Thanksgiving

  So: This is a pretty effective, fun slasher from Eli Roth, fulfilling the promise made by a fake trailer he provided to Grindhouse quite a few years ago. It's built around, well, thanksgiving, of course, but also Black Friday, that recent cancerous growth that's completely eclipsed the holiday.

 The film opens at a thanksgiving dinner hosted by a local business (Rick Hoffman) owner, his family, and a few employees and friends. His daughter Jessica (Nell Verlaque) soon sneaks off with a bunch of university knuckleheads and sneaks into her dad's superstore, triggering the angry mobs outside to storm the supermarket. A few people get killed in the fracas as the mob goes into full consumerist frenzy.

 A year goes by, and a couple days before the next thanksgiving someone with a pretty appropriate John Carver mask starts stalking the people responsible for the small massacre, which was handily filmed and posted online by one of Jessica's friends. The killer is social-media savvy, and uses social media posts to both document his murders and taunt his future victims.

 Thanksgiving (the movie) feels like a lark, but it's a fun lark. Roth, who co-wrote the script with Jeff Rendel, obviously knows and love the elements that make up this subgenre, and he carefully works them in, sometimes memorably. This is the sort of film where if someone mentions knowing how to shoot a blunderbuss, you can be sure it's gonna come into play at some point.

 The tone is very heightened, almost comedic despite some ugliness and shitloads of blood and gore, so plot holes, dumbness and a cast of uniformly unlikeable characters don't take away from the fun. There are a lot of bits that made me laugh, a mix of solid jokes (the killer stops to feed his victim's cat on the way out) and over-the-top bloody spectacle (a guy gets his face pulverized by a large pointy object... as his horrified grandkids, in an inspired evil touch, watch on.)

 Like a lot of slashers, it pays lip service to having a whodunnit - or is it whodoinit? - element. Like virtually every single slasher I can think of that attempts that, it's absolute trash. I guess it's more about keeping people guessing than anything else, but I was really annoyed as the film seemed to want me to wonder about a couple candidates who whose physical frames are nothing like the killer's.

 The kills are bloody and ludicrous, varied, pretty graphic... and satisfyingly holiday-themed. The dumbness and comedic tone precludes any of the film from being even marginally scary or having an tiny bit of suspense, so it's mostly an exercise in waiting for the next kill. That's ok, you never have long to wait.

 A pretty solid outing by Roth - not the most reliable of auteurs, but one who usually makes stuff that's at least interesting. This is, I think, his best movie, playing as it does to all his strengths: an obvious love for the genre, some technical chops and an energetic, if weirdly personality-free style, and a sort of juvenile willingness to push buttons in dumb but entertaining ways.

 Not that it doesn't have its problems. Most of them result from the film wallowing a little too much in its tropes; It's a dumb, dumb film - that goes without saying - but it also makes its characters a little too fucking insufferable. Understandable, and a time-honoured part of the slasher formula, but honestly, spending time with these dipshits was a chore. You usually get at least a few token likeable characters - here, the minority of people who are not absolute douchebags are non-entities, starting with the clearly designated final girl. Oh well, at least the script does do some interesting things in its third act and denouement. That felt weirdly mature compared to the rest of the film.

 A little more personality and touches like that would maybe make it stick a little more in my memory - as it is, I don't think I'll remember anything about this come next black Friday. But I was pretty entertained.