31 DAYS OF HORROR 2024 - Day 5: THANKSGIVING (2023)

White meat. Dark meat. All will be carved. There will be no leftovers.

Plymouth, Massachusetts:

When the local Right Mart megastore holds its annual Black Friday sale on Thanksgiving instead of on the following day, a group of entitled high-schoolers sneak in just before the doors open and they taunt the maddened throng outside. The crowd breaks down the doors, resulting in looting, savage mayhem, and numerous injuries and deaths. The following year, the store's owner intends to repeat the sale, in spite of the memory of the previous year's tragedy still being relatively fresh, but this time around the teens whose selfish assholism ignited the previous year's riot are being stalked and marked for attendance at a diabolical Thanksgiving gathering orchestrated by a masked axe-wielding killer costumed as John Carver, the Pilgrim first governor of the New Plymouth colony, and the path to that feast is mercilessly carved out in blood.

Eli Roth's THANKSGIVING, a full-length film spawned from a fake trailer that accompanied GRINDHOUSE (2007), is a fun and knowing love letter to the holiday-themed slasher film's of the 1980's wave, and it would have fit right in with its brethren of forty years ago. All of the expected tropes are present, so what we get is an enthusiastic textbook example of the form, only crafted by a filmmaker with genuine talent and craft who clearly loves the genre, albeit better-made than the majority of the efforts in the sub-category. It looks great, the characters are actually characters instead of mere meat to be mutilated, and the kills are inventive and nasty.  It even features the trampoline gag from the fake trailer that accompanied GRINDHOUSE, albeit considerably toned down. (If you remember that trailer, you know exactly what I'm talking about.)  Also, the dinner scene during the final reel is clearly an homage to the infamous sequence in THE TEXAS CHAINSAW MASSACRE (1974), a horror landmark that I hold in the highest regard, and it's even more absurd than its inspiration, so that's a win.

In short, it's  It's not over-long, it moves at a brisk pace, and it has several very nasty instances of gnarly gore. The only slasher trope that's absent is nudity, but I don't care about that. I go to slasher films for their R-rated Scooby-Doo aspects, and this film solidly delivered exactly what I paid for. Loads of fun, this would have been a massive hit on the Deuce during the glory days of Times Square. RECOMMENDED.

Poster from the theatrical release.

 

A fun giveaway from the theatrical release. I still have mine.