On Thanksgiving night in Plymouth, Massachusetts, America, a Black Friday riot at the RightMart superstore turns deadly when an eager crowd breaks in early. In the chaos, several people - including a store security guard and a shopper - are brutally trampled and dismembered, leaving little to the imagination! The store is owned by Thomas Wright, whose teen daughter Jess and her friends allowed early entry through a side door, directly inciting the stampede.
We unceremoniously jump forward a year, as the town prepares for its next Thanksgiving celebration. But this one's different, as a masked killer wearing a John Carver (one of the original 'pilgrims') mask begins brutally targeting everyone connected to the deadly store riot from the previous year. The killer posts social media photos of a Thanksgiving table tagged with the victims' names.
You know what's coming - one by one they get picked off and killed in grisly and gory, but very inventive and funny ways, much like in Ice Cream Man! People are sliced in half, decapitated, impaled, ripped apart, and so on! Most of which is really funny and, again, the tongue is firmly in cheek with all of this!
The identity of the killer is hidden from the audience until the final act, so viewers can try and work out who it is as the story unfolds through each of the characters. It's not that difficult, really, even if the clues are a bit fuzzy and Eli tries to put us off the scent by making everyone a likely nut! As we get to the final act with the big reveal, turns are twisted and twists are turned as the gore-fest comes to an end. En route to that, we can enjoy even more gory ways in which people can be killed - and in one case, basted, stuffed and roasted alive for carving on the killer's Thanksgiving table! A spin on the microwave incident in Ice Cream Man, I guess!
The acting is fairly second-rate to be honest, and production values are much like Ice Cream Man - money spent on the hilarious and rampant gore more than anything else. Patrick Dempsey (Dexter: Original Sin, Outbreak) as the sheriff and Nell Verlaque as Jess in the lead were probably the best on offer, whilst most others came across more like higher-rate extras. The film sits between a slasher and a piss-take of American holidays, ending up as riotous fun and entertainment - an absolute bloodbath, driven by bonkers filmmaking and a fruit-loop villain!
Some backend research revealed that Thanksgiving took 16 years to reach cinemas - it originally debuted as a fake trailer in Quentin Tarantino and Robert Rodriguez’s 2007 double-feature Grindhouse - and Roth spent years figuring out how to construct a coherent feature script around the trailer’s most famous absurd gags. Anyway, great fun and highly recommended with a few beers with mates on a Friday night! Looks like there's a sequel, imaginatively named Thanksgiving 2 in pre-production as I write. No doubt more of the same!
No comments:
Post a Comment