It has been 16 years since the very concept of Eli Roth’s Thanksgiving went in the oven. That promise started as one of the faux trailers in Quentin Tarantino and Robert Rodriguez’s Grindhouse cinema event. Since then, we have seen fellow trailers Machete and Hobo with a Shotgun become a reality. And now Roth’s feats are finally cooked and ready to serve, and that wait was really, really worth it!
Thanksgiving sees an axe-wielding John Carver mask-wearing maniac terrorise the residents of the town of Plymouth, Massachusetts, one year after a Black Friday crowd riot ended in tragedy. Picking off particular victims one by one, in a sinister plan centred around that fateful night and Thanksgiving festivities!
Thanksgiving is not only our favourite of Eli Roth’s work by far but is one of our favourite films of the year. A throwback slasher reeking of ’90s whodunnit excellence, in the same joyful vein as Wes Craven’s Scream and Jamie Blanks’ Urban Legend, with the extreme gore of the horror output of the early 2000s.
The kills are especially inventive, with the holiday-themed dispatches proving as ingenious as they are sadistic. Causing us to wince, jump, and squirm at points. While the plot is so very lively and involving, starting off strong with an American consumerism skewering message that is turned up to ten and yet somehow not ridiculous to see, in fact, it’s worryingly digestible as realistic nowadays. From there on, the film never stops swinging! Literally and figuratively.
Roth’s story and Jeff Rendell’s screenplay is dementedly inspired, seasoned with some nice twists, stirred with a welcome undercurrent of pitch-black comedy, and which all simmers to create a new holiday slasher classic and the most definitive Thanksgiving horror of all time, bar none. The film embraces tropes but occasionally twists them, masterfully keeping a firm grasp of where it is going and delivering the goods.
This deserves to be embraced going forward, as does John Carver as a new slasher horror icon. This film’s psychotic pilgrim killer is not only shockingly logical come the end but a genuinely unsettling and very able chameleon, moving through a frantic community and slicing and carving their way through the lead characters with the 18 certificate validating violent abandon.
Thanksgiving is another horror highlight in another vintage year for horror movies and quite possibly the biggest treat you will get this year. Funny, gleefully gory and yet with so much meat on the bone, and most importantly of all, it is all so much fun, coming with instantly rewatchable energy that ought to ensure the film the future status that it richly deserves and earns.
A project so visibly full of passion, Thanksgiving deserves to gobble (gobble) up the box office and find that audience because it is just a complete blast. Plus, it has a very refreshing ethos on animals in horror, as does its director, which is just the added refreshing dessert to a delicious main course and one of the best slashers of the last decade.
What a horror feast… you’ll want second helpings.
Thanksgiving is showing in cinemas now.
