Eli Roth has long worked to collapse the distance between cinema’s mainstream and its grungiest fringes, smuggling determinedly low-rent genres – mostly splatter horror, the odd shameless erotic thriller, the globetrotting safari of third-world depravity known as the mondo film – into your neighborhood multiplex. He did so most literally with his contribution to Grindhouse, a 2007 double feature from the sleaze connoisseurs Quentin Tarantino and Robert Rodriguez styled to evoke the gutbucket treasures of yore, complete with faux-retro scratches and interstitial trailers for nonexistent coming attractions. Roth directed one such short, a spot for a Z-grade slasher that loosed a killer in a pilgrim get-up on the town of Plymouth to slice up their annual Turkey Day parade. “White meat. Dark meat. All will be carved,” went the tagline’s warning, the voiceover basted with an affectionate irony.
In fully realizing his gravy-drenched gorefest Thanksgiving, Roth tempts fate by expanding a joke perfectly portioned at two minutes to feature length, which got old sooner rather than later when tried on fellow Grindhouse alumni Machete and Hobo with a Shotgun. He does away with the throwback aesthetics, a visual tidying-up that matches the image quality to its present-day setting of Instagram live streams and land acknowledgments. And within an amply earned R rating, a couple of concessions needed to be made; a vaginal impalement from the original trailer has been relocated to a more tasteful part of the body, and an immaculately roasted nude human corpse with stuffing bursting from its pelvic cavity now wears clothes. But Roth has nonetheless held fast to the demented playfulness of classic exploitation in a stick-to-your-ribs feast of ascended schlock. Never mind all the talk of poultry, he’s dishing up red goddamned meat: prime-certified laughs and mutilations, no fillers or additives.
Surely to the great frustration of the many DIY deviants following his example, there’s no substitute for Roth’s nuts-and-bolts skill as an orchestrator of tension and humor, which lays a finely honed foundation for his wicked games. In the exhilarating prologue, a coiled sense of foreboding tightens and explodes as a stampede of Black Friday shoppers storm a Walmart knockoff and claim three lives in the chaos. A clever inversion of Dawn of the Dead’s mall invasion recasting the zombies as consumers, it’s an unsubtle yet chillingly plausible remark on our grotesque capitalist distortion of a holiday that, as one teacher points out, began with America’s genocidal original sin. Roth shoots the crowd like the rabid rioters that form after Bostonians win or lose a major sporting event – among its plentiful virtues, this is one of the finest and truest films ever made about the people of Massachusetts – but lingers on a “Doorbuster Sale” sign as a reminder that businesses stoke and profit from such behavior. Roth reduced human lives to dollars and cents with the soulless auctions of the second Hostel film; here, they’re 50% off, as declared by a banner forming a delectably morbid pun with a woman’s bisected carcass.
Roth thinks in hooks and punchlines, which keeps the copious slayings inventive and gratifying while also enlivening the connective tissue between them. One year after the massacre, the buckle-hatted maniac – hidden behind a mask of the Plymouth colony governor John Carver like a seasonal kitsch Michael Myers – starts picking off those visible in a viral recording taken that night, targeting the store owner’s teen daughter Jessica (Nell Verlaque) and her buddies (most notable among them the social media personality Addison Rae, a gen Z “Paris Hilton in House of Wax” without the grisly payoff). Despite the valiant efforts of the town sheriff (the Maine native Patrick Dempsey, dropping his Rs like so many lobster traps into the icy Atlantic), one local after the next becomes part of the ghastly place-setting at a dinner where the menu includes decapitation, disembowelment and forced cannibalism. As with any good meal, timing is everything, and there’s no lollygagging or self-serious ponderousness to forestall the fun. Even a tacked-on subplot concerning two boys dueling for Jessica’s affections has the decency to poke fun at its own extraneousness.
The table’s tableau echoes The Texas Chain Saw Massacre’s previous perversion of wholesome Rockwelliana, its emphasis on family and togetherness turned incestuous and rageful. Roth’s reference points aren’t particularly obscure, but he earns the right to claim them through his proud commitment to horror for horror’s sake, a balm at a time when it feels like every other entry to the genre is buckling beneath the weight of its belabored trauma metaphors. He applies discipline to the disreputable, elevating choice cuts of trash not with put-on profundity but with a keener mastery of and appreciation for their foulest, basest pleasures. What more do we need to give thanks for?
Thanksgiving is out in UK and US cinemas on 17 November
