Thanksgiving Movie Review: Eli Roth’s Return to Horror as a Director After a Ten-Year Hiatus

Cast: Patrick Dempsey, Addison Rae, Milo Manheim, Jalen Thomas Brooks, Nell Verlaque, Adam MacDonald, Rick Hoffman, Gina Gershon

Director: Eli Roth

Where We Watched: In Theaters

Filmyhype.com Ratings: 4/5 (four stars)

The avenues of cinema are also endless. Thanksgiving, in theaters from November 16, 2023, for an Eagle Pictures distribution, directed by Eli Roth and starring Patrick Dempsey, Gina Gershon, Rick Hoffman, Addison Rae, and Nell Verlaque, is the film that lived twice. It was born around 2007 as a fake trailer for Grindhouse by Quentin Tarantino and Robert Rodriguez. Something in the idea settles in the authorial conscience of Eli Roth, who uses the idea to write the story with Jeff Rendell (the screenplay is also his). An innocent cinephile joke made available to the artistic vision of others is enough to shape a glorious bloodbath of about an hour and three quarters, built around the most sacred and popular American holiday. Not Thanksgiving Day, as the viewer might innocently think by looking at the title. No, Black Friday.

Have you ever reached saturation point during a holiday lunch with relatives? Add to this an event which is celebrated heartily throughout your country, with parades, typical dishes, various solemnities and which perhaps hides under the blanket of US capitalism some little historical problem such as the massacre of Native Americans often hidden under the pillow of an excellent turkey oven. And here we are, metaphorically aside, at American Thanksgiving powered by Eli Roth, who of all the words you read before takes up one above all, with the typical smile on his lips of his Bear Jew: massacre. Thanksgiving is a cheerful dismemberment of American obsessive capitalism that takes all the stylistic features of one of the most influential horror authors of the new millennium and puts them at the service of a deliberately simple and bare-bones story. Which maybe isn’t that of a turkey, at least not what you might imagine.

Thanksgiving Movie Review: The Story Plot

The story takes place in an American town. We are in Plymouth, Massachusetts, it is Black Friday, and a large local store offers unrepeatable discounts that attract a crowd that is nothing short of demonic. Indeed, that super-discounted waffle iron is exactly what the local bar needed to satisfy its customers. However, the anxiety of waiting generates anger and nervousness; so the “hardened consumers” rush through the doors before the official opening, throwing themselves into a frantic and overwhelming race to grab whatever is on sale. People are trampled like ants. Although there were victims, no culprit was ever identified and the following year the store reorganized the event as if nothing had happened. This time, however, someone decided to take justice into their own hands. We’re approaching Thanksgiving and a mysterious masked killer starts brutally killing people.

The victims are not random, each one had a specific role that fateful evening; in particular, a group of teenagers seems to be the favorite target of the mysterious vigilante. It will be a bloody Thanksgiving… Plymouth is the city of the Mayflower. The ship that brought the Pilgrim Fathers, founders of the first American colonies, to the New World docked here in 1620. Eli Roth‘s gaze is broad: he embraces the country’s past and present, public history and private events. The killer hides behind the mask of John Carver, governor of Plymouth Colony, one of the ship’s most illustrious passengers. John Carver becomes the moralistic and avenging emblem of Puritan America who rages against his corrupt and materialistic heirs. The policeman with a soul, Sheriff Patrick Dempsey, takes care of the investigations. He was there, on the evening of the massacre, at the shop, but he couldn’t do anything, too many people went crazy. Many paid a heavy price: Jeff Teravainen, for example, worked there and had the misfortune of being joined at the wrong time by his wife Gina Gershon, who just wanted to bring him food. Then there are the local kids. Some of them are the killer’s main target.

Jessica (Nell Verlaque) is Mr. Right’s daughter. She is engaged to Bobby (Jalen Thomas Brooks), but they break up after the disaster; he disappears only to reappear in perfect sync with the murders. Jessica, Bobby, Gabby (Addison Rae), and Evan (Tomaso Sanelli) had jumped in line precisely because they were friends of Jessica, the boss’s daughter. Perhaps, with their arrogant behavior, they had added fuel to the fire, provoking a little. Not enough to justify the riot but tell the killer about it. His revenge is sophisticated violence. She is not satisfied with the atrocious suffering that accompanies the murders. She manipulates the corpses afterward to shape the perfect Thanksgiving dinner, using what remains of the unfortunate’s bodies. The killer’s excessive cruelty is the brutal, moralistic, and crazy response to a corrupt and anarchic society. But it is also the legacy of an auteur vision, that of Eli Roth, built on the obsessive drive to push the limits of what can be represented, by violence in the cinema.

Thanksgiving Movie Review and Analysis

If you’re expecting the dark colors of a Halloween-style slasher or a splatter-like Hostel then you’re off the mark. Eli Roth knows he is throwing himself into a genre on which so much has been produced and to differentiate himself he tries to reinvent the genre, and he does so by playing the black humor card. In some ways, we are closer to the latest Scream where a lot was played on the discourse of metacinema in an especially humorous way (it is the genre saga that talks about itself and better satirizes the rules of horror). But with Thanksgiving perhaps we have something even different. Fun, fear, and violence aside, Eli Roth‘s latest film is an immense drawing of social criticism that deliberately plays on a surreal absurdity by representing a crazed population subjugated by its own consumerist “rules” and enclosed in the virtual prison of social media. A humanity that has stopped giving value to serious things, where even relationships are built on appearance; everything is aesthetics, and no one seems to understand what is important.

Roth’s film is set in this context where a serial torturer decides to take justice into his own hands because the police and local authorities have pretended nothing happened. However, be careful not to fall into the initial (intentional?) provocation of rooting for the bad guy. The violence of Thanksgiving is something conceptually strong but at the same time represented in such a picturesque and sometimes excessively grotesque way that it is clearly and deliberately fake also to underline the black humor that permeates throughout the film. A winning choice in our opinion. The killings are funny precisely because they are “unnaturally refined and absurd” as if to underline the same surreal absurdity of that bloody Black Friday that started it all. A splatter therefore absolutely not an end in itself and for entertainment as such but in a certain sense once again conveys the theme and the main message of the story: contemporary madness taken to extremes, everything becomes excessive and extreme.

It’s that “artistic note” that you don’t expect but that goes very well with everything that is the spirit of the story. The classic ritual jumpscares that must necessarily be present in a film of this kind remain: we leave the psychological and tensive fear to much more elaborate and refined horror films. The film certainly entertains, both for the rhythm, and the tension, and also for the comic ideas. If you are passionate about the genre, and above all about the director, you will hardly be dissatisfied at the end of the screening. Despite reinventing the genre, a little, Eli Roth is also attentive to the details that should not be overlooked in a slasher film, starting from the weapons used, strictly sharp/piercing or blunt, up to the favorite victims, the group of teenagers. Just around the corner is the classic twist that you don’t expect, or theoretically wouldn’t expect since Thanksgiving struggles a bit in creating those red herrings that should confuse the viewer.

Reflecting carefully on the characters and some issues, it is not difficult to imagine who, even if unsuspected, the killer could be. And this could potentially be a big flaw. The other problem might be for purists of the horror/splatter genre since Eli Roth adds too much humor; especially in the end the matter takes on such grotesque tones that it is, in some ways, ridiculous, almost a parody of itself. Points of view obviously, but there is no doubt that this could be the Achilles’ heel of Thanksgiving. Ultimately, the film convinced us and entertained us for what it is: a film without too many pretensions and which could be the beginning of a new slasher series by Eli Roth (we hope so if the project remains maximum content in a trilogy). Even for some humorous traits, the film is much more enjoyable at the cinema or at least in the company. We leave you with the official trailer of the film. Good vision!

Watching Thanksgiving you understand how much a film of a genre seen and seen again that embraces all its stylistic features (even the negative ones) can leap forward if there is an author behind it. Eli Roth bets everything on an atmosphere as Grand Guignol as possible that mixes Thanksgiving with death, contaminating the elements dearest to traditional American culture of this day with the worst horrors that can be inflicted in a sadistic and gratuitous way on another human being. And it is here that we finally see Eli Roth and his idea of ​​horror, even applied to a deliberately over-the-top product. However, there is everything that made the director beloved, from the mix of horror and comedy of Cabin Fever to the physical torture of Hostel and The Green Inferno. Thanksgiving will be able to make you laugh while dear John Carver cuts and dismembers everyone.

From Gen Z to Boomers, without ever skimping on the graphic and prosthetic part of the bodies that are tortured by a murderous and vengeful fury that in a broad sense also raises a big middle finger to the consumerist and capitalist culture typical of the United States, especially during national celebrations of this type. And in the chaos of daring deaths here appears Patrick Dempsey, the city’s sheriff, who exquisitely lends himself to this operation, going outside the lines of the interpretations to which we are accustomed and giving himself completely to the splendid madness of Eli Roth. This, in order not to miss anything since Halloween had already been mentioned in the fake Thanksgiving trailer, as we told you at the beginning, ends with another very famous reference to the genre. To a film that used horror to eviscerate the idyllic images of American teenagers. After all, from Carver to Carrie perhaps the step is shorter than you think, according to Eli Roth.

The Film That Lived Twice is also a double film. On the one hand, Thanksgiving is a pure slasher exercise: the provocation of a director who questions himself (and us) about the possibilities offered by the combination of cinema and the representation of violence. It will be up to the viewer’s conscience and sensitivity to decide if and how much the film has gone too far. The violence is furious, foul-mouthed, disgusting, so charged, crazy, and exasperated that it is almost funny. A very dark and very perverse fun, it is clear, which serves to balance the horror, to exorcise the shock, and to put things back in their place. Thanksgiving is the homage that Eli Roth dedicates to a certain type of horror cinema, one that enjoys desecrating the innocence of the most beloved holidays – from Black Christmas to Halloween, the examples are many – but it should not be considered a pretentious authorial exercise (in a horror key) on violence and representation.

The philosophy of the film is indeed a bit halfway between the social criticism of George A. Romero and the disturbing chronicle of the suburbs that John Carpenter likes so much, with a sprinkling of Saw-style moralism; of the moralistic genre par excellence, horror, the most moralistic saga of all. The priority, the guiding star of the film, beyond the aesthetic provocations, is much more linear: solid, provocative, and bloody entertainment. Thanksgiving enjoys ridiculing the furious and blind consumerist obsession of our times, tackling head-on the hypocrisies of a world devoted to profit and oppression, in which the only mantra is to accumulate, prevail, and crush. Life and death are games, it is difficult to recognize in the other a “full”, complete subject.

This is why it is easy to rage against the defenseless: because they are things, no longer people. Ultimately, this is precisely the perverse symmetry of the killer, his absurd moral justification: he treats his victims as (he says) they treated the victims of the riot. America according to Eli Roth – and the vision is anything but reassuring – is a picture of dark colors, rambling chaos with bigotry (the Puritans), and unbridled materialism at the extremes of the spectrum. There is also an individual dimension that is close to the film’s heart, the story of intimacy and the little big secrets of the characters, which overlaps with the wide-ranging reflection. The narrative structure of the film is built on this principle: progressively sliding from the public to the private level and vice versa. The film That Lived Twice has been mentioned, and the double film has been brought up, but it is not correct. The horror of Thanksgiving is a fantasy in three parts: pure violence, social satire, and private dilemmas.

Many, perhaps too many irons in the fire. The film also works on the excesses of narcissism and the invasiveness of social media, manipulating them for narrative purposes and making fun of them. The freshness of the faces of the kids, above all Nell Verlaque and Addison Rae (singer and social celebrity), also serves this purpose. Sometimes the satire is sharp and precise, sometimes lazy. The limit of the film is its courage, the ambition to hold together many reading levels as well as a very violent and very ferocious aesthetic. It works on the whole because Eli Roth has an instinctive feel for the genre’s high-speed shocks and pulses. His story accumulates a lot and does not return with uniformity, but the audacity of the proposal must be appreciated more than any weaknesses.

Thanksgiving Movie Review: The Last Words

Eli Roth returns to horror with his taste for the horrifying perfectly intact, transforming the fake 2007 trailer into a real showdown, a slasher that gets straight to the point with no frills. Eli Roth almost slavishly takes up the fake trailer for Thanksgiving seen in Grindhouse by the Tarantino-Rodriguez couple and creates an exquisitely canonical but entertaining slasher from start to finish, including terrible dismemberments which however become a lot of fun in being so over the top. This Thanksgiving of his is also a clear caustic attack on American consumer culture which manifests itself above all during events of this type, which Eli Roth decides to dismember piece by piece as every slasher tradition wants. Cinephile quotes, prosthetic effects, blood, laughter, and Patrick Dempsey. What more do we want?

Thanksgiving Movie Review: Eli Roth's Return to Horror as a Director After a Ten-Year Hiatus - Filmyhype

Director: Eli Roth

Date Created: 2023-11-17 19:02

Editor's Rating:
4

Pros

• Fun from several points of view
• The black humor and social criticism you don't expect
• Direction and soundtrack

Cons

• Sometimes too grotesque and picturesque
• It might make purists of the genre turn up their noses
• Conceivable killer