Eli Roth’s Thanksgiving is a strange creature of a film. It’s the product of a fake trailer that appeared in Quentin Tarantino and Robert Rodríguez Grindhouse (2007), a movie that wasn’t the hit some expected it to be upon release. It became a fan favorite almost instantly, though, getting even more attention once it landed on YouTube. Audiences demanded a full feature, and more than a decade later, the fake became real. The question is, does the movie live up to the Grindhouse trailer?
Thanksgiving follows a group of high schoolers that jump the line to go Black Friday shopping before the big retail store they’re at even opens. As a whole mass of people angrily waits outside for the store to open, the core group starts mocking the mob from behind the glass windows of the locale. Death and destruction ensues, setting up a reason for the killer – a pilgrim-costumed character called John Carver – to start picking off those who made that Thanksgiving day such a dark and disturbing display of American capitalism.
The movie’s final girl, Jessica (played by Nell Verlaque), drives the makeshift investigation for the killer’s identity, going through red herrings and the usual misdirection until all is revealed. Her dad’s the owner of the store where the initial tragedy occurred and she is struggling with a new stepmom that’s trying very hard to become the center of attention.
Where the original trailer goes for an appropriately grindhouse look and feel (exploitation imagery all around complete with grainy shots and the requisite scratches and cigarette burns found in damaged film), the version we get is made to look like a modern slasher. It’s more Scream than The Prowler, giving it a more by-the-numbers feel than the Grindhouse trailer ever had. It’s well shot and dynamic, but it looks too sanitized. The grittiness of the trailer is lost here, robbing the movie of the chance to be truly unique when compared to recent slasher fare.
What also robs it of its chance to be unique within the slasher subgenre is its story. The group of victims at the center of it never do much to bring anything new to the table. No extra wrinkles to the well-worn slasher formula, no clever killer motivations, and no twists on genre conventions. It boils down to fairly generic slasher stylings when all’s said and done.
It has a few clever ideas that could’ve led to something worthwhile, though. The concept behind Jessica’s dad deciding to open the store on Thanksgiving Day hinted at a fun and bloody look at the viciousness behind the monetization of what’s essentially a yearly family gathering. While there’s a bit of it there, it’s only ever kept at surface level. Thanksgiving introduces interesting ideas one moment and forgets about them the next. They all point to the Thanksgiving holiday itself being the source of evil here, but there’s little connective tissue holding it together.
The same goes for the other staples of the tradition, like the requisite Thanksgiving parade and the familial anxieties associated with it. They’re all excuses to set up gruesome kills, which are exquisitely bloody but not as shocking or creative as those we saw in the fake trailer. In fact, the gleeful excesses of that original trailer don’t transition all that well to the movie.
The infamous trampoline kill from the trailer, for instance, is modified here in a creative way that still made the audience I saw it with wince and gasp, but it does not compare to what that original kill was like. Believe me, just watch the trailer and you’ll know. The grindhouse aesthetic made those kills come off as even more gruesome and macabre, something that the cleaner visuals of the movie doesn’t quite get right. Had the grindhouse effect been kept, the movie certainly would’ve hit harder with the violence. As it stands, it falls a bit short.
On the final girl side of things, Jessica doesn’t really do much to make her stand out in the role. The script just doesn’t give Verlaque much to do with the character and her trajectory is pretty predictable, especially if you have a few slashers under your belt coming into the movie. It’s nothing particularly memorable, which unfortunately also sums up the film.
Thanksgiving is a fun time if all you’re looking for is a competent slasher flick with great gore effects that goes from point A to point B without detours. There’s nothing wrong with that. And yet, I couldn’t overlook the potential it wasted in between death scenes. There are a few inventive nods to slashers of old, especially one to the opening sequence of the original Halloween movie along with a few others in honor of Friday the 13th and The Burning in its final moments. Again, you’ll enjoy yourself. Just don’t expect it to reach the highs the fake trailer did in a fraction of the time it takes the film version to reach the credits.
