Review: Thanksgiving

Director:  Eli Roth

Stars:  Rick Hoffman, Nell Verlaque, Patrick Dempsey

Better late than never, right? 16 years after Quentin Tarantino and Robert Rodriguez’s Grindhouse double-feature first appeared, Eli Roth has finally made good on his fake trailer for a seasonal slasher movie. In fairness to Roth, he’s been busy elsewhere, postponed by studio fantasy pictures and documentary passion projects. Thanksgiving marks his first real return to the mechanisms of an all-out horror picture since 2013’s The Green Inferno. One can sense that Roth has missed the opportunity to let loose.

His timing may be better than he realised. With the resurgence of Scream and a wave of similarly knowing teen slashers in recent years – particularly on streaming services – the bare bones efficiency of the knife-wielding maniac is back in fashion. So welcome to Plymouth, Massachusetts, a town settling down for the holidays when carnage rocks the news. A fervent Black Friday mob causes havoc at a local big box store. Lives are lost. And, thanks to insufferable jock Evan (Tomaso Sanelli), much of the chaos is captured for likes and subscribers on his not-YouTube channel.

Flash to one year later and the town is still recuperating. Business owner Thomas Wright (Rick Hoffman) is under pressure to close his store as a mark of respect for the mistakes made 12 months earlier, and a group of teens are being tormented via text by a mysterious figure in a cheap John Carver costume.

The masked villain quickly escalates, offing two of the more loathsome key figures from the previous year’s tragedy. Making the youngster squirm all the more, ‘he’ summarily sends them photos of a dinner scene with seats reserved in their names; guest spots slowly filling with body parts…

It’s a classic slasher set-up. Revisit any number of key low-rent, low-budget slasher movies from the 1980s and you’ll find that this is pretty much textbook. The anniversary of a scarring event compels some unhinged individual to wreak their warped version of justice or revenge on a gaggle of dimwitted teens. And there are plenty of festive variants to investigate; from Silent Night, Deadly Night and My Bloody Valentine to a key text some may remember called Halloween. But while such classic video store fodder was undoubtedly the inspiration for Roth’s Grindhouse short, his feature elaboration cleaves closer to the vibe found in many of their mid-’00s remakes.

Jolted by the shockwaves of 9/11, many of the slew of studio slasher remakes that appeared in the ’00s were defined by their own sense of trauma and nastiness, from the tendency toward torture porn than Roth himself helped eschew in with the Hostel movies, to the intensely obnoxious and entitled characters that populated them. It is this vibe that Roth channels. Grown-ups and teens alike are wildly crass creations throughout; hostile, angry, all speaking with the same voice. Roth’s own filmography exudes this puffed-up frat-boy energy consistently, but it feels powered up on Red Bull here (perhaps his own enthusiasm to return to genre excess?). Few filmmakers present an America so driven by rage and resentment as Roth. Maybe only Rob Zombie holds up such an unflattering mirror.

Likable characters are scant, and that’s maybe part of the point. Roth asks us to revel in their misery as he shows us their gory comeuppance. He favours a strain of silly, gloopy gore here, but there’s something off in the delivery. Thanksgiving seems to pause a hair too long on these moments, like a comedian allowing space for the audience to laugh. But often the set-up feels rushed or secondary, so Roth’s ‘prestige’ moments are robbed of their power, comic or otherwise. Only one poor victim’s accidental interaction with a saw manages to feel like something from, well, Saw. Otherwise, most of Roth’s big finishes fall flat.

Taking a leaf from recent Scream entries, Thanksgiving also gets a shade too wrapped up in the whodunnit aspect (it’s fairly obvious), and is overlong for a slasher. Roth’s keenness is commendable – like the over-eager child or pet you placate with a head-pat – but he doesn’t find any real momentum until the third act. Here, things do pick up. Nell Verlaque’s Jessica becomes a serviceable if vanilla Final Girl, and her method of getting the killer finally lives up to the all-out hokiness of the film’s premise and fake trailer heritage. But it’s not quite enough to save the picture as a whole, and good graces are undone by a decidedly undercooked and half-hearted Carrie-style fake-out before the film shrugs-to-credits. Adding insult to injury, Gina Gershon is woefully under-utilised.

Thanksgiving isn’t bad. But it’s both try-hard and forgettable, undone in part by a mire of identikit American brats and Roth’s own relentlessly coarse delivery. Once revealed, the actor playing the killer gets the opportunity to flex their crazy, but the weird elaborations of their masterplan aren’t grounded in reality, and Thanksgiving is a little too torn between presenting a heightened version of the slasher and playing its beats for real.

In spite of an inference of more to come pilfered outright from The Guest, I’m not sure there’s a need for seconds.