Despite homages to classic slashers and a decent twist, the movie suffers from shallow characters, a tired plot and a lack of genuine tension. The title Thanksgiving deserved a much better movie.
Before the titles roll, the best part of Thanksgiving is already over. It’s shocking to me how a movie with so much promise can get so underwhelming in less than 2 hours. The movie has some good ideas but the end product unfortunately doesn’t add up to a satisfying experience.
It’s Thanksgiving in Plymouth, Massachusetts and the people of the small town are gearing up for the Black Friday sale at a supermarket called RightMart. The store is unable to control the masses waiting for them to open and tragedy ensues leading to multiple deaths. Out of the tragedy, a sadistic killer is born who strikes the following year to exact vengeance on the people responsible for the incident. What follows is a series of gory murders, some of them being seriously wild.
The by-the-numbers story follows a bunch of teenagers who have been marked by the killer to seek vengeance. The teenagers are led by Gaby (Addison Rae) who is the store owner’s daughter caught in the mess. The sheriff (Patrick Dempsey) and his department are shown to be too incompetent to get anywhere close to catching the killer throughout. There aren’t any protagonists to speak of in the movie as there is no depth in the characters or any development in them. That may have been the intent of the creators but in this case, the movie felt incomplete without it. The only redeeming quality of the movie is that the villain is half-decent and the twist is genuine. Some of the murders are also quite scary. The makeup looked far from real but achieved the desired ickiness. The performances, however, are mediocre as there isn’t one actor or character memorable enough to speak of.
Eli Roth, who is known for splatter films (a subgenre of horror films that focuses on graphic portrayals of gore and violence), directs this movie which in the first few minutes looked like a return to form for him like in his earlier films such as Cabin Fever and Hostel. Heavily inspired by Halloween and the Italian Giallo films, Roth attempts to pay tribute to these films but falls short. The good ones from those movies are known for the tension that’s built in the viewers’ minds, the anticipation of something terrible about to happen and then either fulfilling those expectations or subverting them, but providing a gratifying experience. It’s unfortunate that this movie never rises to that level of tension.
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