“If we let the police handle it, we’re all going to end up 50% off.”
Like many film critics who have no doubt done their time in the trenches of retail, I have spent more than a couple of years as an employee during Black Friday. One year saw me serving as a door guard at a Texas Old Navy. While that sole experience was a relatively calm one, I still felt the desperation and the hunger that particular crowd exuded when it came to finding their magical bargain. It’s a feeling that came shooting right back into me when I saw the opening of writer/director Eli Roth’s Thanksgiving. After some general exposition, the film opens with a spectacular sequence of some of the most brutal visual commentary to ever come out of a Black Friday scenario. It’s the scariest and most palpable sequence of the entire film and sets the stage for one of the most refreshing slashers to come around in the last couple of years.
Taking place in a small Massachusetts town over the course of Thanksgiving weekend, a group of teens led by highschooler Jessica (Nell Verlaque) find themselves being stalked by a killer in a pilgrim mask who is intent on disposing of those he feels are responsible for the carnage that happened the previous year.
Before all the deadly mayhem takes place, Thanksgiving sets the tone as a movie that could have come straight out of the classic slasher era that took place during the Jimmy Carter administration. Roth and his movie pay great homage to classic slashers but incorporate modern-day sensibilities to showcase both relevance and universality. As previously mentioned, the Black Friday sequence is so palpable and possibly the scariest part of the movie, that it’s impossible not to get sucked into the intrigue of what’s to come. There’s a cheesiness to that sequence, a heightened exaggerated quality that follows and continuously shows up, regardless of what kind of scene is being performed. Roth has gone for a level of purposely cheesy, which works, giving some dark levity to Thanksgiving, while also going a bit deeper than the average slasher. Also, with most of the killer’s victims being quickly identified as key players in the Black Friday massacre of the year before, Roth has us spend a few moments with them before they meet their demise, reminding us that they were people, regardless of what money saving hunger was driving them a year earlier.
Admittedly, Roth is not everyone’s taste. The director has enjoyed highs (Cabin Fever), surprises (The House With a Clock in its Walls), and outright disappointments (The Green Inferno), the last of which made the editor-in-chief of this blog more incensed than I ever thought he could get. Yet when Roth knows what he’s doing, it shows, and it more than shows here. In keeping with the best of slasher titles, the director manages to build actual suspense about who the killer is. This is not always the case with a slasher as most directors typically seem more concerned with the nature of their movie’s kills and little else. Speaking of the kills however, when it comes to the gruesome ways in which the victims meet their end, Roth has designed and executed a perfect collection of deaths, all of which are not only right for the movie’s theme, but also fit squarely into Roth’s wheelhouse. Even if the ultimate killer reveal is a bit anticlimactic, the creative kills coupled with the addition of dark humor (in one scene the murder takes the time after brutally offing a victim to feed his cat) make Thanksgiving an instant slasher favorite.
A good many slasher fans remember when they saw the original fake trailer for Thanksgiving. Originally conceived as a gimmick ahead of the underappreciated Grindhouse double feature, the Roth-directed segment stood out for its outward appreciation of the slasher genre’s heyday. Well over a decade later, the filmmaker has followed up on the titillating promise of the piece of film he intended to be a loving but brief throwback. Not only has he expanded on the late 70s/early 80s spirit of the trailer (including brilliantly recreating one of its iconic moments for the film), but the filmmaker has also injected a modern-day mentality to the whole affair, giving Thanksgiving a specific sense of timelessness that’s all its own.
Thanksgiving is now available on Blu-ray, DVD, and digital from Sony Home Entertainment.
