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I feel like movie theaters have died ever since COVID. Every time I’ve gone half of the theater was empty and I was starting to lose hope. Then, I got tickets to see an early showing of the new Thanksgiving movie by Eli Roth in theaters and my faith was restored. It was so much fun and the movie was better than I expected so I thought it would be exciting to write a little review.
Before I saw the movie, I decided to do a little research and discovered that Eli Roth was the director. I thought that the name sounded a little familiar, so I decided to look up his previous works. I found out that he was also the director of The Green Inferno, which I have seen before, Cabin Fever, and Hostel, which I’ve heard a lot about. With this basis of knowledge, I was a little nervous to see this movie as I know that his films tend to have a lot of gore and can be a little much at times.
It seems like there is a slasher movie created around every single holiday. I was thinking to myself, “How good could a scary movie about THANKSGIVING really be??” I’ve never seen a slasher surrounding this holiday so I was intrigued from the get-go. Boy, was I pleasantly surprised. Personally, I think that this movie was a mix between Scream, and Final Destination, and the deaths reminded me a lot of the horror movie X.
One of the biggest things that stood out to me was the ways in which the characters were killed. This kind of thing can really make or break a movie. Each of the deaths was really exciting to watch (as gruesome as that might sound), as they were all unique to the character and a lot of them were quite unpredictable. With all of the deaths, I felt that there was a good amount of gore. It wasn’t too harsh to the extent of feeling nauseous, but it was enough to make you cringe and, in some cases, audibly react. Something that I think is important to note is the fact that there was a good amount of comedy to combat the grossness throughout the movie. Also, there were a lot of characters that I expected to die, especially early on, that didn’t die until later or at all, which was actually really nice because it helped maintain an element of surprise.
Usually, music plays a massive role in films for me, especially horror movies. If a film is trying to be scary and has very eerie background music, I am 10 times more likely to be freaked out. In Thanksgiving, the music wasn’t really prominent to me and the film still managed to be scary. The jumpscares that were placed throughout the movie were actually entertaining. A lot of them weren’t super scary, just catching you off guard. I actually prefer this because it kept the film entertaining and light, letting the level of “scariness” be determined by the antagonist and the deaths.
As the movie played out, it progressively got more and more intense. Usually, I find that I get bored when films do this, but this one had my attention from the start. The cinematography in this film was actually really good. They had a good variation of camera angles and used a lot of elements that you don’t typically see in horror movies, and made them very scary. There were certain images in the film that just had a very eerie feeling and made the scene feel a lot more intense.
I’m not going to lie, I thought the acting was going to be rough. I’m sorry, but a real movie with Addison Rae as one of the main characters is not very promising. Also, I only recognized a couple of the actors, so I wasn’t sure if I would like the others. Despite all of this, I think they all did a fantastic job.
Overall, I would recommend seeing this movie, especially if you enjoy slashers. The ending was a little predictable and didn’t provide much clarification (which was slightly annoying) but I have definitely seen worse endings. I really enjoyed this film and I look forward to hearing what others think about it. I give Thanksgiving, directed by Eli Roth 4 stars out of 5.