Monday 1 April 2024

Thanksgiving (Eli Roth, 2023)



Eli Roth is by many film goers a deeply misunderstood director and creator of cinema. There are many who consider him a horrible, phony director who exploits violence and gruesome scenes for no reason at all. I read a review on Thanksgiving at a fancy website of a Greek magazine and he gave the film zero stars, writing all kind of terrible, insulting things for the movie. Well truth is that the guy who wrote the review didn't get anything from the film. Quite possibly he gave zero starts to the movie before it had even started. Fact is that Thanksgiving is the best Eli Roth movie till this day and a slasher movie that has much more to offer than the usual body count. Yes there is no doubt that the killings are extremely inventive and thrilling, but there is something deeper to the movie, that the critic from the Greek magazine didn't even care to point.
Thanksgiving has one of the best opening sequences that I have seen in a horror movie. A straightforward, brilliant and deeply vulgar, comment on consumerism, on trend, on holidays and finally on American society in general. That sequence gives to the movie a totally different flavor and the thing that follows is been seen by the spectator through a totally different angle. The killer is a monster, but is he really the only monster in the movie? Thanksgiving goes beyond the typical popcorn slasher movie that you enjoy watching with your friends while smoking a long, thin joint and goes to territories where it sets some questions for the spectator to answer. Isn't real life sometimes even worse than the most gruesome horror film? I don't know what the critic from the Greek magazine had in his mind, but I am certain that he failed to see all this that the movie offered because he was surrounded by cliches, that tell him that Eli Roth is a B director who can't possibly deliver anything good. Well, the fucking truth lies inside the movie. Eli Roth has told us something deeply valuable with Thanksgiving. That we are, all of us, beasts.  

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