Directed by Eli Roth
Written by Jeff Rendell
Starring:
- Patrick Dempsey as Sheriff Eric Newlon
- Ty Olsson as Mitch Collins
- Gina Gershon as Amanda Collins
- Lynne Griffin as Grandma
- Karen Cliche as Kathleen
- Nell Verlaque as Jessica Wright
- Rick Hoffman as Thomas Wright
- Derek McGrath as Mayor Cantin
Rating: 
Slasher tradition meets consumerist contemporaneity in this blithely violent holiday comic shocker devotedly crafted to the letter of the genre to serve as the most pitch-perfect crossbreeding of modern clichés and antiquated filmmaking methodologies. Friday the 13th, Halloween, Fourth of July, Mother’s Day, April Fool’s Day, Christmas, New Year’s Day and Thanksgiving. In the holiday slasher canon, it’s the latter that has yet to be exhausted (although there are horror movies that are set on Thanksgiving), slasher aficionado Eli Roth fixes that by movie-titling it and turning it into an eponymous motif to render the sweetly beloved American holiday the perfect setting for a mouthwatering butchery – no roast turkey, just roast human and a gory pie.
Faithfully sticking to the textbook – lovely small-town ambience; kicking off with an origin story; and outrageously awful characters – Roth’s slasher takes place in Plymouth, where a Black Friday tragedy during a reckless superstore sale unleashes a moral dilemma on the town a year after the fact. Should the store reopen on Thanksgiving Day after what happened? Of course no one heeds the warnings, much less the ridiculous Groucho Marx mustachioed big store owner played by Rick Hoffman, who owns the big store in question. The consequences? A creepy maniac dressed as John Carver stalks all the protagonists of the tragedy that befell last Thanksgiving. A ragtag bunch of boisterous teenagers are mainly the murderous focus of John Carver; among them the store owner’s daughter played by Nell Verlaque. The town sheriff (Patrick Dempsey) steps into the sleuthing role, trying to find out who the man behind John Carver is.
Unpretentiously directed by Eli Roth, this is the work of a horror filmmaker rediscovering his style and limitations, delivering specific and self-effacing entertainment. Thanksgiving is the kind of film that Eli Roth should have made from the beginning of his faltering filmography. Because the brilliance of this satirical whodunit doesn’t come from the same pretensions as his other works seeking to imitate the inimitable, but stems from the same exploitation motivations of the genre to which it pays obeisance. This movie is delightfully campy fun – arguably the funniest slasher of the last few decades, or the 21st century – because it doesn’t pretend to be witty with its post-modern lampooning of a Tik Tokified juvenile culture, it aims purely to be a straight-up traditional slasher in a modern setting, that’s all. And it is astonishingly successful at it.
It’s gratuitously gruesome. And while it sorely lacks the salacious coarseness of a Grindhouse-era slasher, Thanksgiving’s bloody set pieces galore do conjure up the very best of the genre’s heyday. If there’s one modern-day slasher film that merits an uproarious endless stream of dreadful sequels turning John Carver into the new horror icon, it’s this one. Be that as it may, I certainly think it warrants a place in the pantheon of the best slasher flicks of the 21st century.