Thanksgiving

All over the world each country celebrate different kinds of holiday weekends. For example did you know that in Romania they celebrate Grape Havest Festival between October 7th - October 8th? At this festival they celebrate with grape stomping, wine tasting, live music performances, serving food such as "Zausa" a vegetable hodgepodge, arrange traditional dance shows, art exhibitions, and serve gastronimic delights. It sounds like my kind of festival considering i like to try local food and other countries traditional meals. I might actually try and travel to Romania at some point to visit the Grape Harvest Festival hoping they serve local beer as well. I don´t mind some good wine but i prefer beer to be honest. Would i visit Transylvania if i would go to Romania? Of course, i want to hear the history surrounding Vlad The Impaler as well since i am a big fan of Bram Stoker´s novel Dracula. Here in Sweden we celebrate Christmas weekend and Easter weekend as many other countries do, except for one unique weekend and that is of course Swedish Midsummer. It´s a summer festival where we eat, have moonshine and dance around a Midsommarstång. Unfortunately we do not celebrate as they did in the film Midsommar from director Ari Ester where they sacrificed human beings during Swedish Midsummer. I was hoping we would change our holiday traditions and do exactly what the film Midsommar does, because to me that looks exactly how Swedish Midsummer should look like. Either way i still enjoy celebrating this weekend every summer, as long as someone offer me some moonshine i am all good. A lot of you have probably heard that Thanksgiving weekend is really big in America, and a lot of turkey´s are being prepared that weekend. I have never celebrated this weekend myself but it would be nice to try at some point. Back in the year of 2007 while 2 horror films was released in the same year known as Death Proof and Planet Terror, a trailer of a film supposed to be called Thanksgiving was shown during the Grindhouse cinema run. It turned out it wasn´t a film coming out soon, but after many years director Eli Roth decided to actually make this film after seeing many people interested in that trailer. So here is the actual film Thanksgiving and i was finally able to experience the film myself. Is this one of the better horror films from director Eli Roth, or should this film be burned in the owen with the stuffed turkey into ashes ?

Thanksgiving weekend have arrived in the town pf Plymouth, Massachussets and the big Black Friday sale is about to begin at the local RightMart superstore. Chaos breaks out as customers break into the store and people actually die during the Black Friday sale. The horrible tragedy affects the whole town and people want to understand how this could happen. A year passes by and a group of selected people get a picture invitation to a Thanksgiving dinner with a table with each paersons name next to the chair. What they don´t know is that this is no ordinary Thanksgiving dinner.

The slasher genre have been struggling to make a more modern film and make it enjoyable as well. It´s been a very long time since i have seen a really fun slasher film and Thanksgiving is definetely one of the better releases in the slasher horror genre in quite many years. This film is really brutal, have some really funny scenes, the film looks really good from a cinematography perspective and i have to say that the killer is actually really effective. If you compare the Thanksgiving killer to the Scream killer for example i would say that Ghostface wasn´t really that scary if you ask me. This is why the John Carver masked killer in Thanksgiving is much more effective because they don´t hold back on violence at all, while in Scream you only got to see a smaller amount of killings. We don´t get many horror films based on Thanksgiving very often so of course a film like this definetely feels like a fun idea. One of the best highlights of this film is all the brutal kills and we get some really gory moments. You can feel that director Eli Roth is back in his Hostel cape where he knows how to step it up even further than most horror films these days. After all, if you are making a slasher film you should make the killing scenes really enjoyable and that is exactly what Thanksgiving manage to do. The acting in general is actually pretty good and im especially susprised over actor Patrick Dempsey as the character Sheriff Eric. I am honestly not a big fan of Patrick Dempsey as an actor and never have been, but i do think he did a good job on this character. I really enjoy the acting from Rick Hoffman ( who you might recognize from TV series Billions ) in this film, he was definetely a perfect choice for his character and he brings a powerful personality to the big screen. As a horror film in general i would have to say that Thanksgiving is better than i expected, and that is something i am very pleased about since a lot of horror releases don´t really make a big effort to surprise this specific genre. Director Eli Roth proves once again that he knows how to make fun horror movies and this might be his best one since Hostel if i am being honest. You should also pick up a blu ray of Thanksgiving and celebrate just like myself, i can not promise you though you might suvive if you step into my home. After all, i do have a sweet tooth for fresh meat.

Rating: DDDD