'Thanksgiving' review: A gore snore
Once a purveyor of bad taste cinema, Eli Roth sinks to new levels of phoning it in with Thanksgiving, one of the blandest, least enjoyable slashers this side of the Nightmare on Elm Street reboot. It's holiday-themed horror that initially seems to have a point, but it quickly devolves into a hapless imitation of much better films, without much ingenuity of its own to show for it.
Based on a fake trailer Roth directed in 2007, Thanksgiving follows a known roadmap, but without any of the charm or trashy allure that might make something like this work. Broad stock types are hardly a weakness in the slasher subgenre; they can actually be wielded to tremendous effect. But when a work is this aesthetically dull and unoriginal, each retread of familiar tropes works against what little the movie is able to achieve.
It has no sense of mischief, of visual contrast, of political perspective — of anything worth recommending.
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What is Thanksgiving about?
Set in Plymouth, Massachusetts, the movie's initial scenes chronicle a group of teenagers hopping the barricade at local superstore RightMart before a crowded Black Friday sale. Preexisting personal tensions, mixed with the fervor for cheap electronics, lead to a stampede in which several people end up dead; these kills make use of practical effects, but are only mildly fun or disturbing.
This extended prologue spends more time on character-building than shock and awe, which sounds like good drama on paper, but largely serves to shift various cardboard cutouts into place. The plot is set a full year later and takes awfully long to get going, after reintroducing each teenager and catching up with every adult, in addition to familiarizing us with a couple of newcomers at the local police precinct. This buildup does, at the very least, serve to introduce us to the fictitious Plymouth tradition of people dressing up as John Carver, the town's early 17th-century founder and mayor, setting the stage for captain hats and Guy Fawkes-esque plastic masks to appear numerous times.
It doesn't really matter whether an ensemble like this looks ridiculous or terrifying out of context. The Ghostface mask from Scream is silly on its own, but Wes Craven's intense, tongue-in-cheek filmmaking transformed it into a symbol of death by irony (and sharp knives). Roth, unfortunately, transforms the ax-wielding "Carver" into a vampiric emblem that sucks all the energy and tensions out of the room. On paper, his first stalk-and-kill sounds wicked cool, but it's shot at such a remove, with such bland, uninteresting lighting and framing, and employs such shoddy CGI gore, that it fails to remotely make an impact.
Thanksgiving is a vapid throwback to better films.
As the investigation begins, the kids and cops (led by Patrick Dempsey's good-natured sheriff) start putting the pieces together, and they realize those involved with the previous year's trampling are Carver's would-be victims. It's not an uninteresting mystery altogether, with enough potential culprits and disgruntled red herrings to create mild intrigue, but the more Thanksgiving goes on, the more mechanical it becomes.
There's a film school quality to Thanksgiving — an eagerness with which Roth overtly references specific horror hallmarks. The opening POV shot quotes John Carpenter's Halloween, as do several moments of Carver stalking characters out in the open, even though his motives and M.O. have nothing in common with Michael Myers's. Roth's attempts to craft an equivalent holiday horror are withheld constantly by sanded edges and a sense of irreverent snark that borders on conceptual meanness, without following through visually or tonally.
The core premise surrounds hundreds of shoppers breaking down doors on Black Friday in an act of mindless violence akin to modern zombies, but George A. Romero already satirized this concept with aplomb in his mall-set 1978 classic, Dawn of the Dead. Roth's commentary extends only to the surface appearance of such an event. He captures neither its fervor nor its wider circumstances, treating it as little more than a plot catalyst, with scattered attempts at Gen Z social media commentary that never take off, let alone land.
There's a hint of something Pretty Little Liars-esque in the movie's margins, with Carver taunting the movie's leading teens on Instagram, but these also serve as mere plot updates to remind us of his progress, rather than to tap into fear or paranoia. Each use of new technology, like live-streaming, serves the same purpose as handycams and hand-written letters. Despite employing social media, the killer's plans and taunts feel blinkered and cut off from a wider, interactive world.
If it feels like it belongs to an earlier era, that's because it began as a throwback to '70s exploitation horror, to which the finished product bears no resemblance at all.
Thanksgiving turns its back on its schlocky origins.
In 2007, Quentin Tarantino and Robert Rodriguez collaborated on the stylized double feature Grindhouse, which consisted of their individual movies Death Proof and Planet Terror. This tribute to splatter B-movies also featured a number of fictitious trailers harkening back to this era of grimy, low-budget genre moviemaking. Two of these trailers — Rodriguez's Machete and Jason Eisner's Hobo With a Shotgun — have already become feature films.
Thanksgiving was also among this lineup. It started out as a grainy, tongue-in-cheek trailer for a lurid gore-fest, with the borderline-snuff-film stylings of the original Texas Chain Saw Massacre. The finished product, however, smooths down each and every edge Roth once sharpened for his fictional preview, to the point that it recycles several gags from the trailer, but without their gross, tasteless punchlines. (For instance, the trampoline kill — if you know, you know).
Roth has long been a vocal opponent of people he deems "social justice warriors" (he even fed one to cannibals in Green Inferno), but regardless of whether or not this outlook is agreeable, dude, at least it's an ethos. At least it represents some kind of passionate perspective he was once able to aptly translate into furious sounds and images, even as he waded helplessly against the tides of social change. With Thanksgiving, he loses the one thing that might've made him stand out in the modern "elevated" Hollywood horror landscape, since his substitute for poor taste ends up being no taste at all.
Every kill is withheld. Every gag is bland. Every bit of gore and commentary stops short of reaching some kind of conclusion. Don't be surprised if he comes out swinging against "woke culture" for the movie's failings, though he's the only one to blame for Thanksgiving's lack of sauce.
Thanksgiving is now in theaters.
Topics Film
Siddhant Adlakha is a film critic and entertainment journalist originally from Mumbai. He currently resides in New York, and is a member of the New York Film Critics Circle.
