‘Thanksgiving’ 4K UHD Blu-ray Steelbook (review)

Thanksgiving is a strange bird: where comedy and the slasher genre have coexisted since Wes Craven’s Scream in 1996, generally the humor is meta-textual and self-referential, which is just a fancy way of saying that it comes from characters reflecting on the absurdity of the conventions of the slasher film itself, while in a thriller you could take seriously.

Thanksgiving, on the other hand, has a cast that’s playing everything with a wink in heavily stylized melodramatic style and then that’s married to kills and suspense that also contain visual gags.

In other words, like the 1966 Batman TV show, it is in on the joke. This is a camp slasher film.

Thanksgiving is the third film to be based upon a mock trailer from Quentin Tarantino and Robert Rodriguez’s 2007 double-bill Grindhouse (after Machete and Hobo With a Shotgun). It plays as an extended parody of early 80’s “holiday” themed slasher films released to capitalize on the success of John Carpenter’s Halloween and directed by Eli Roth (Cabin Fever, Green Inferno) who has made a career out of this kind of over the top satire mixed with over the top gore.

Set in Plymouth, Massachusetts (where Thanksgiving is the most important day of the year, naturally) Thanksgiving is the story of Jessica Wright (Nell Verlaque) who inadvertently causes a riot on Black Friday when the crowd lined up outside sees her and her friends already walking around in her father’s (Rick Hoffman) department store with hilariously fatal consequences.

A year later, someone wearing a “John Carver” mask (purported to be the first governor of the colony and essentially the town’s mascot for Thanksgiving) is killing off teens and adults connected to the riot and it’s left to Jessica and Sheriff Eric Newlon (Patrick Dempsey) to try and truss up the culprit before he makes stuffing of the entire town.

Thanksgiving is, first and foremost, a satire of the self-importance and selfishness of American suburbanites, and on that level it absolutely works.

Tim Dillon’s character declaring “I’m a security guard, I kill people every day” or the captain of the football team raging over a canceled game directly following a cheerleader being murdered on a trampoline are not exactly subtle but strike a balance between farce and sadism that Roth’s previous attempt at this sort of horror-comedy, The Green Inferno, never could.

Be warned: There is no underlying sensitivity to this film or emotional core that you’re supposed to take seriously. The characters are hilariously over-the-top cliches who are introduced and killed almost in the way situations are set up in a Monty Python film.

I particularly enjoy Joe Delfin’s heavy metal and gun obsessed townie McCarty who offers up a .44 Magnum revolver to our heroes as “a more reasonable option” and hands out “Another Satisfied Customer” t-shirts to anyone who leaves his keg parties vomiting.

I’ve spent a lot of time talking about the film as an element of satire but some of the suspense ideas work beautifully in their own right: I’m particularly reminded of a sequence where Jessica is hiding from the killer by kneeling behind a table covered in “test haircut” heads for a salon and keeping still which works as not only a great visual and a clever means of escape but another bit of pitch black comedy integrating with the horror.

As you might expect, many of the kills double as sight gags with an ironic Thanksgiving twist and for the most part, they land.

In conclusion, Thanksgiving has the same kind of gore and gag combination as most of Eli Roth’s work. There is a kind of self satisfied air to his direction as we’re presented with a procession of horrible people dying in outlandish ways that never feels earned with real insight or understanding.

I could imagine Trey Parker and Matt Stone, as an example, taking on the same material and really getting to the heart of the matter whereas Roth seems more interested in the gags for their own sake.

Extras include commentary, behind the scenes featurettes, EPK, Deleted, Alternate & Extended Scenes, outtakes, and short, early films by Eli Roth and co-writer Jeff Rendell.

However, in this case the gags work– I laughed quite a lot at Thanksgiving and that’s really the only basis on which to recommend or not recommend a comedy.

Recommended.