Eli Roth’s Thanksgiving Isn’t Terrible, and for That We Can Be Thankful

Even those of us Eli Roth un-fans have been waiting for him to make Thanksgiving, which originated as one of the grotesque, tongue-in-cheek trailers for fake ’70s movies that ran between the two feature-length halves of Quentin Tarantino and Robert Rodriguez’s Grindhouse. Roth, then known primarily as a key figure in the nascent torture-porn genre, seemed to be poking fun at his own fondness for graphically outré gore: The central image of that long-ago trailer was a trussed-up human, roasted and served like a big crispy turkey. That moment was Grindhouse’s biggest laugh, but it was also disturbing enough to stick with the viewer. I’ve personally never forgotten it.

Perhaps revealing whether that image returns in Roth’s new feature-length, Thanksgiving, would constitute a spoiler of sorts, but who are we kidding here? The whole movie is building up to it. (It’s also building up to several other signature shots from that trailer, including the sudden beheading of a guy dressed as a turkey during a Thanksgiving Day parade, as well as the grisly impalement of a half-naked cheerleader bouncing on a trampoline.) Roth has a talent for anticipation, but not really for suspense. We don’t watch Thanksgiving wondering what’s going to happen next to these people. We watch because we know what’s going to happen next to these people.

So perhaps Roth and screenwriter Jeff Rendell can be forgiven somewhat for making those characters so unmemorable. Thanksgiving follows a typical slasher-movie template, albeit without the deft characterization that can elevate the genre’s better efforts. (Think Scream, think Final Destination 2, think of the better Nightmare on Elm Street sequels.) The film’s best sequence is actually its opening, which depicts a Black Friday sale gone horribly wrong, as a huge mob of angry shoppers rush a department store in a fatal late-night stampede. A clerk is crushed, a shopper is gored in the neck by a shard of glass, the local baseball hero has his arm turned inside out, and Gina Gershon is scalped by dueling shopping carts.

Evan (Tomaso Sanelli), a dumb-jock teen who’s there with our ostensible heroine, Jessica (Nell Verlaque), and her friends, livestreams the mêlée, and the video goes viral. One year later, the people glimpsed in the video start getting split open by a mysterious killer dressed as a pilgrim and wearing a mask depicting John Carver, the first governor of the Plymouth colony. That’s a pretty neat slasher villain, and the John Carver mask’s vague resemblance to the Guy Fawkes mask made iconic by V for Vendetta gives the proceedings an interestingly anti-authoritarian twist; expect John Carver to enter some sort of genre pantheon once Thanksgiving births its inevitable sequels.

As the bodies pile up, the killer Instagrams a Thanksgiving dinner table with places set for Jessica and her pals. The cops, led by the seemingly outmatched Sheriff Newlon (Patrick Dempsey), aren’t of much use. (“If we let the police handle this, we’re all gonna end up 50 percent off” is one of the funnier lines in the film, which is better written than most of Roth’s efforts.) In fact, there’s a general lack of urgency among the general populace of Plymouth, Massachusetts, about the fact that someone’s carving up the citizens.

An idea emerges, half-heartedly. Thanksgiving flirts, particularly in its early scenes, with an over-the-top satire of consumerism, while also poking fun at social media and our obsession with virality. The store where the carnage happened is owned by Jessica’s father (Rick Hoffman), and he seems a bit too preoccupied with keeping the store open and resurrecting its (and his) good name. But the film does precious little with these undercurrents. One character who is set up as one of the working-class victims of the fat-cat department-store owner is mostly dropped from the story. Meanwhile, all the livestreaming and Instagramming winds up being more a shallow plot device than anything particularly meaningful or cutting.

Thanksgiving suffers from the same disease as a lot of horror films, which is that it gets less interesting and inventive as it goes on — substituting gore for creativity, and settling into the cat-and-mouse of escape, pursuit, and capture instead of anything resembling a story. (There’s a reason this thing worked best as a fake trailer in someone else’s movie.) Of course, all that matters only if you’re looking for something special or genuinely scary. If all you want to do is watch an assortment of teenagers and others get carved up in garish ways, Thanksgiving certainly gets the job done. Knock yourself out.