Poster // Gravitas Ventures via IMDb
‘Gobble, gobble…’: reviewing “Thankskilling” (2008)
By: Magnus Blanchard-Rockhill
Staff-Writer & Advertising Co-Manager
This review contains spoilers for “Thankskilling” (2008).
It’s November, and Thanksgiving is right around the corner. “Thankskilling” (2008) is definitely a movie about Thanksgiving, and as a comedy slasher with a 4.2/10 on IMDb, it is ripe for a bit of butchery.
The plot is essentially that there is a turkey that hunts people down and kills them every Thanksgiving. We follow a group of college students traveling home for Thanksgiving break. Their car breaks down, the turkey finds them, etc. Very standard – boring, even.
Honestly, there are some genuinely funny jokes early on in the movie. Halfway through, though, everything gets too in your face. It feels like someone’s sitting next to you, pointing at the screen, and explaining that you are watching a Funny Movie and should Laugh. If the characters know that what they are doing is funny, a lot of the time it is no longer funny.
The turkey is simultaneously completely uninteresting and unlikable as a villain. The few jokes involving him that I enjoy come about when people somehow fail to recognize him as a turkey when he wears the thinnest disguises imaginable. Other than that, it feels like a guy doing a weird and bad impression of Freddy Krueger and holding a turkey puppet.
I love bad horror movies. I love cheesy, self-aware, comedic slashers. This movie is just too much, with nothing that feels like genuine love for the genre holding it together. The turkey puppet is alright, and I like the goopy oatmeal-esque gore, but other than that there’s nothing here that feels exciting enough for me to care about the plot.
The defense of parody and comedy can only take a bad movie so far. Too much fourth-wall breaking just brings more attention to the flaws, instead of distracting from them. This was pretty clearly made based only upon the premise of a turkey killing a bunch of people on Thanksgiving, which I would not usually mind, but there’s nothing else going for this movie at all.
The actors were clearly doing what they were supposed to, so I cannot blame them at all for bad acting. The movie was written in a particular way, and the dialogue is all inherently stilted, so there’s nothing that could be done about that. The problem is that it never lets up and allows for any of these people to actually act, and at a certain point it stops being funny and becomes distracting.
When I watch a movie, I do not want to be reminded that I am watching one every five minutes. The occasional nod to genre or film or even a glance or quip to the audience is fine if it’s intended to catch you off-guard, but in horror? It should be used sparingly. Having your disbelief suspended is critical to enjoying a horror movie; otherwise, it is difficult to be invested at all.
I also thought that the depictions of Native Americans were in poor taste. It seems to have just been the writers attempting to explain away a sentient turkey out for vengeance, but the “Spooky Native American Curse” trope is weird and so completely overplayed in horror. It isn’t like anything else was explained in this movie, so why was that needed for the turkey?
Before watching, I figured this review would be similar to the one I did for “Insecticidal” (2005). That I would come to the conclusion that really this was just people giving a low budget horror comedy a hard time. And while that may be partially to blame for the low reviews, I also think that this movie does just genuinely suck.