Thanksgiving is a Turkey 

THANKSGIVING. The scream and spatter of slasher movies hasn't spoken to me for most of my horror-viewing life. It's not the violence or the blood alone that turns me off — my action movie palate is unencumbered by those. It's that slashers so often strike me as too fascinated with female torture and/or unable to deliver scares beyond the jolt of sudden attack on the helpless. No, give me hauntings and possessions, maybe a good monster. But post-Scream self-awareness and convention-breaking, as well as the blend of action elements when we get a Final Girl with some survival chops, is enough to lure me now and again. As are trailers where somebody takes a couple corn cob holders to the ears. Come on, it's Thanksgiving.

As someone pointed out to me, a guy dressed as a Pilgrim doing murder isn't exactly new. But Thanksgiving seemed poised to drill into so much unmined potential. Coming hot on the heels of Spooky Season, the roots of the Thanksgiving holiday are fairly cursed and made more so by that history's general erasure. In places like Massachusetts, the trees are bare, the winds are cold and the history of famine, colonial violence and witch-burning abounds. Add to that the gathering of unhappy families that so often predicates a horror movie bloodbath and an arsenal of corny holiday kitsch. Anything else, as they say, is gravy.

But those historical and cultural elements would take smart, insightful writing, clever handling and more guts than the paltry giblets in the movie at hand. Evidently, Thanksgiving started out as a goofy parody trailer from 2007's Grindhouse, a riff on Silent Night, Deadly Night (1984) and Halloween (1978). But in fleshing out the feature, accomplished splatter director Eli Roth (he of the Hostel movies) never cuts deeper than initial joke of the premise.

In Plymouth, Massachusetts, the wealthy owner of RightMart (Rick Hoffman, in Muppet villain mode) sits down to Thanksgiving dinner with his family while his employees prepare to open the store a day early for a mob of Black Friday shoppers pushing at the barricades. His teen daughter Jessica (Nell Verlaque) heads out for a night with her pals and baseball star boyfriend Bobby (Jalen Thomas Brooks), stopping at the store on the way. When the crowd busts through the glass doors, the stampede turns deadly and the inevitable video recording goes viral.

A year later, despite those deaths and a small but shouty group of protesters, Jessica's father plans to open on Thanksgiving again. But as the day draws near, a mysterious assailant disguised as town founder/Mayflower alum John Carver starts picking off people involved in the previous year's tragedy. They're also tagging Jessica and her friends in taunting social media posts that grow progressively gory. All this on the eve of a town Thanksgiving parade. While the kids and the sheriff (Patrick Dempsey) piece together footage of the stampede to determine whose villain origin story it was, the bodies — or parts or them, anyway — are piling up.

The deaths are as comically messy and over the top as one would expect/hope, though the sheer volume of thick, wiggling intestines strewn about makes one wonder if there was a sale on kielbasa Roth didn't want to waste. Pitchforks and holiday kitchen implements are all called into service — who still uses an electric knife? — along with the usual buzz saws and axes. There are some rubbery decapitations, teen buffoonery and blood spray with stronger pressure than the shower in my first apartment. Those who came for the wincing laughs will find plenty on the menu, but adrenaline, tension and wit are in short supply.

Verlaque's Jessica is profoundly boring, though I don't imagine she could have scraped together much of a character from Jeff Rendell's screenplay. Surely even the most basic of bitches could muster something compelling to say with an estranged ex, a new beau, retail blood on her family's hands and a masked killer picking off her friends. Instead, she has all the moxie of an air plant with very good hair. The same can be said for most of the main cast, who go through the motions and take their licks and screaming on cue — Dempsey included, despite going all in on the Boston-adjacent accent. Gina Gershon, who knows how to bring the camp, is wasted here, as are a couple of inspired minor characters. I would absolutely watch McCarty (Joe Delfin), the wildly irresponsible supplier of guns and booze to minors, and the joyless Detective Chu (Russell Yuenn), whose bitchiness you could miss reaching for the popcorn, team up with Gershon in a 90-minute comedy horror.

The fun of a holiday slasher is the transgression, the shredding of wholesome family cliché and with it the veneer of our traditions and values. Roth is comfortable launching his satirical ax toward the easy targets of greedy bosses, consumerism and shallow trophy wives, but little else. In one cringy scene, a white student's report on Thanksgiving ends with his vowing not to celebrate it and is played for laughs, with girls fawning over his emo delivery and washboard abs. It's a cheap evasion in a story that is itself about refusing to acknowledge responsibility for violence and murder. It's a wild choice when the writers and cast of Reservation Dogs live and breathe, making hilarious and poignant work from Indigenous perspectives. Ignoring all the symbolic power it might have held, John Carver's visage functions as no more than a Guy Fawkes mask with autumn vibes. It's an opportunity missed, a place for Roth, or perhaps another writer/director with the chops for it, to dig in and make something far more iconoclastic. R. 107M. BROADWAY, MILL CREEK.

Jennifer Fumiko Cahill (she/her) is the arts and features editor at the Journal. Reach her at (707) 442-1400, extension 320, or [email protected]. Follow her on Instagram @JFumikoCahill and on Mastodon @jenniferfumikocahill.

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Fortuna Theatre is temporarily closed. For showtimes call: Broadway Cinema (707) 443-3456; Mill Creek Cinema 839-3456; Minor Theatre (707) 822-3456.