fake trailer is now a real movie, though Roth has ditched the whole retro, grainy, damaged-print gimmick. His new Thanksgiving is like a remake of the imaginary ’80s version, upgraded for the age of smartphones and slasher whodunits of the Scream variety, but with the sick-puppy sense of humor left intact.
A prologue situates the story in Plymouth, Massachusetts, just south of Boston. Here, a Black Friday promotion at a Walmart-like superstore explodes into a stampede, resulting in casualties – and there’s plenty of blame for the tragedy to go around. And so one year later, a killer in pilgrim couture and a plastic John Carver mask begins, well, carving his vindictive way across town, knocking off those he holds responsible one by one in creative, grotesque ways, and often with the aid of kitchen supplies. His targets include the unruliest rioters, the store’s owner (Rick Hoffman), and the owner’s teenage daughter (Nell Verlaque), along with her clique of variably vapid, expendable high-school friends. Hunting the killer is a cop played by Patrick Dempsey, back on the slasher-detective beat after logging some time on Ghostface’s trail in Scream 3.
The violence in Thanksgiving, which arrives every few minutes on cue, is ridiculous and brutal in equal measure. It somehow walks a tightrope of being memorably, inventively nasty without ever becoming truly unpleasant – though, of course, mileage will vary according to sensibility, sensitivity, and gag reflex. Roth, the writer-director of such barf-bag anti-classics as Cabin Fever and Hostel, has basted his usual sadism in the cartoon inconsequentiality of slasher cinema, so that even the most ghoulish moments – like the main course of diabolical cruelty, a last supper of sorts – play closer to shock comedy than horror. In that respect, the film feels indebted to the instantly infamous Terrifier movies, complete with a villain who occasionally trades out his whole pilgrim theme for a pistol and a clown getup.
For all its grinning gore, Thanksgiving also serves up some surprisingly effective suspense here and there, going cat-and-mouse at odd intervals. There’s one particularly Wes Craven-worthy sequence in a school involving long hallways, an ominously chirping cellphone, and a room full of mannequin heads – a sequence all the more impressively tense for unfolding in broad daylight, with the police parked just outside. This isn’t the most sophisticated mystery, even by the lower standards of later Scream; figuring out the killer is largely a matter of dismissing the obvious red herrings and using process of elimination. But Roth subverts expectations in other ways. He has a wicked talent for drawing your attention to one vulnerable body part, only to wreak havoc on another.
The characters are, naturally, a grab bag of obnoxious caricatures – screen-addicted kids, bellowing Massholes, etc. They’re vintage slasher fodder, doomed to die by vintage slasher protocol. Roth has never dabbled at length in the Jason Voorhees school of horror, but he’s an old hat at spreading contempt in all directions, and punishing dullards for their sins. Thanksgiving fits cleanly into a filmography unified by mean-spiritedness more than anything else.
Still, the movie has none of the culture-war button-pushing that’s soured some of Roth’s previous efforts, like the Italian-cannibal throwback The Green Inferno or his cheeky gun-nut Death Wish remake. Thanksgiving is not a trollish screed or an allegory. It hasn’t much on its mind at all, culturally speaking, beyond a general disdain for the uncivilized yearly scramble known as Black Friday. It’s just a blast of throwback gnarliness – an old-school slasher kill-scene machine with a pronounced dark-comic streak. An Eli Roth movie more fun than smug? Now there’s something to be thankful for this holiday season.
