Flasz On Film

The camera wobbles a bit as it attempts to establish a point of view of a person. You hear breathing. You see the camera slowly roam around the house. You’ve seen it all before. You know the drill. We are firmly drawing from Black Christmas and Halloween. And probably from another three dozen lesser-known slashers. And the filmmakers know it. What is more – we know they know it. And they know we know they know it. Which bolsters their impetus even more to turn in a movie of a very specific ilk.  

That’s how Eli Roth’s Thanksgiving greets you. With a POV camera establishing a simple idea that what’s about to unfold is an extended piece of homage to the kinds of movies you may have grown up watching, or – if you’re a little bit younger – the kinds of movies the movies you grew up watching were actively trying to reference. That’s right – Roth’s new film is probably best described as an attempt at reviving the 90s slasher revival that saw Scream, I know What You Did Last Summer, Urban Legend and others briefly take over the genre landscape before yielding to found footage horrors and J-horrors immediately thereafter.  

But wait, isn’t it what Scream 5 and Scream 6 (or if you prefer to be pedantic, 5cream and ScreaIVI) have been doing already? Well, not exactly. The Bettinelli-Olpin/Gillett additions to the Scream series are fully self-aware meta-sequels concomitantly adding to and satirizing the trend of engineering nostalgia sequels to movies from three decades ago that effectively tell the same stories as their predecessors, but with some kind of a twist and/or an unexpected character turn on behalf of one of the original leads. With Thanksgiving, we are in a different universe because Eli Roth and his co-conspirators don’t want you to reminisce about the 90s as much as they’d like you to live through them again.  

Therefore, this movie both comes across as incredibly familiar and fresh enough to be its own thing. Predictably, we shall find in it a group of teenagers who find themselves in a department store on Black Friday and, as luck would have it, a terrible massacre ensues where people are trampled to death, have their limbs broken, their scalps torn off their heads, and their eyes gouged. The thing gets hush-hushed because of lack of evidence and at the end of the day it gets chalked up to an unfortunate accident, even though we all know there is always someone you can blame, be it the kids who taunted the crowd or the shop’s owner (and one of the teenagers’ dad, played by the amazingly cringy Rick Hoffman). We fast forward to one year later when a masked vigilante appears in the town and methodically goes after everyone involved in the unfortunate Black Friday gorefest, at which point you’d have genre hound points taken off your score card if you didn’t clue into the fact it is a direct homage to the template from the aforementioned I Know What You Did Last Summer.  

Thus, the mystery ensues because – again, expectedly – a movie of this ilk most often would include an element of a whodunnit, where the central group of teenagers would begin wondering if someone from their group is secretly the killer. Or maybe even if there’s more than one killer, like in Scream. And, if at all, whether the movie is keen to follow any of the more nuanced rules of the slasher subgenre that have crystallized over the years.  

Yes. Yes, it does. Without necessarily trying to tickle your nostalgia gland directly by pulling obvious visual references from iconic slashers, Thanksgiving manages to find its niche close enough to them that it comes across as an improvised piece of fan fiction trying to idolize those movies, but it is still sufficiently self-assured to make sure Eli Roth’s particular style and penchant for delicious goresomeness would come across in the process. And it all adds up to exactly what I’d expect a movie of this kind to be – fiendishly brutal, extremely entertaining, light on logic and occasionally so borderline stupid that it borders on self-parody. It’s just right.  

In fact, I might as well indulge and tell you that Thanksgiving is like a holiday turkey roast. Almost everyone has at some point had a crack at roasting a whole turkey and it almost never comes out right. It takes a truly competent and experienced chef who knows what he’s doing to make sure the bird comes out of the oven in this obscenely narrow timeframe between raw and completely dry. It takes skill, expertise and immense care to put a roast turkey on a holiday table and have it taste gloriously.  

And Thanksgiving is one such perfect turkey. It’s nothing original, just like that turkey. You’ve seen one, you’ve seen them all. The taste profile is probably not going to surprise you either. But there’s nothing more satisfying than biting into a turkey breast that is succulent, delicious and cooked to perfection. I can only say that if Eli Roth’s cooking is anywhere as good as his genre acumen, I’d like to invite myself to his house for Christmas because it sure will be a feast to remember – familiar, scrumptious, and satisfying.  

With not much more than a confidence of a movie nerd and his signature Tarantino-esque approach to splatter, Eli Roth’s Thanksgiving lives up to its ambition of providing high quality entertainment without necessarily reinventing the wheel. It is fun with capital F, even though you’d be excused if you thought the movie was dumb or that it was riddled with plot holes.  

No. Wait. Scratch that.  

You won’t be excused. Plot holes and stupidity are hallmarks of the genre and I will gladly defend this movie’s incredibly embarrassing IQ all day long because – repeat after me – slashers don’t need to be smart as long as they are fun. And this one is so much fun that it can afford to be terminally braindead. It honestly does not matter.  

What matters is that Thanksgiving occasionally pushes the envelope of good taste with its incredibly gruesome kills (in a few cases ridiculously so) and at least a few scenes that are just as uncomfortable to sit through as the iconic dinner sequence in The Texas Chain Saw Massacre. Between axes, pitchforks, pizza ovens, walk-in freezers and even dumpsters deployed as murder weapons, Thanksgiving shows with each passing minute just how much fun this movie can be. Familiar and fresh in equal measures, it is a phenomenal revival of the 90s Slasher Revival that knows how much nostalgia is enough to give the movie the signature 90s umami flavour without overpowering it completely.  

Bloody, stupid and perfectly roasted – Thanksgiving is a real treat for those who can get excited about the prospect of a perfectly cooked turkey, which may not be anything special if you’re looking for novelty or a challenge for your tastebuds, but it will mean the world to you if you are after a great feast full of dishes you remember from your childhood.  

And with that, I am out of culinary analogies and metaphors, so all I will say is that I wish we could move on from fetishizing nostalgia to using it creatively, just like Eli Roth did with his newest movie.  

Which I loved.  

And the stuffing? To die for.