THANKSGIVING (2023) ¢ ¢
D: Eli Roth
Patrick Dempsey, Nell Verlaque, Jalen Thomas Brooks,
Gabriel Davenport, Milo Manheim, Addison Rae
Tomaso Sanelli, Joe Delfin, Rick Hoffman,
Gina Gershon, Jenna Warren, Karen Cliche
A blood-and-guts slasher movie that opens on Black Friday (actually Black Thursday Night) with a mob of rabid shoppers breaking down the doors of a department store and trampling anybody who stands between them and a hundred free waffle irons. Skip ahead a year, and people involved in the riot are turning up dead, dispatched and dismembered in gory, horrible ways. It's Thanksgiving with all the trimmings, and the trimmings include characters being beheaded, eviscerated, stabbed with a pitchfork, chopped with an ax, sliced with a power saw and baked alive in an industrial-sized oven. That's good for some shock value, but there's nothing original, or even especially interesting, going on here, the plot and characters pulled straight out of the timeworn, holiday-themed, slasher-movie playbook. You don't even care who the killer is, really. It just doesn't matter. The film started out as one of the fake trailers in "Grindhouse" (2007). The trailer was better than this.
