Just the Ticket #164: Thanksgiving

Article by Sean Wilkinson,

a.k.a. the Ticketmaster

Happy Thanksgiving, Ticketholders!

By the time you read this, I will most likely have cooked and eaten a balanced breakfast (balanced on a large waffle, that is), composed my social media promotional materials, and begun helping prepare a meal of pork tenderloin, rice, stuffing, biscuits, gravy, cranberry sauce, and bacon-wrapped peppers for an early dinner. I am thankful to still have a job and income, a place to live, and a family who is willing to support me in these challenging times. And I am thankful to whatever source of strength I am able to call upon that I have not succumbed to the temptations of financially crippling RNG in the face of a potentially catastrophic future for the country I love and reap the benefits of living in every single day. Now that our senile, sadistic, pathological, McCarthyist President-elect has seemingly had all legal action against him dropped because people who presumably went to prestigious schools to study, memorize, and affect the entirety of Law decided that thinking is too hard when damning, on-the-record, objective facts exist and a convicted criminal threatened to fire them for doing the right thing, it only makes sense that I review a horror movie about an American patriot who takes revenge on those who killed their loved ones in a senseless riot.

I know I'm going to need all the strength I can get to endure the next four years of American history, so please remember to Become A Ticketholder if you haven't already, leave a comment at the bottom of this post to let me know what you're thankful for, help out my ad revenue so I don't get cooked, and follow me on Tumblr, Reddit, Facebook, and LinkedIn to like what you see and receive the latest news on my content.

Back in 2007, Quentin Tarantino (Pulp Fiction) and Robert Rodriguez (The Faculty) teamed up to honor and revive the Grindhouse theater experience with the double-feature of Death Proof and Planet Terror. Its raw footage aesthetic and sensationalized gore and sexuality in absurdist action/horror context would go on to influence TV series like Blood Drive, Happy, and American Horror Story, as well as movies like the Bunnyman Grindhouse Edition, Shoot 'Em Up, and Bounty Killer. But as part of creating a theatrical Grindhouse viewing experience, Tarantino and Rodriguez gathered a dream team (more 1992 Men's Olympic Basketball than the 1989 movie about escaped mental patients road-tripping to watch baseball) of directors to make fake movie trailers.

With some, it was easy to see why they wouldn't fly as feature-length movies, such as Rob Zombie's Werewolf Women Of the SS (sexy Nazis and Nicolas Cage in yellowface) and Edgar Wright's Don't (annoyingly repetitive and overly artsy). But Rodriguez's own Machete trailer would spawn two movies, tease a third, and cross over with Spy Kids of all things, short-form director Jason Eisner's Hobo With A Shotgun would get adapted with Rutger Hauer in the lead role, and in 2023, torture porn pioneer and future Borderlands director Eli Roth would adapt his Thanksgiving trailer to the big screen, which is what I'm talking about today because reviewing My Bloody Valentine would have been too obvious.

One year after a riot at a We Can't Afford Walmart run by Thomas Wright (Rick Hoffman, Suits and commercials for the Royal Match mobile game, whom the film's official trailer vaguely suggests to be the killer despite Hoffman only getting an "and" credit, meaning he's only in a featured guest role)

where people, who make MAGA supporters on January 6th look sane, literally murder each other over fucking waffle irons and Furbies, the town of Plymouth, Massachusetts (a.k.a. Ontario, Canada because Canada is still one of the cheapest places to film, I guess) is plagued by a killer in a pilgrim costume and a John Carver mask (aside from the one scene where they dress as a creepy clown instead).

Leading the investigation (now that his Scream 3 character is living a nice, quiet life offscreen with Sidney Prescott) is Patrick Dempsey with his Noreaster accent turned to five Wahlbergs as Sheriff Eric Newlon. And filling out the cast are final girl with anti-commercialism and anti-stepmother issues Jessica Wright (Big Shot's Nell Verlaque), her coupled friends Gaby (social media personality Addison Rae) and Evan (Tomaso Sanelli, Creeped Out), her bland, overprotective boyfriend Ryan (Zombies star Milo Manheim), vain stepmother Kathleen (the unfortunately named Karen Cliche, of Mutant X and Saw VI), Right Mart manager Mitch (Supernatural favorite Ty Olsson), and obvious red herring Bobby (Jalen Thomas Brooks, Walker). Gina Gershon (Breathless) plays Mitch's wife, who died in the opening, prolific TV "that guy" Joe Delfin plays charismatic "party entrepreneur" McCarty, and relative unknown Gabriel Davenport as token black jock Claude "Scuba" Dybing. There are more characters, but they, and most of the ones I bothered to mention, only matter enough to get killed because they're terrible, one-note human beings, if they matter to the plot or each other at all.

The plot, when not giving Jessica early resolution with her father, is a Grindhouse-alike, Scream-alike holiday revenge, whodunit slasher that pays homage to such 70s and 80s camp-fests as Silent Night, Deadly Night, Leprechaun, and Jack Frost (even throwing in a dinner scene that would feel at home in Texas Chainsaw Massacre), in that the killer finds sensationally gory ways to off his victims with Thanksgiving-themed tools and appliances (an electric turkey carver, a giant brining bag, an axe, corn grips, and even trussing and garnishing a grown woman and roasting her alive like a giant turkey).

I watched Thanksgiving twice.

The first time was by myself for the purposes of this review, and I found it safe, unwilling to commit to its killer's gimmick, unable to support a satisfying mystery, too gruesomely wacky, and too many years removed from the crazes that spawned it to be as absurd and reverentially exploitative with its sex and violence as it could have been in the late 2000s. 

But when I watched it again a few days later, I did so with my family, and enjoyed my experience a lot more. There are still lines that don't work (Mitch telling the mob of shoppers that RightMart opens in ten minutes, five minutes after one of the security guards tells them the store will open in ten minutes, and Jessica telling Ryan and Bobby to "get out!" when everyone is already outdoors, for example), but knowing what's coming up gave me a greater appreciation for the dialogue that does work (which most of it does) and the bits of foreshadowing that make the mystery aspect stronger and more fun for the audience on rewatch despite the non-police characters not being very active in solving it until the third act. Despite breaking theme at one point with the aforementioned clown costume, a tranquilizer pistol, chloroform, and smoke bombs (like they have some kind of tactical training), Carver adheres to their gimmick outside of this one instance, and the resulting kills are more entertaining with an audience than alone.

Although unable to go full Grindhouse, Thanksgiving adequately pays homage to its original trailer in its recreated and updated scenes (the trampoline, the parade, the dinner scene, etc.).

I'm not entirely sure the fakeout or actual killer reveal work as well as they logistically could have.

But the scares in this are genuine, and both the "assholes get their comeuppance" kills and the villain's defeat (if not their death, because a sequel has been scripted and several returning cast members have been announced, including Hoffman, Verlaque, and Rae) were ultimately satisfying. After the villain reveal and a campy, suspenseful finale with a literal Chekov's Gun, things wrap up with the expected line, "nobody could've survived that; everything's burned to ash in there" (which means the killer got away and will probably be back with horrible burn scars in Thanksgiving II), and an I Know What You Did Last Summer ending dream sequence to pile on the sequel bait.

So much for there being no leftovers!

For its flaws, real or subjective, Thanksgiving is fun, throwback horror that works well enough in a modern context, and I'm looking forward to seeing what Roth and co-writer-and-more Jeff Rendell (Cabin Fever) will set the table with next year.

B+

In addition to my blessings, I'm also counting analytics, so please remember to Become A Ticketholder if you haven't already, leave a comment at the bottom of this post to let me know what you're thankful for, help out my ad revenue so I don't get cooked, and follow me on Tumblr, Reddit, Facebook, and LinkedIn to like what you see and receive the latest news on my content.

Ticketmaster,

Out of Food.