By David Dent
Locating the events of the slasher movie Thanksgiving within the historic American town of Plymouth, Massachusetts (the same state as his birthplace) is a rather knowing move for Eli Roth, a director who regularly brings the snark alongside the shocks.
Eschewing the town’s traditional connections with Thanksgiving – site of the arrival of the Mayflower, the Pilgrim Fathers etc etc – Roth opens his film by offering up a version of the holiday that has become all too familiar for Americans – the Black Friday sale scrum.
It’s Thursday night at the Right Mart superstore and the staff are preparing for the bargain-seeking customers, who are reaching fever pitch while they wait for it to open. Things spill over when some jocks at the front of the queue spy the family of the store’s owners getting first dibs on the discounts inside. Push comes to shove and before you know it the front doors have been forced and everywhere is carnage (surely a nod to January 6th). But the resultant bloodbath is hushed up by management; nobody is held responsible for the fatalities.
One year on and Plymouth is preparing for the holiday once again; masks of founding father John Carver are ubiquitous, and it’s this disguise adopted by a killer, who’s stalking the town, picking off people who were in some way involved in the previous year’s fatal chaos, including store owner Thomas Wright (Rick Hoffman, familiar from a gazillion TV shows), daughter Jessica (Nell Verlaque) and her waspy new step mum Kathleen (Karen Cliché).
For a feature adapted from a fake trailer (from Robert Rodriguez and Quentin Tarantino’s 2007 Grindhouse double bill), Thanksgiving is arguably better than it has the right to be. Roth has never been a great devotee of character development in his films, but his cast do well to elicit some sympathy despite their rather entitled demeanours.
Of course, what we’re really here for is the gore, and the movie doesn’t stint on this, particularly in its last scenes; heads fly and get bashed in, a circular saw is deployed nastily, and there’s a particularly horrible death on a trampoline. At nearly an hour and fifty minutes, Thanksgiving slightly drags – the setup is quickly established and doesn’t really move on, and the film never really recovers from its fabulous opening – but it’s entertaining enough and demonstrates that the slasher genre still has some relevance in the 21st century.
Thanksgiving is now screening in UK cinemas.
Bloody Flicks 