Thanksgiving (2023)
Directed by Eli Roth
After a Black Friday riot ends in tragedy, a mysterious Thanksgiving-inspired killer terrorizes Plymouth, Massachusetts - the birthplace of the holiday. Picking off residents one by one, what begins as random revenge killings are soon revealed to be part of a larger, sinister holiday plan.
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What critics compared Thanksgiving to
The core premise surrounds hundreds of shoppers breaking down doors on Black Friday in an act of mindless violence akin to modern zombies, but George A. Romero already satirized this concept with aplomb in his mall-set 1978 classic, Dawn of the Dead.
After a decade away from big-screen horror, director Eli Roth (Hostel, The Green Inferno) returns to his favorite stomping grounds with Thanksgiving, a feature-length expansion of the 2007 faux-trailer that he contributed to Quentin Tarantino and Robert Rodriguez’s Grindhouse.
This is Roth‘s first horror picture since 2015’s The Green Inferno (unless you count Knock Knock, but I see that as more of a straightforward thriller).
Anyone who’s seen Roth’s horror movies also knows that he fancies himself a bit of a satirist, which he sometimes nails (Hostel and Hostel: Part II) and sometimes… doesn’t (Death Wish, The Green Inferno).
Depending on who you ask, Thanksgiving is the first horror film Roth has directed since his 2013 cannibal extravaganza The Green Inferno, and it's a welcome return from the director who cut his teeth on early aughts classics like Cabin Fever and Hostel.
Electric carving knives, meat cleavers, and even corn cob holders await the capitalists who pissed off Carver, and though only one of those creative kills rises to the level of extreme queasiness achieved in Roth’s “The Green Inferno” or “Hostel: Part II,” “Thanksgiving” proves a smarter slasher for the restraint.