Thanksgiving (2023)

3 Stars (out of 4)

That's Not Cranberry Sauce...

By Jeffrey M. Anderson

Opening Friday in Bay Area theaters, the exceedingly gory, darkly funny, and cheerfully clever Thanksgiving arrives six days before the actual holiday to give viewers time to prepare… or recover.

Directed by Eli Roth, Thanksgiving was cooked up sixteen years ago as one of the fake trailers included in Quentin Tarantino and Robert Rodriguez's 2007 anthology film Grindhouse.

Two of those, Rodriguez's Machete and Jason Eisener's Hobo with a Shotgun, were made into feature films, and Thanksgiving now follows suit.

The 2007 Thanksgiving trailer was one of Roth's misogynistic, torture-centric efforts, akin to his repugnant films Hostel, The Green Inferno, Knock Knock, and the inexcusable Death Wish remake.

But in 2023, after making his first kid-friendly movie, 2018's The House with a Clock in Its Walls, he seems to have grown up.

His Thanksgiving re-creates much of the imagery from the trailer, but with a newfound sensibility, less cruel and more ironic, even occasionally more empathetic.

Indeed, it's one of the rare horror movies in which surviving teens take a moment to mourn their fallen friends. Death means something in this one. It's not just a stunt.

But what really makes Thanksgiving work is its wily sense of self-aware humor, striking a tone similar to the six Scream films, the two Happy Death Day films, and the recent Totally Killer and It's a Wonderful Knife.

It begins with a POV shot of someone breathing menacingly and stalking toward a front door. Anyone who has seen Halloween would guess that a killer has come to attack. Instead, it's Sheriff Newlon of Plymouth, Massachusetts, played by People Magazine's current "Sexiest Man Alive," Patrick Dempsey.

It's Thanksgiving, and — in a win for rampant consumerism — the owner of the Right Mart big box store (Rick Hoffman) has decided to open his store early Thanksgiving evening for the Black Friday sales.

The owner's daughter Jess (Nell Verlaque) and her boyfriend, talented baseball pitcher Bobby (Jalen Thomas Brooks) meet up with friends Gabby (Addison Rae), Yulia (Jenna Warren), Evan (Tomaso Sanelli), and Scuba (Gabriel Davenport).

It's decided that they need to make a quick stop at Right Mart. Thanks to their connection to Jess's father, they are let in the back door while the store is still closed. The roiling, raging crowd out front sees them, and a stampede begins, smashing down the doors. In the ensuing grisly mayhem, several people are killed and Bobby's pitching arm is broken.

A year later, everyone is still haunted by the events of the holiday previous.

Soon, a killer, wearing the mask of Mayflower pilgrim John Carver, begins killing people who were at the sale, starting with a vindictive shopper (Amanda Barker) and a cowardly security guard (Tim Dillon).

The friends begin receiving mysterious texts with photos of a gruesome table setting, the severed body parts of the victims showing up at designated places around it.

And the killer is getting closer to Jess and her friends.

The plot twists in Thanksgiving are, frankly, familiar, from the "one year later" motif of It's a Wonderful Knife to the surprise unmasking of the killer. But Roth and screenwriter Jeff Rendell are well aware of that familiarity, and just go with it.

They make up for it in the film's little touches, such as the killer pausing to feed a hungry kitty before fleeing a gory crime scene, or the little happy faces adoring a pair of corn holders that are eventually used as murder weapons.

After a particularly groan-worthy one-liner, "we're all gonna be 50% off," Roth pauses for a beat as if for a "ba-dum-DUM" drum roll.

All of which is not to say that Thanksgiving is some kind of work of art. It's a slasher film at its core, with spilling intestines, smashed craniums, ripping flesh, and worse.

But these kinds of films exist because, for some viewers, they provide a kind of ironic comfort. No matter how anxious or exhausting or deceptive or malevolent the real world can seem, things could be worse.

The films offer a way to exercise one's fear muscles, get a little burst of adrenaline, and still remain perfectly safe. We may even come out the other side feeling more relaxed.

And so, what better way to help digest (or expel?) the evening's last bite of pumpkin pie?