Eli Roth's Rock Solid Thanksgiving Does Pretty Much Everything It Says It Will on the Label

If you're looking for a violent, profane, satirical Thanksgiving-themed horror movie then boy do I have a violent, profane, satirical Thanksgiving-themed horror movie for you!

I recently re-watched the demented 2017 dark comedy Mom and Dad for my podcast Travolta/Cage and The Travolta/Cage Project. It’s an instant cult classic about a world where a strange spell falls over the parents of the earth that causes them to want to murder their children. 

Mom and Dad boldly chooses not to give a definitive explanation as to why parents suddenly transformed into murderers en masse but it’s clearly something supernatural. 

In Mom and Dad parents are so excited to kill their progeny that they show up at their schools so that they can murder them as soon as possible. The natural order of the world has been reversed, and the innate instinct to protect and nurture has been replaced by one to obliterate and destroy. 

There is an analogous scene in Eli Roth’s Thanksgiving, the latest feature-film adaptation of a fake trailer from 2007’s Grindhouse Death Proof/Planet Terror double feature.  

In it, shoppers at a Black Friday sale at a Wal-Mart-like superstore called Right-Mart are so intent on getting free waffle irons that when they see obnoxious teens taunting them from within the store a riot ensues that quickly wracks up quite the body count. 

Consumers turn instantly into savages willing, even eager to maim, injure and kill for the sake of a cheap giveaway. In a particularly bleak touch, a dying man makes sure to secure his free waffle iron in his last horrifying moments on Earth. 

The man’s waffle iron is then ripped out of his dead hands in an orgy of capitalism and consumerism taken to their violent extremes. 

This bravura opening set-piece also reminded me of the undead carnage of Dawn of the Dead, that most satirical of zombie movies. 

In Mom and Dad and Dawn of the Dead something horrifying, inhuman and otherworldly is turning people into monsters hell-bent on destruction. In Thanksgiving, the horrifying, inhuman and otherworldly force that turns people into monsters is capitalism/consumerism. 

It’s the deeply selfish need to get your hands on the latest technological wonder by any means necessary, including throwing hands if a motherfucker thinks that they’re going to take your Tickle Me Elmo doll without a fistfight. 

On one level, the villain in Thanksgiving is a mystery figure in a mask of conveniently named pilgrim John Carver intent on making a peculiar Thanksgiving dinner with an unusual main dish and some unexpected guests. By “unusual main dish” I mean a woman who has been carved up and cooked like a delicious turkey and by “unexpected guests” I mean people whose heads have been severed from the rest of their bodies by the gentleman throwing one of the more unpleasant cinematic dinners in recent memory. 

Thanksgiving peaks early. Thanksgiving’s opening scene depicts capitalism as a monstrous, murderous force that brings out the worst in everyone. It’s the blackest of black Fridays, where the homicidal ugliness lurking behind capitalism’s shiny veneer comes bubbling to the surface. 

Like the previous entries in the Grindhouse universe: Quentin Tarantino’s Death Proof, Robert Rodriguez’s Planet Terror, Machete and Machete Kills and Jason Eisener’s Hobo With a Shotgun, Thanksgiving is a throwback pastiche rooted in the cheesiest recesses of 1970s and 1980s low-budget horror. 

Thanksgiving’s masterful opening takes place on Black Friday, 2022. The rest of the film documents the next year but spiritually the movie seems enjoyably and deliberately stuck somewhere around 1983. 

That extends to the script’s soothingly familiar coterie of horror movie archetypes. There are high school kids of the jock, outcast and preppie variety as well as the greedy owner of Right-Mart, who offers killer deals to consumers with an unfortunate predilection for killing people, as well as a Sheriff played by the Loverboy himself, Patrick Dempsey, whose performance is ninety percent Massachusetts accent. 

In the lead-up to the Black Friday sale of death someone is killing people prominently involved in the riot, the stampede and killings that have gone unpunished because the security footage from that night conveniently disappeared and live-streaming his gruesome handiwork.

Since this takes place in the present there’s copious camera phone footage from the night, however, some of it taken by our jackass high school anti-heroes. First a waitress who played a particularly shameful role in the riot is brutally murdered. Then a security guard who ran away when shit got real is murdered in an exceedingly graphic fashion. 

There’s a lot of overkill in Thanksgiving. Roth is intent on delivering the goods. That includes enough graphic gore and bloodshed to satisfy even the most bloodthirsty Fangoria subscriber as well as all the curse words you love to hear in movies like this: crap, darn, shit, the whole lot. 

Like a true fright master, or a serial killer, Roth has clearly spent a lot of time thinking about the many colorful ways that human bodies can be killed, destroyed, maimed and mutilated. 

There is a method to the mystery killer’s madness, however. He wants to stage a ghoulish Thanksgiving dinner where the villains of the Black Friday debacle are finally held responsible for their crimes and transgressions through murder, dismemberment and even the odd bit of cannibalism. 

It’s been a very long time since I saw the trailer that inspired Thanksgiving but certain images from it stand out in my mind, like the aforementioned sight of a poor woman who has gone from eagerly anticipating Thanksgiving dinner to being Thanksgiving dinner. 

The nifty fake trailers of Grindhouse—which unexpectedly became real trailers when movies were made out of them—are parodies of popular genres and sub-genres from decades past but the movies traffic more in pastiche. 

The opening of Thanksgiving is so heavy and so intense that some part of me was relieved to discover that the rest of the film is slower, more familiar and less intense.  

Thanksgiving is a holiday-themed slasher movie but it’s also a whodunnit that generates mystery and suspense by deliberately withholding the killer’s identity until the third act. 

Red herrings and suspicious characters abound. Could the bad guy be a high school pitching phenom whose seemingly bright future changed in a heartbeat when his pitching hand was injured in the melee? Or could it be the preppie jerk dating the film’s final girl? What about the husband of a woman who lost much of her brain, and consequently her life, in the stampede? 

The mystery at the film’s core isn’t terribly mysterious or surprising but I got from Thanksgiving pretty much everything I wanted from it. 

In that respect it’s a lot like Cocaine Bear, another proudly campy, goofy throwback horror movie with a sense of humor about itself and a deep reverence for schlock. 

Thanksgiving doesn’t quite live up to the promise of its opening but it is nevertheless a solid slasher movie with a cutting satirical edge that amply earns its title. It occupies a place of prominence and pride in the great Grindhouse pantheon, below Death Proof and Hobo With a Shotgun but well above all of Robert Rodriguez’s contributions. 

Three and a Half Stars out of Five