The table is set, the cutlery’s shining, everybody’s gathered around the glazed, fatted turkey, you can just smell the sweet meat as the knife slices like butter. One slice, two slices, each making their way to everyone’s plates. Before we eat, we clasp our hands and declare what we’re thankful for this year. Uncle Dan is thankful for his family, Dad is thankful for the wealth and work we’ve gotten, Mum is thankful for the delicious bounty. Me? I’m thankful Eli Roth didn’t hold back with ‘Thanksgiving’.
With the amount of disgust and horror that came from the ‘Terrifier’ films, I thought “no one is ever going to let anyone make a film like that again” and yet, once the gauntlet was thrown, Eli Roth lifted it with his cold, bloody hands and his cheeky, sadistic grin. ‘Thanksgiving’ is a film that actually started back in 2007, when Roth was approached to create a fake horror trailer for Quentin Tarantino’s and Robert Rodriguez’s double feature ‘Grindhouse’. The trailer is in no way pretty and the film, while modernised and more comedic, stays true to the dirty, grungy violence.
On Thanksgiving night, a family man is called into work, guarding his store from the hungry, relentless consumers until opening time. But when all hell breaks loose and the angry mob unleashes a fury, just to get their pancake-maker on sale for $12.99 including GST, workers and civilians are caught in the crossfire and people have more blood spilled than the cleaners know what to do with. One year later, a group of kids who inadvertently caused the riot are tagged in an instagram post by one, ‘John Carver’, a picture of a dinner table with their names at each seat. One by one, the riot instigators are hunted down and murdered by an axe-wielding pilgrim and the crew must find out who the killer is, before Thanksgiving dinner is served.
At first, I didn’t realise Addison Rae of TikTok fame starred in the lead role and while it feels unnatural knowing that, she does admittedly do a passable job as Gabby. The man I was waiting eagerly for, however, was Rick Hoffman, who plays Thomas Wright, the owner of the store in which the massacre takes place. He pulls off the creepiness and suspiciousness of the character so naturally that he was one of my picks for the killer. Patrick Dempsey stars as Sheriff Eric who investigates the ‘John Carver’ murderer. Surprisingly after all those years as McDreamy, a genre-shift so shocking doesn’t faze him, and he’s able to show that horror is definitely an avenue worth exploring in his career. Maybe he’ll be able to shed off that rom-com skin and take a few darker roles.
‘Thanksgiving’ is a horror murder mystery that I find hard to fault in any of its elements, it’s fun, darkly comic and brutal in its violence. If you love the ‘Scream’ and ‘Terrifier’ franchises, this’ll keep you occupied until their respective sequels, no problem.
Mason’s Rating: 4 out of 5 stars! Watch It Tonight!
Mason Horsley is a graduate of UOW with a Bachelor’s degree in Creative Arts, majoring in Creative Writing and minoring in Theatre. He hopes to write and direct a feature film and has been working on screenplays since he was 17. He writes film reviews for the Tertangala and works on his latest project ‘The Last Film’ while working a full-time job at a fish market. Mason despises reviewing films he dislikes and because of this, every review he writes acts as a recommendation.
Image Credit: Sony