One year after a horrible Thanksgiving Day massacre, a masked madman begins a killing spree in Plymouth Massachusetts. With efforts from local police and a group of high school teens, it becomes a race against the clock to unmask the new serial killer and find out why he has turned his sites on the residents of Plymouth.
Right from the jump, I want to give credit to the filmmakers for making this slasher one of the more memorable ones when it comes to the death sequences. This movie absolutely leans into its Thanksgiving themes and finds new and creative ways to keep these sequences engaging, all the meanwhile making you want to look away as fast as possible. The special effects throughout the movie all look incredible and at times leave you squirming in your seat! This is one of the gorier horror movies that has been put out in some time, and if you are into that sort of movie, you are going to get that in here.
Despite that, however, I did not end up loving this movie as much as I wanted to. I did really love how similar it felt to other slashers such as Scream and Halloween, but at the end of the day, this movie did not work as well in its execution. The best thing that Thanksgiving has to be compared with those other slasher movies is its tension. There are some great tension-filled sequences, but there is nothing very scary about this movie. It is jam-packed with jump scares, but not much beyond that.
One of my biggest issues with the movie is just how one-note, and two-dimensional every single one of the characters is. Usually in these types of slashers, they give you one character to latch on to and route for. This movie had no interesting character arcs or motivations that made you invest in the people on screen. To be entirely honest, I can’t even remember any of the character’s names. Which can only mean one thing…most of these people are here to act as targets for our killer. This is all well and good if you are into that sort of thing with your horror movie characters, I was just hoping for something a little deeper and that just was not present here.
Another issue that I had throughout the movie was just how clunky it all felt. At times the dialogue felt very out of place for the situation taking place. There was also a ton of exposition-heavy dialogue found all over this movie. It felt as though there were many circumstances where the writers did not know how to tell the audience something, and the best they could do was just have the character say it, despite it not fitting in with the scene taking place, or the movie as a whole.
Another really sort of simple thing I had issues with was that this movie takes place in Boston. The characters in the movie would sometimes talk with a Boston accent, and then not talk with it in the next scene. This is just a small thing, but every time it happened it pulled me right out of the movie.
Overall, if you are a fan of slasher movies, I think you are going to have a fun time with this one. The theme of Thanksgiving was a super creative way to bring a new slasher to the big screen. I was just hoping for something a little bit deeper. I am going to give Thanksgiving a 5/10 but am intrigued to see if this universe cooks up anything else!