Thanksgiving

Grade: B

I’ve realized within the last year that Thanksgiving is my favorite holiday. You don’t have to buy anybody anything. You don’t have to spend hours passing out candy to disguised children flocking to your front door. There’s no post-holiday blues, because there’s another one coming right up after it. I use the fourth Thursday of November for ruminating on my blessings, and stuffing my face. One of my children has a history of mostly preferring ham, with little to none of much else.

Director Eli Roth’s film Thanksgiving is a feature length follow-through of a mock trailer he made in 2007, which played during the Quentin Tarantino/Robert Rodriguez Grindhouse double feature. The opening sequence is full of wicked satire, shocking gore, and is the best part of the movie. It begins in Plymouth, Massachusetts on Thanksgiving night. A Black Friday opening at a Walmart type store goes tragically awry, due to the ravenous mob of shoppers. A year later, an anonymous slasher emerges. This person, who wears a John Carver mask, is systematically after the handful of townspeople who were responsible for the massacre the previous year. And just like in any movie, they have the time, money, resources, locations, strength, smarts, and persistence to stage these elaborate killings, and show up anywhere.

In a large cast that feels like a parade (no pun intended), three performers are standouts. They are Patrick Dempsey (Grey’s Anatomy), Nell Verlaque, and Rick Hoffman. The latter has an unsettling demeanor, and a face which oozes smarminess, but is one of the hero characters who – deep down inside – wants to do good. One of the things I appreciated about this movie is the pacing. It’s not a first half with sunny, benign, uneventful exposition followed by kill kill kill kill. The gruesome parts weave in and out of the regular scenes, and make a nice, well-distributed flow.

Most of the teenage characters are forgettable, easy to mix up, and underdeveloped. This is both a downfall AND it works in the movie’s favor. I needed a score card; there were times where we’d see someone and I’d think “wait a minute, didn’t they get decapitated a couple scenes ago?” But on the other hand, since I was at such arm’s length from them, I was free to emotionally detach and admire the prowess from the makeup/props/special effects team. These are some creative executions. My favorite was the one that involved the trampoline.

The last act might have played better if they had kept it simple with the killer’s reveal. Maybe someone could have pulled off the mask, Scooby-Doo style. Instead, we find out Usual Suspects style, with previous lines repeated in echoey voice-over while a character notices a detail that was pretty sloppy of the Carver not to have concealed. Once we find out, my biggest thought was that this person’s been busy. Talk about a double life. That’s where the writers make things too complicated for its own good, and should have pulled back on the convoluted details. It’s more frustrating than edifying. I’m not sure of this movie’s staying power when it comes to whether it will become an annual holiday rewatch among fans, but as a one-off, Thanksgiving is nice shallow entertainment. If only the writing team had realized there’s no need to pile on all this extra stuff on the plate when you just want ham.

Grade: B