Hold onto your giblets, 3.5 readers. BQB here with a review of what I think will be this year’s surprise hit.
I love it when I go into a film thinking it’s going to be total drek, only to come out pleasantly surprised.
“But BQB,” you might say. “Why would you go to a movie if you think it’s going to be drek in the first place?”
Simple answer. I was bored af.
IMO, the promos didn’t look good. A pilgrim chopping up the residents of Plymouth, MA, home of the first Thanksgiving dinner, with an axe? No thanks.
But it turns out this is one twisted, outrageous dark comedy, a satire that sends up everything we know and love about our favorite holiday dedicated to gluttony as well as the slasher genre itself. I can tell you on a personal level, I can’t remember the last time I sat in a theater and heard an audience laugh and gasp in terror so if you can get out to your local cinema, it’s worth it.
The story centers around a group of dopey teenagers who, on one fateful Thanksgiving night, stop by a big box Walmart type store to shop before they go to a movie. A Black Friday mob has assembled and as shoppers push and shove their way toward the front of the store, things get ugly. Alas, the kids engage in some childish antics that inspire a riotous stampede, though in their defense, they’re stupid kids and how could they have known? As you might expect, many a shopper is killed in the fracas, often in sad, silly, and OK, yes, hilarious ways. This is an Eli Roth picture and if you know his work then that’s all you need to know.
Flash forward a year later and the town of Plymouth is still recovering from the box store melee. Many residents lost a loved one. The high school kids are all depressed over what happened. But as the next Turkey Day approaches, some maniac in a John Carver mask (as in John Carver, the pilgrim and governor of the original Plymouth Colony but the name takes on a new meaning as the murderer is literally carving victims up with an ax) targets the kids, picking them off one by one. He even goes outside the group, hacking up any town resident who displayed bad behavior during the riot – i.e. an idiot who filmed the massacre on his cell phone and streamed it rather than help people, an evil lady who physically attacked people just to save a buck on a waffle iron and so on.
It’s up to the kids to solve the mystery as they run down a list of townsfolk, each with their own motive, each who lost something or someone to the box store riot a year earlier. Patrick Dempsey headlines an otherwise talented cast of unknown young up and comers, playing the town sheriff tasked with unmasking the axe wielding lunatic. Since it takes place in MA, you can imagine the Boston accents are laid on thick and heavy by most of the actors involved, Dempsey included.
STATUS: Shelf-worthy. It’s a surprise winner, in my book, bound to become a guilty pleasure people will break out every Thanksgiving. It’s funny. It’s original. Though it has a predominantly young cast of late teen, early-twenty somethings, it doesn’t get bogged down in PC wokesterism as so many flicks catered to that age group do. It knows it has one job – to make you laugh and make you disgusted. It does both well, though a word of warning, at times, it does the latter too well. Do keep in mind, the killer is quite literally turning his victims into his own personal Thanksgiving dinner, with all the gore that entails, so if you’re squeamish, this one probably isn’t for you.
BONUS POINTS: Gina Gershon has a great early cameo and I’m too lazy to surf around to find out who he is, but the kid who played the gun nut “McCarty,” who supplies the gang with all their weapons to fight the baddie was funny and is someone to watch.
Bookshelf Battle 