“Eli Roth’s Thanksgiving is a brilliantly violent, riotously funny slasher comedy.”
Pros
A refreshingly brutal return to the slasher genre’s greatest hits.
Many unforgettably bloody were dismembered and killed
overall enjoyable comedy horror tone
Shortcoming
A runtime that’s about 10 minutes too long
Many uninteresting lead and supporting characters
Thank you is a deliciously mean, bawdy horror-comedy. like ti west x, it feels like a throwback to simpler times when horror movies could be gory, bloodthirsty, extremely funny, and not much else. In many ways, that’s exactly what it is Thank you Is. Directed by Eli Roth, it is a feature film version of the trailer he shot for 2007 grindhouse, back then, Thank you It was just a trailer for a cheap, low-budget horror movie that didn’t exist. Sixteen years later, it’s now too much.
The new film is just like the holiday horror movies black christmas And silent night, deadly night Just like the trailer inspired it, but it’s so much more than that. What was once merely an extremely rough-and-ready, low-budget piece of pure horror pastiche has now been expanded into a full-blown Eli Roth gorefest – one that’s every bit as repulsive and gleefully violent as that suggested. Has gone. It is everything it needs and nothing more. In a time when mainstream slasher films like this one have become harder to find, this is perfect.
Founded in the city of Plymouth, Massachusetts, Thank you It opens on the night of the same name and follows a series of characters as they all eventually end up at the same supercenter for Black Friday. After his second wife tries to capitalize on the financial opportunities presented by the commercial holiday, the store’s owner, Thomas Wright (Rick Hoffman), orders his employees to work Thanksgiving night and leaves them with only two men to control them all. Provide security guards. Impatient consumers are literally knocking on the gates to get in. When Thomas’s daughter, Jessica (Nell Verlach), helps her friends get in early, she inadvertently angers everyone waiting outside.
Soon, everything turns into chaos: workers are crushed, throats are slit on broken shards of glass, and unsuspecting innocents are crushed in shopping carts. This sequence, an over-the-top critique of consumer culture and mindless capitalist decision-making, marks the moment when Thank you Fulfills the violent, verbal promises of its origin grindhouse Trailer. Behind the camera, Roth keeps track of every instance of skin-tearing violence – ensuring that the film’s opening Black Friday massacre serves as an effective prologue to everything that follows.
One year later, the citizens of Plymouth find themselves terrorized by a masked killer who intends to make everyone present and responsible for the riot pay for their sins. Jessica, Sheriff Eric Newlon (Patrick Dempsey) and other characters in the film attempt to uncover the identity of the killer, Thank you Adopts a familiar small-town slasher movie structure. It spends most of its runtime bouncing from scenes of quiet paranoia and suburban humor to outrageous, cartoonishly violent set pieces and murders. Unfortunately, the film doesn’t always strike the right balance between those two approaches.
Thank you, which could have easily been about 10 minutes shorter, sometimes fails to maintain the light, brisk pace that its story demands. It gets lost in the dramatic relationships between its teen characters and doesn’t fully justify all its various subplots and tangents. While all of the film’s actors are well aware of what tone they must support and what tasks they must perform, Jeff Rendell’s script gives the audience no reason to care that any of their Whether the character will survive or not. , This fact is not fully accepted Thank youBut many of its non-violent sections fail as a result.
However, for the most part, Roth’s latest effort is an easily digestible cocktail of bloody horror and pitch-black comedy. All of the film’s scenes are not only surprisingly well-staged and paced, but also frequently delivered with a jarring, satirical edge that makes some of its most brutal moments easy to understand. Whether it’s the box of unopened waffle irons that a Black Friday customer literally ate or the disturbing use of two corn on the cob holders, Roth never fails to deliver darkly funny details that effectively punctuate each. pauses Thank youMoments of slasher horror with laugh-worthy visual punchlines.
Thank you This is an undeniably one-note horror film. It’s a 106-minute farce that plays to the strengths of both its famously terrifying director and the slasher subgenre it clearly loves. One could criticize it for its lack of originality, but that would be missing the point. Thank you, which just wants to give horror fans a fun time in the movie theater. It does so almost with flying colors, to the extent that its satisfaction with its surface-level thrills and kills can be easily forgiven. After all, if any movie is allowed to satirize something you’ve seen a million times before, why not let it be a movie that lovingly spit-roasts the same American holiday that’s spawned by the same hit movies every year? Is it about to repeat?
Thank you Now running in theatres. For related content, please read The End of Thanksgiving Explained.