Just Desserts

It took 16 years, but Eli Roth is finally serving us Thanksgiving dinner. In 2007, five fake trailers mostly stole the show in Quentin Tarantino and Robert Rodriguez’s double feature love letter to trash cinema of the 60s and 70s Grindhouse. One of those trailers was Roth’s Thanksgiving. Now fully fleshed out and realized as a feature film, the absurdist slasher adaptation was worth the wait. 

THANKSGIVING ★★★ (3/5 stars)
Directed by: Eli Roth
Written by: Jeff Rendell, Eli Roth 
Starring: Patrick Dempsey, Nell Verlaque, Rick Hoffman, Gina Gershon
Running time: 105 mins

In Roth’s film, the historic town of Plymouth, Massachusetts takes the Thanksgiving holiday and Black Friday shopping very seriously. A Wal-Mart analog called Right Mart makes the decision to promote an early doorbuster and stay open on Thanksgiving night. It proves disastrous. People get trampled. Lives are lost. A year goes by and Jessica (Nell Verlaque), the daughter of Right Mart owner Thomas Wright (Rick Hoffman), starts getting menacing messages on Instagram, along with her group of shitty high school senior friends. 

Plymouth has a tradition of people walking around in John Carver masks leading up to the big Thanksgiving Day parade. This provides the perfect cover for a serial killer to start a series of Thanksgiving dinner-themed murders dressed in a pilgrim disguise. The targets seem to be the most blame-worthy participants in the doorbuster fiasco. Jessica and her friends must find and trap the John Carver killer before they end up at his dinner table of death. 

Thanksgiving mostly works as a modern slasher with nothing to lose and a full lean into using the holiday’s iconography and traditions, providing creative kills. It’s at its best any time Carver is onscreen coming up with messed up ways to end a motherfucker. It’s at its worst any time the leads are onscreen. In fairness, the movie wants us to despise everyone but Jessica to justify the gruesome deaths. 

Disappointingly, the film eschews its grindhouse fake trailer aesthetic and most of the sleaze, as well as the deadpan satirical humor in the fan favorite moment of a detective tasting a crime scene and deadpanning, “It’s blood,” with the sheriff responding, “Son of a bitch!” At least the full movie treats us to the major set pieces of the trampoline and dinner table scenes. Also, skewering big box retailers feels a little late to the party in 2023 when most have relented on in-store shopping on Black Friday. 

Despite all of that, Thanksgiving knows where it butters its bread. The kills will make you hoot and holler. And even a sanitized version of the fake trailer is pretty damn depraved. It will be nice to have this franchise reliably extend spooky season beyond Halloween in the future. 

Thanksgiving coming through means we are a perfect three for three on full features born out of Grindhouse’s fake trailers. The only question now is when are we getting Edgar Wright’s Don’t and Rob Zombie’s Werewolf Women of the SS?