Eli Roth’s Thanksgiving is a feast for horror fans

Courtesy of Sony Pictures

In the beginning, there was Grindhouse.

In 2007, Quentin Tarantino and Robert Rodriguez lived out their childhood dreams by recreating the B-movie theatrical experience through a back-to-back double feature of movies (Rodriguez’s Planet Terror and Tarantino’s Death Proof). Those movies sandwiched a set of trailers for other pretend Grindhouse features. One of these was Eli Roth’s Thanksgiving, a holiday-themed slasher full of cheesy kills, boobs and horny teenagers getting messily dispatched by a masked killer.

Sixteen years later, Thanksgiving is the second of the Grindhouse trailers to get the feature treatment (Rodriguez’s Machete came out in 2010). Unlike that goofy cash-in, however, Thanksgiving is worth the wait.

One fateful Thanksgiving in Plymouth, Mass., local big box store owner Thomas Wright (Rick Hoffman) is convinced by his fiancée (Karen Cliche) to open up rather than wait for Black Friday. Unfortunately, the heavily Boston-accented huddled masses outside the RightMart are anything but patient. Some teens get into the store early, and a riot breaks out. The mob is too much for store manager Mitch (Ty Olsson) and Sheriff Eric Newlon (Patrick Dempsey) to control. The chaos destroys the property, injures many, and leaves over a dozen dead.

The city is still recovering from the carnage a year later. Wright’s daughter Jessica (Nell Verlaque), and her friends Yulia (Jenna Warren), Scuba (Gabriel Davenport), Evan (Tomaso Sanelli), and Gabby (Addison Rae) are social pariahs, blamed for inciting ‘The FightMart Massacre.” 

Courtesy of Sony Pictures

As Plymouth residents try and fill themselves with hope for a new turkey day, a mysterious figure dressed like historic Plymouth governor John Carver, and armed with a cryptic Instagram account, arrives on the scene. Before you can say “gobble gobble” the body count starts piling up. Jessica and her friends must find out who’s behind the slaughter before they end up on the chopping block.

From the jump Roth and co-writer Jeff Rendell have fun playing with conventions. Unlike their proof-of-concept trailer, this Thanksgiving takes place in modern times, but save for the rampant use of cell phones, it feels like it was pulled out of the past. Roth and his frequent collaborator seamlessly fuse the grindhouse films of the 70s with 80s slashers of the 80s and 90s teen screams to create a unique experience that’s a lot of fun. 

Courtesy of Sony Pictures

Much of the film’s success comes down to the comedy and gore. Though Thanksgiving never strays into full-on satire, there’s a good deal of biting laughs throughout (not surprising coming from the team behind Hostel’s pitch-black occasional humor). It’s also satisfyingly chockablock with creative kills that use both practical and CGI effects and unfold in glorious widescreen. This is the whole bird with all the trimmings. It’s a cornucopia of deliciously nasty delights that will leave even the most jaded horror junkies pleasurably stuffed.

Perhaps the most surprising element, however, is Roth’s overall direction. Known mostly for the hardcore style that defined Hostel, The Green Inferno and others, he got pigeonholed early on as a “torture porn” director. That cornering was a disservice, as exemplified by 2018’s surprising, family-friendly The House with a Clock in Its Walls. Here, Roth also stretches his creative muscles beyond what we’ve been taught to expect from him, an effort which makes Thanksgiving sing when it could have easily fallen on its face.

There could easily be a litany of complaints lauded at lack of characterization, themes dropped quickly, a hokey motive behind John Carver’s killings, or people making bad decisions, but that’s also inherent of the kind of film Thanksgiving is lovingly trying to emulate. Plenty of movies ruin themselves trying to capture a bygone filmmaking era. Roth and Rendell find a way to fuse elements to make a memorably holiday slasher that’s likely to become an annual tradition.