Thanksgiving (2023)

Plot of Thanksgiving: Thanksgiving falls on a Black Friday and there is a stampede at the site of a electronic store offering gifts and 50% off. People are killed including Amanda the wife of the store manager. At the same time Jessica, the daughter of the store owner takes her friends inside which adds to the crowd trouble. The following year as preparations are being made for another bargain day a waitress, Lizzie, who had been involved the previous year, is killed by a man in a John Carver mask (John Carver – one of the pilgrim fathers). Killings continue and the young people involved are tagged by an unknown person, showing a Thanksgiving dinner table with an increasing number of corpses sitting round it. During the Thanksgiving parade a man in a clown suit causes a distraction and captures Jessica and her friends and the store owner’s wife Kathleen. Kathleen is cooked in a big oven and the others wake up sitting round the table, gagged and tied up. How can it end.

Content: There is no sex or nudity, and just a bit of drinking. There is focus on the collection of people in the store owner’s house and then the riot at the store itself when a couple of people are killed. Once the phones of the young people are  set up to receive the gory details of the killing and the killings themselves start to take place people die in a whole variety of ways. A cheerleader decides to seduce her boyfriend by discarding her underwear while trampolining, but is impaled on a blade sticking up through the canvas. People are beheaded. One girl is eviscerated by a circular saw. Kathleen is cooked and served at the table instead of a turkey. One of the boys is beaten to death using a tenderiser. And so on!

A View: The whole plan seems to be for us to guess who the killer is, and there only seems to be one boy tall enough, but is it him? Had I known it was a Grindhouse film it would have made more sense, and now, if you have read this you will know what it is. Obviously the whole plot is pretty tenuous so you have to go along with it. In its favour the young people are not too irritating. If you are thinking about watching it you might be better off watching one of the other Grindhouses first. Try Deathproof or Planet Terror.

Fun Fact: The third film based on one of the five mock trailers shown in the Grindhouse films. Two remain to be made.