Eli Roth’s holiday slasher opens with a Black Friday riot that is funnier and nastier than anything that follows it. The kills are inventive and the tone is right; the whodunnit around them is thin, and the middle hour marks time.
Eli Roth made a fake trailer for a slasher called Thanksgiving as part of Grindhouse in 2007, and sixteen years on he has made the film. It is set in Plymouth, Massachusetts, where a superstore opens on Thanksgiving night for the Black Friday sale, the crowd outside breaks through the glass, and several people are trampled or worse. A year later a man in a black hat and a plastic John Carver mask begins working through the survivors. It is a good slasher for an hour and a passable one after that, and its opening ten minutes are the best thing in it by some distance.
The riot is a proper set piece. Peter Mihaichuk’s store is all white fluorescent light and cardboard displays, and Milan Chadima shoots the car park outside in the orange of sodium lamps, so that when the doors give way the crowd pours out of orange dark into white light. Michele Conroy and Michel Aller cut it fast and low, at the level of trolleys and ankles, and the injuries arrive in glimpses: an arm through glass, a woman dragged by her hair under a trolley. Roth has timed it so that every horror is followed by something absurd, usually a person stepping over a body to reach a free waffle iron. We laughed, then felt slightly grubby about it, because the joke is that these people would kill for a discount and the film has just shown them doing it.
The killings that follow are built with the same care and mostly with real objects. The tagline promises no leftovers and the kills honour it: kitchen equipment and dinner service are pressed into use, and the effects are done with props and prosthetics rather than on a computer, so the blood has weight and the bodies come apart the way bodies do. Leslie Kavanagh’s costume for the killer is a black coat, a buckled hat and a hard plastic face with a painted smile, and it manages to look silly from across a car park and nasty in close-up. Brandon Roberts’s score is stabbing strings and synth in the manner of the early eighties, and it fits. The 18 certificate is earned early and often.
Patrick Dempsey plays Sheriff Newlon as a decent, slightly weary man who is pleased to be trusted, and he gives the film its one adult. Nell Verlaque’s Jessica is a capable final girl, quick to notice things and not written as a fool, which puts her ahead of most. Around her the teenagers are harder to tell apart. Addison Rae’s Gabriella is there to be looked at and to scream; Milo Manheim and Jalen Thomas Brooks, as the two boys with a claim on Jessica, are sketched in a line each. Gina Gershon and Rick Hoffman, as two of the adults who were in charge that night, are the ones who seem to know what kind of film they are in, and both are enjoyable for exactly as long as the script allows.
The trouble is the story between the kills. Jeff Rendell’s screenplay wants to be a whodunnit as well as a slasher, and it hands out suspects by rota: a shifty father, a resentful ex, a grieving husband, each given a scene of looking sinister and then dropped. None of it generates much suspense, because the film has not made us care who did it, only what he will do next. Somewhere in the middle hour we noticed we were waiting, checking how far along we were, and a 106-minute slasher should not allow that. Scream (1996) managed to be funny about the rules and still frightening when it stopped joking; this is funny about the rules and then goes quiet for twenty minutes at a time.
Against Roth’s own films this is the most good-humoured thing he has made. Cabin Fever (2002) and Hostel (2005) wanted to make us feel ill; this wants us to laugh at the moment we flinch, and for the first hour it manages both. It also has less on its mind than it pretends. The jokes about greed and shopping are all in the opening. After that the film is a slasher like any other, with a better than average sense of humour and a worse than average plot.
It runs 106 minutes and does not waste many of them, which is worth something. See it with people who will laugh at the right moments, and do not eat first.
