Holiday slashers are a dime a dozen, of course, but some holidays end up kinda getting the short shrift; Halloween, Christmas, and even Valentine’s Day are pretty well-represented, but when was the last time you saw an Easter slasher, for example (well, other than The Passion of the Christ, har de har)?
Thanksgiving is one of those special occasions that seems like it would be ripe for a slasher extravaganza, but surprisingly, Turkey Day is pretty dry in the horror film department. There’s 1987’s Blood Rage, which is set on Thanksgiving but doesn’t have much to do with the holiday itself (and which we talked about here); there’s the ultra-low-budget Thankskilling movies (which we discussed here); there’s Hulu’s 2019 Pilgrim (which I reviewed here); and there’s a 2021 film called Black Friday starring Bruce Campbell which I admit I haven’t seen yet, among a handful of other examples.
But in 2023, horror icon Eli Roth decided to throw a Pilgrim hat into the ring and unleashed Thanksgiving, a gory slasher based on the fake trailer he made all the way back in 2007 for the movie Grindhouse. The project took forever to get off the ground, reportedly because Roth wanted to make sure the film itself lived up to the promise of the trailer; I’m not sure he entirely succeeded in that endeavor, but I will say that Thanksgiving is a fairly entertaining and satisfyingly bloody affair, leaning hard into the possibilities afforded by the trappings of the holiday.
The story is set in Plymouth, Massachusetts, and opens with a massive Black Friday sale at a big box store called Right Mart. The man who owns the place, Thomas Wright (Rick Hoffman), had previously closed the store on Thanksgiving, but his new wife Kathleen (Karen Cliche) has persuaded him to open at six p.m. on Thanksgiving Day, to get an early start on that sweet, sweet Black Friday revenue. Store manager Mitch (Ty Victor Olsson) gets called in to work before he can even sit down to turkey and all the trimmings, but he seemingly takes it in stride.
Down at the Right Mart, the mob of potential shoppers is already getting restless, straining at the barricades placed in front of the store and shouting and shoving one another in their quest to be the first to grab a sale-priced waffle iron. One of the two security guards tries to placate the huge crowd by telling them the store will be open in ten minutes, but the rabid (M)assholes aren’t having it and are starting to get abusive.
Meanwhile, the store owner’s daughter, Jessica (Nell Verlaque), is ostensibly on the way to the movies with her boyfriend Bobby (Jalen Thomas Brooks), and their largely obnoxious and indistinguishable high school friends Gaby (Addison Rae), Evan (Tomaso Sanelli), Scuba (Gabriel Davenport), and Yulia (Jenna Warren). On the way, though, Evan insists he needs to replace his phone and has to make a quick stop at Right Mart. In spite of everyone’s protests that the place will be a zoo, they all grudgingly go along. Jessica, since her dad owns the place, is able to sneak them all into a back entrance so they can shop before the hoi polloi are let in. Instead of being gracious and chill about this, however, they proceed to rub it in the faces of the angry horde still waiting outside, taunting them through the front glass windows.
Led by a football rival who Evan punched earlier, the crowd surges through the barricades, causing the single security guard outside to abandon his post. The shoppers then bust in the front glass and stream into the store, trampling the other security guard to death in the process. In true Black Friday fashion, the scene soon becomes one of utter chaos and carnage, and in the melee, another customer is killed, and star athlete Bobby has his arm broken in several places, putting an end to his potential sportsball career. Also horribly killed is Mitch’s wife Amanda (Gina Gershon), who had only come to the store to bring her husband some of the Thanksgiving food he missed out on.
The movie then jumps forward a year. In spite of the tragedy at Right Mart, Thomas Wright is again planning to open the store on Thanksgiving evening for a big Black Friday sale, and the residents of Plymouth are not happy about it. Not long after the sale is announced, the slashing phase of this holiday slasher begins in earnest.
The first to get it is a diner waitress named Lizzie (Amanda Barker), who was one of the worst offenders among last year’s Black Friday mob and is somewhat responsible for the death of Mitch’s wife Amanda. The woman is pursued and eventually cut in half by a dumpster lid in a gruesomely hilarious sequence. The killer, who is dressed as a Pilgrim and wearing a mask representing the real historical figure John Carver (credited with writing the Mayflower Compact), then leaves the victim’s lower half perched very visibly on the Right Mart sign on the front of the building. The upper half of Lizzie’s body is nowhere to be found.
Authorities, including Sheriff Eric Newton (Patrick Dempsey), pretty quickly twig onto the fact that the John Carver killer is targeting the people involved in the Black Friday tragedy the year before, and this suspicion is confirmed when Jessica and all her friends start receiving troubling shout-outs on social media. Someone with the screen name John Carver is posting increasingly grisly pictures and tagging all of them, hinting that they are all on the killer’s shit list.
As the story goes on, you have the standard slasher tropes explored, including lots of red herrings as to who the killer might be. Is it Bobby, whose promising sports career was ruined by the incident and who only just returned to town after a year of being completely off the grid? Is it Ryan (Milo Manheim), who has been in love with Jessica for ages and swooped in to claim her as soon as Bobby disappeared? Is it the new police officer who just came to town, or is it Mitch taking revenge for his wife’s death? I won’t spoil it for you, but I will admit that I didn’t guess who it was, so make of that what you will.
Along the way, there are also many gleefully gory kills, including a cheerleader who gets repeatedly knifed in various parts of her anatomy while jumping on a trampoline, a woman being disemboweled with a table saw, a dude in a turkey costume being beheaded with an axe, and another dude having his noggin absolutely obliterated with a meat tenderizer. Oh, and a woman gets cooked alive and served like a Thanksgiving turkey, which was a nice, festive touch, I thought.
It all wraps up with a big, explosive confrontation that leaves just enough ambiguity to suggest that there will probably be a sequel (and yep, it looks like there’s gonna be a follow-up in 2025, so stay tuned), before segueing into the visually cool end credits, which are set to The Misfits’ “Where Eagles Dare.” I’m not sure what that tune has to do with Thanksgiving, but it’s a great song that always brings up happy memories of my misspent youth, so it’s okay by me.
As I said, this was a fun, very holiday-focused flick with some fantastic gore gags and some well-placed black humor. The characters were largely pretty annoying, but on the plus side, you did get to see many of them get killed in horrible ways. The mystery of the killer’s identity was also decently constructed, with lots of potential suspects on offer and many townsfolk with a motive for the murders. I’m not sure it hung together completely for me, and some of the humor fell slightly flat, but overall, this was a pretty engaging slasher with a cool-looking villain, well-executed grue, and a commitment to making it as Thanksgiving-heavy as possible. All that, and the cat (Dewey) survives!
Until next time, keep it creepy, turkeys. And happy Thanksgiving.
The Scare Salon 