I Can't Stop Thinking About the Black Friday Setpiece From Eli Roth's Thanksgiving
Quentin Tarantino and Robert Rodriguez’s Grindhouse was a flashy, high-profile commercial failure. Tarantino and Rodriguez conceived their great Grindhouse experiment as not just a double feature but an experience that would take audiences back to the heyday of drive-in movies.
When the project was not an immediate success, the Weinsteins decided to abandon everything that made Grindhouse special and unique. The double feature was cynically split into two separate movies, Death Proof and Planet Terror but it was for naught. Commercially, at least, Grindhouse failed as a double feature and as two stand-alone motion pictures.
In the seventeen years since Harvey Weinstein put the kibosh on Tarantino and Rodriguez’s crazy dream something curious has happened.
The Grindhouse universe has quietly expanded into something unique and unexpectedly enduring.
With the exception of Robert Rodriguez’s entries—Death Proof, Machete, Machete Kills—the Grindhouse universe is full of creative winners that took the spirit of the double feature that started it all and ran with it.
Hobo With a Shotgun was not part of Grindhouse originally but a fake trailer for the movie won a contest and was included in some screenings of Grindhouse in the United States and Canada.
The Rutger Hauer vehicle is a hilarious and pitch-perfect parody.homage to the wildly excessive ethos of Cannon in its Reagan-era prime in general and Death Wish 3 in particular.
Hobo With a Shotgun earned its place in the Grindhouse universe but last year’s Thanksgiving was part of the grand gestalt from the very beginning.
It took sixteen years but Eli Roth’s fake-trailer for an eighties-style holiday bloodbath to go from mock trailer to genuine motion picture. It was worth the wait.
I quite liked Thanksgiving. Roth nails the look and sound and vibe of the slasher movies its writer-director grew up loving.
But what I really love about Thanksgiving is its opening setpiece. I haven’t been able to stop thinking about it since I saw the movie.
Thanksgiving opens with a Black Friday sale that ratchets the brutality and cruelty of capitalism and consumerism to horrific levels. In Thanksgiving the mindless competition to get a cheap consumer good quickly takes on a homicidal quality.
The film’s crazed consumers are willing to murder their fellow shoppers for a killer deal. This bloodbath could have been played for broad laughs. Instead Roth makes everything as brutal, intense and realistic as possible.
I’m not sure I have ever seen a depiction of consumerism as savage as the one found in Thanksgiving’s most riveting and unforgettable scene.
The opening is so scary and extreme that I found myself grateful when it ended because I didn’t know if my nervous system could handle ninety minutes at that fever pitch.
The villain in Thanksgiving is a mystery mass murderer in a pilgrim’s mask but on a broader level it’s capitalism, materialism and capitalism and how it brings out the murderous worst in all of us.
Thanksgiving was a critical and commercial success and it is a slasher movie. So, in an inevitable development, it inspired a sequel that will be released next year.
I’ll be first in line but, like pretty much all sequels, it will not have the element of surprise and novelty on its side any more. It’s doubtful it will have anything half as compelling as the Black Friday set-piece from the original but that’s setting the bar awfully high.
Thanksgiving is a retro delight but its Black Friday stunner is a setpiece for the ages.
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