NOTE: Big spoilers within for Thanksgiving. Like “who the killer is” level spoilers!

It’s midway through November, and I’ve accomplished my January goal: I’ve seen 100 movies that came out this year. I’d say it was hard, but… I did it with a month and a half to spare, so I guess it wasn’t that bad at all. It was less hard and more… trying, I guess? Constantly seeking out new release flicks and watching a lot of streaming originals of varying quality; movies I’d never have watched without this particular quest. A lot of stuff bad enough to have long been forgotten.

But I did it, and we are into the triple digits! And I can say, despite my aforementioned complaint, I’ve seen more good movies than bad. So now I can slow down and watch whatever I want to watch as I get my 2023 Top 50 Movies articles and my Bottom [X*] Movies videos ready.

(*I can’t decide how many of the worst movies of the year I will cover. Maybe just 20. But I’m doing it for Patreon, so maybe I’ll let Patrons tell me what they want, since that’s typically how I run that)

Anyway, this is all just tooting my horn for smashing my target for the year; Thanksgiving was not even the 100th movie I saw; It was #101.

My 100th was Slotherhouse.

Oy!

Anyway, Thanksgiving is the new holiday-themed slasher (talk about reviving a dead genre!) from Eli Roth, and it is based off of a fake trailer initially released with the Grindhouse movies (Death Proof and Planet Terror), much like how Machete was. In the time it took us to get TWO Machete movies, Thanksgiving was left as a fake teaser only for about 15 years… until now.

The plot of the movie focuses around a Black Friday sale at a Wal-Mart analog (Right-Mart) that starts, as so many of the sales do now, on Thanksgiving night. The general tension of the crowd waiting for the store to open is exacerbated by a group of high school friends, one of whom is the daughter of the store owner. They enter the store before it opens and begin taunting the anxious crowd.

Soon, a full-fledged riot breaks out, and the crowd busts their way in, leaving destruction and death in their wake. A few characters we meet early on are killed, and at least one other is left seriously injured.

Cut to one year later, and Thanksgiving is approaching again. The owner of Right-Mart has done penance over the course of the year, but he also remains steadfast that the store will open again Thanksgiving night. As the holiday approaches, a typical Slasher Movie Villain In A Mask starts brutally killing (it’s an Eli Roth movie based on a Grindhouse trailer, so… use your imagination. The movie is thankfully not Hostel, but it doesn’t pull many punches, either) people involved in the previous year’s riot.

The teens that at least partially incited the previous year’s riot start getting tagged in threatening Instagram posts, indicating that the killer is saving the worst for them. So it falls on our young characters to solve the mystery of The John Carver Killer before he stuffs them.

With murder.

You know… like a turkey!

Nailed it.

TWO UPS AND TWO DOWNS

+There are some GREAT shots across this movie where, love of gore and blood and viscera aside, you can tell that Roth is definitely a student of John Carpenter’s Halloween. There are moments where John Carver is just lurking in the far distance, out-of-focus. There is one shot in particular that creeped me out and made me want to scream at the screen where the INSTANT that Carver comes out from around a corner behind one of the characters, the scene cuts. It’s brilliant at building tension. It sets Carver up as this ever-lurking threat a la Michael Myers, and I loved it. It contributed so much more to the atmosphere than any number of vicious deaths ever could.

+SPEAKING OF VICIOUS DEATHS! If that’s what you are here for, Thanksgiving won’t disappoint. Carver’s first kill in particular is the high point of his massacre, and I won’t spoil it other than to say it involves a dumpster (hilariously I don’t want to spoil a death, but I’m moments away from outright telling you who the killer is).

The trailers gave away that one character ends up getting roasted alive, but it thankfully doesn’t spoil what else goes on in that aftermath. We get a very sudden and shocking jump scare murder during a parade (which itself chain reactions a few other very visually impressive offings). There are a slew of inspired kills here, and that should make any slasher fan happy.

-At no point did I find the idea of who The John Carver Killer was mysterious, as the reveal was frustratingly predictable, and honestly, not because the flick was riddled with clues or anything. It just fell into the annoying old Law & Order trope: one member of the cast was by far more famous than the rest, so he was the killer.

Early on in the movie, I realized no one here was of the same star power or recognizability as Patrick Dempsey, so I spent the entire movie waiting for the reveal that he was the masked murderer. I was even hoping at multiple points to be surprised, but… it never happens. You get to the third act, Jessica (the primary protagonist) puts all of the clues together, and yep: McDreamy did it.

-Well first of all, if I never hear another New England/Bostonian accent again, it will be too soon. Patrick Dempsey pretending to be countrified Matt Damon was driving me nuts across this run time.

But aside from that, I’d say I didn’t personally find the movie as funny and it occasionally wanted to be. It was very tedious with its “Look at how dumb Gen Z is with social media!” in some of its attempts at levity, and across the movie, the stuff that wasn’t kills that was trying to be funny just didn’t land. Because of this, I think it took me a little while longer to get into the movie than it should have. I eventually got there, but it was more of a realization of “Oh wait, this is pretty good after all” than my just getting invested early.

OVERALL

Roth takes inspiration from a lot of the best slashers (the lurking threat of the killer, the cast of characters where we WANT to see many of them die, the charming final girl) and adds his brand of mayhem and brutality to the mix. We even get another moment of a gagged character throwing up; why does he love that idea so much? Thankfully it’s less disgusting here. I was pleased to see decent filmmaking blending with my favorite tropes. I just wish it hadn’t been so, so predictable for the worst reason.