Thanksgiving

Eli Roth – 2023 – USA

Thanksgiving has a thoroughly entertaining, and genuinely hilarious, first half, that both homages and parodies 80s holiday-themed splatter films, but its drawn out climax fizzles because the horror cliches starting being checked off as if they’re obligatory and unavoidable, not because director Eli Roth has any more spin to put on them. I feel it would have been stronger if Roth had found a way to extend the humor through the finale instead of falling back on the standard “villain chases victim” and “tables get turned” tropes over and over again. Nevertheless, it’s very much worth seeing for the razor-sharp satire of the first act, which revolves around a riot at a Walmart type store during a Thanksgiving Day “Black Friday” sale, during which rampaging customers trample each other for electronics, and one character even struggles to hold on to his waffle iron while blood is gushing from his neck wound. This scene and a couple others had me wrapped around Roth’s finger, but ultimately, the rest of the film was a let-down because, as I said, it was all fairly routine, morphing into a by-the-book whodunnit thriller that anyone else could have made. Having said that, I would still put Thanksgiving in the ‘good’ column on a list of Roth’s films, along with Cabin Fever, Hostel and The Green Inferno.