Sony Pictures Entertainment/YouTube Screenshot
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. That mock promo played like a sick joke and so too does Roth’s latest, even as it operates in the straightforward slasher vein of Black Christmas and My Bloody Valentine.
Thanksgiving pits a group of innocent Massachusetts residents against a fiend in appropriate holiday attire: a pilgrim outfit comprised of a wide-brimmed hat and a John Carver mask. Harkening back to its ’70s and ’80s ancestors, it’s a sturdily formulaic affair that taps into the strengths of its splatterhouse-aficionado helmer, and it should satiate genre fans hungry for a cinematic feast of guessing-game mystery and gnarly gruesomeness.
Thanksgiving (in theaters Nov. 17) rehashes the best sequences of its coming-attraction source material, so those ignorant of that predecessor would be wise to avoid catching up with it until after seeing this horrorshow. The setting is Plymouth, fabled site of the Mayflower colony and the first Thanksgiving meal, and now home to Jessica (Nell Verlaque), a high schooler whose dad (Suits’ Rick Hoffman) owns retail store Right Mart, which per tradition opens on Thanksgiving night to customers eager to get an early jump on Black Friday sales.