Thanksgiving

I’m a sucker for any movie set in the Boston area. Especially if they have the guts to really lean into the Boston accents. Gimme the most over the top take on a townie, preferably a guy talking out of the side of his mouth who perpetually has a Dunks cup in his hand. Someone who would be right at home on the docks, who uses the word “fuck” as a comma. Like, Manchester By the Sea and Spotlight are both great, but How to Rob is perfection. I mean, not really: it’s a trashy, sloppy crime movie set in Quincy. But I adore it so much, just because the Boston accents are incredible, and they make sure to shoehorn in phrases like “bubblah” and “Cumby’s”. Given that Eli Roth is from Newton and this film is set in Plymouth (of course), I had high hopes this would constitute “Bos-ploitation”.

On Thanksgiving Day, Right Mart will be opening at 6 PM with some door buster deals. An enormous, rowdy crowd gathers, eager for a free waffle iron. Some local teens swing by to buy a new phone, and Jessie (Nell Verlaque) is able to slip them in the side door since her dad is Thomas Wright (Rick Hoffman), the owner of the store. Once inside, they taunt the angry crowd, causing them to charge the doors, breaking them down and leading to mayhem, as well as a few deaths.

A year later, Right Mart is gearing up to open on Thanksgiving again. Plans are derailed, however, when someone dresses up as a Pilgrim wearing a John Carver mask and starts killing people involved with the stampede from the year before. First is Lizzie (Amanda Barker), who shows up on a cell phone recording of the event as a greedy shopper, followed by Manny (Tim Dillon), s security guard from the evening who ran away. But the killer quickly reveals his true targets are the teens and the Wrights. So they start working to try to figure out who it could be, and how to stop them.

First off, let’s acknowledge that this couldn’t happen in Massachusetts. Not because the people are any more civilized. God no. Just because state blue laws prevent retail stores from opening on Thanksgiving Day proper. As soon as the clock strikes midnight and it’s technically Black Friday, they can (and do) open. But not before.

That aside, this is basically exactly what you’d expect it to be. It’s gory, it’s mean, it’s grimy, and it knows all that. It rarely tries to rise above its premise, and the whole thing is imbued with the same dark humor present in the idea. The teen angle lends it an air of classic slasher films, although we spend a lot more time with them investigating, during which none of them stand out. They also throw in a love triangle with Jessie at the center, whose thinly veiled purpose is to try to confuse our hypotheses as to the identity of the killer. Both Bobby (Jalen Thomas Brooks) and Ryan (Milo Manheim) never seem to be around for the attacks, and always show up afterwards. And Bobby has a pretty good motive: his arm was crushed in the stampede, derailing his promising baseball career.

Of course, as a culture, we’ve gotten used to the horror movie formula. We know that almost always, the person made to look the most suspicious is not the perpetrator. In fact, you could almost argue that making that person the killer would be the subversion at this point. So you have to decide what type of movie this is: one that subverts audience expectation, or one that subverts tropes.

That this movie opens with a nightmare Black Friday scenario makes me realize it’s been a minute since I’ve heard about one. There was a ten-ish year period when it felt like every year, you heard about people getting hurt or even killed in such a stampede. My memory is probably a bit heightened, but point is that they were a widely talked about news item. Thankfully, it seems that’s not as true any more. I’d have to assume that it’s due to the modern dominance of online shopping, with COVID dealing them the final deathblow. That doesn’t reflect poorly on the movie, though. It just indicates Eli Roth is of a generation which clearly remembers it as a key indicator of American greed.

The best thing to be said about this movie? It’s a blast. Cheesy as hell, over the top, and melodramatic. It recreates a few of the bits from the original trailer in Grindhouse. Most of the kills are thematic in some way, and all are pretty gruesome and creative. The teen drama does get grating pretty quick, and for such a silly premise it is fairly drawn out. Especially once it slows down in the third act, it starts to get a little boring before picking back up again. It didn’t need to be over 100 minutes long. Hell, it didn’t need to be over 90 minutes. But to see a movie in which the entire town of Hanover is constantly referenced and dissed for no reason? Yeah, I’ll take it.