Weekend Watch - Thanksgiving
Welcome back to the Weekend Watch where each week we take a look at a new piece of film or television media and give it a rating, review, and recommendation. This week’s topic, as voted by the blog’s Instagram followers, is Eli Roth’s new holiday slasher, Thanksgiving, which opened in theaters this weekend. The film, which follows the citizens of Plymouth, MA, who are being terrorized at Thanksgiving by a masked killer one year after a disastrous Black Friday sale left multiple people dead, stars Nell Verlaque, Patrick Dempsey (sexiest man alive 2023), Rick Hoffman, Milo Manheim, Addison Rae, Karen Cliche, Ty Olsson, Jenna Warren, Tomaso Sanelli, Gabriel Davenport, and Joe Delfin as its ensemble of potential killers and victims. Let’s get into it.
Letter Grade: B+; it’s got plenty of that tongue-in-cheek slasher humor and gory action to please any audience even if its story underwhelms in the final act.
Should you Watch This Film? Yes! This is a great time at the theater that never gets too serious or self-important, giving audiences just about everything they might want in a new classic slasher.
Why?
Thanksgiving delivers up a fun, anti-Black Friday slasher ride that feels like Eli Roth at his most crowd-pleasing, never getting excessive with its gore while still maintaining the director’s twisted reputation with a collection of creative holiday-themed kills and injuries. It’s not a perfect film by any stretch of the imagination with a third act and mystery that end up fairly underwhelming in their execution due to an aggressively choreographed plot twist that even the most basic viewer can probably see coming from a mile away. There’s plenty of dangling plot details to potentially give us sequels if it does well enough, and I really hope that it does because the film’s themes of corrupt business owners, cross-town rivalries, and Thanksgiving-related shenanigans deserve to be further explored alongside its archetypal cast of characters.
The best parts of the film are its moments of creative kills and attacks that often come out of nowhere. They had the audience in my theater absolutely losing our minds with creative use of industrial-grade ovens, corn cob holders, pilgrim axes, and the heavy doors of a restaurant’s dumpster. They are brutal in the most hilarious ways possible, living very much in the same space as Tarantino’s stylized gore. Each one leans into the film’s holiday motifs and feels like something you haven’t quite seen before in a slasher, at least not in this context. It’s fun to see this type of innovation in a genre that so often relies solely on tropes and familiarity, especially in recent years, to win audiences over.
Story-wise, Thanksgiving jumps in with a promising premise – someone is out for revenge on the people responsible for a violent and deadly Black Friday mob one year later at Thanksgiving in Plymouth, Massachusetts, the home of the original Thanksgiving (purportedly). After showcasing the horror of a mob at a Black Friday sale, which also introduces us to the film’s collection of characters, it gets into its present-day setting, a town amping up for a Thanksgiving celebration with cross-town sports rivalries, a parade getting prepped up, and lots of hurt feelings as the town approaches the anniversary of the previous year’s disaster. Every bit of dialogue is loaded with potentially incriminating statements to keep the audience guessing as to who the real killer is and whether there might even be multiple killers operating in tandem. For anyone paying the slightest bit of attention, it’s pretty obvious who the perpetrator(s) is (are?), but there’s enough smoke and mirrors and plenty of fun violence to make up for that lack of mystery.
Each of the characters are fun and decently fleshed-out, with a well-selected cast of lesser-known actors portraying them (2023’s sexiest man alive Patrick Dempsey notwithstanding). Dempsey delivers a performance that works well in building up the setting as Plymouth’s thick-accented sheriff, worried about the impact of the killings on the town’s annual celebration of Thanksgiving. Nell Verlaque does the most as Thanksgiving’s new final girl, occasionally making some questionable decisions but never losing the audience’s support in a passable performance as a burgeoning scream queen. Her band of friends, comprised of Milo Manheim, Addison Rae, Jenna Warren, Tomaso Sanelli, and Gabriel Davenport, fills out the cast well, giving the audience enough individuality to make us curious about who makes it out and who might be the killer.
Thanksgiving might not have the most surprising reveals and suffers some in its third act, but its fun characters, innovative violence, and tongue-in-cheek humor more than make it a satisfying time in the theaters and a welcome addition to the slasher genre. It might not be perfect, but there’s plenty of potential to follow it up with Thanksgiving 2 (or Easter or St. Patrick’s Day or July 4th) if Eli Roth wants to give us more, and I certainly hope that he does. It’s currently showing in theaters, and I definitely recommend checking it out this week as a way to celebrate the holiday.
