![]() ![]() ![]() He looks creepy enough to be a cosplay mascot of death.īefore it gets to Carver’s rampage, though, the film kicks off on Thanksgiving the year before, when the local Right Mart big-box store is about to open its doors for Black Friday, which now starts on Thursday night. It’s set in Plymouth, Massachusetts, where a group of high-school friends (and a handful of adults who turn into collateral damage) are stalked over the Thanksgiving holiday by a maniac named John Carver, who wears the tacky plastic mask of a kitsch Plymouth Rock pilgrim (in the “Grindhouse” trailer his face was just buried in shadow), as well as a pilgrim’s hat and uniform. “Thanksgiving” follows the rules of the slasher genre, but it’s got a more charged and entertainingly hyperbolic atmosphere than these movies used to have. He’s a highly skilled pulp practitioner, witty and shameless enough to be at once incorrect and diabolically unhinged. They were, with rare exceptions (like “A Nightmare on Elm Street 3: Dream Warriors”), incredibly formulaic films. They’d completely dispensed with the idea that we cared about who lived or died, and characters like Jason and Freddy were now showbiz heroes of cheeky terror - ringleaders that the audience cheered on. But by the ’80s, with the rise of the “Friday the 13th” and “Nightmare on Elm Street” series, as well as holiday slasher junk like “Christmas Evil” and “Bloody New Year,” they’d become something else: sick-joke comedies with jump scares. In the ’70s, when the slasher film was coming into its own, with movies like “Last House on the Left” and “The Hills Have Eyes” and the “Citizen Kane” of the genre, “The Texas Chain Saw Massacre,” they were true nightmares on film (or trying to be). And “Thanksgiving,” I’d say, is juicier fun than they were, because it’s so brazenly up front about embracing how everything in the “Grindhouse” trailer - the way it walked the line between gruesome and preposterous - is, in fact, exactly what audiences have loved about these movies for 40 years. Holiday horror movies may now seem as corny as a bowl of creamed corn, but David Gordon Green’s rebooted “Halloween” trilogy helped revive interest in them. The movie reconnects us with a genre that is so out it’s in. ![]() Though Get Out's impressive box office numbers mean indie movies still have a chance against studio Goliaths, that film relied on a lot of word-of-mouth hype to turn out those figures.It turns out that “Thanksgiving” has been perfectly timed - and I don’t just mean because it’s coming out on the eve of Thanksgiving weekend (though I suspect it will generate some box-office gravy). This looks like a delightfully devastating character study that's sure to draw chuckles and tears at the theater, but it's unclear whether it will be able to contend with studio franchises and sequels at the box office. Critics have been praising this film for its unique story and heartfelt performances - the movie holds a 97% at Rotten Tomatoes - and this trailer makes it easy to see why. Nanjiani and Kazan have wonderful chemistry in the trailer, and the tension between Kumail and Emily's parents is delicious. Nanjiani, meanwhile, has been a fixture in the comedy scene for some years now, landing guest appearances on Portlandia and Veep before he was cast as Dinesh in the critically-acclaimed ensemble comedy Silicon Valley. Kazan has become somewhat of an indie darling herself, and wrote and starred in 2012's Ruby Sparks, a tale about a desperate writer who pens his own girlfriend. ![]() The film stars Nanjiani as himself, with Zoe Kazan as Emily and all-stars Ray Romano and Holly Hunter as her parents. ![]()
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