It was one big, happy, festive town, or so you thought. “Thanksgiving” was a new holiday movie for the Thanksgiving season. Eli Roth directed the movie and had an extensive celebrity cast including Addison Rae, Milo Manheim, Nell Varlaque, Patrick Dempsey and Rick Hoffman.
The movie is set in Plymouth, Massachusetts, the town that started Thanksgiving and was the first settlement. For good reason, the city gets seriously into the holiday season. The whole town is a stereotypical, perfectly normal town you would find in a cheesy Hallmark movie. However, a dangerous stampede on Black Friday turns ugly, leading to a darker future.
There is a murderer on the loose with Thanksgiving-themed killings, taking on the likes of John Carver, a real-life pilgrim. This movie was scary in a suspenseful way, but it was one of the goriest movies I have ever seen. The very graphic kills and advanced special effects include a lot of blood, brains and guts. I would not watch this movie if you can not handle gore. The worst moment was when one of the characters was cleaning her ears with a Q-tip and the killer snuck up on him and pierced his ear with a corn on the cob holder. Another incredibly gory moment was when one character got her tongue stuck to a below-zero industrial-sized freezer door to only then get her head cut off while she was stuck to the side of a freezer’s metal and could not move.
A big aspect of horror movies nowadays is the usage of phones. In older horror films, phones were less common on your person and did not play a major part in the movie. In modern films, all the characters have a phone on them, and the plot would be over if it stayed that way. Typically, there is some sort of power outage, breaking of the phone or another excuse to have them out of the plot. This movie was one of the first I have seen that used modern technology in the plot with the usage of social media. The killer used Instagram, and tagged the future victims in a group in a photo. It enhanced the plot by making it more interesting and scarily realistic.
While this was a scary movie, in a gory way, I personally found it hard to be scared by murderous pilgrims. To me it seems more comical and unrealistic but the scary suspenseful mood was definitely there for the film. I was very nervous for Addison Rae, as her acting talent can be somewhat questionable from her previous movies. She was not as cringy as I expected, and the cast actually did a nice job adding to the suspense.
If you are a horror movie lover like me, it definitely adds to the Holiday/Thanksgiving season and it will become an annual Thanksgiving tradition for me and my family, if they can stomach it.
