Throughout the 16 (!) years since GRINDHOUSE, there’s been talk about Eli Roth turning his fake trailer THANKSGIVING into a real movie. Now it’s finally here and the unexpected thing about it that might not have happened if he’d made it earlier (like when he was talking about it as a double feature with Edgar Wright’s DON’T) is that he didn’t repeat the grimy faux-‘80s style of the trailer. Instead he took the premise, a couple of kills and the climax and adapted them into a straight-faced, contemporary horror movie, almost like it’s the modern remake of the movie in the original trailer. And I’m thankful for that it’s sweeter than pumpkin pie How do you like them sweet potatoes? I think it was a good choice.
It’s a holiday slasher movie in the year 2023, obviously it knows you know it’s silly, but it’s acting in good faith. It’s less of a comedy than JACK FROST or MACHETE. There’s kind of a post-SCREAM feel to it but it’s ‘80s in its construction. It asks okay, if this is the slasher movie for Thanksgiving then what are the things we gotta do? Pilgrims, turkeys, corn on the cob, potato mashers? As in the trailer, it’s set in Plymouth Massachusetts, there’s a killer in a pilgrim hat, there’s a parade where a guy in a turkey costume gets beheaded, people are tied up at a table and served a human cooked like a turkey. But now there’s also a story and characters and what not. (read the rest of this shit…)
THE BONEYARD is a pretty cool little horror movie that according to IMDb was release direct-to-video on June 12, 1991. I’m not sure if that’s right, because that was a Wednesday, but I’m gonna assume it really was a summer of ’91 release. I’d never seen it before, but if I’d known about it when I was a little bit younger than I was in ’91 I definitely would’ve wanted to see it, because the cover has a demonic poodle monster, and for some reason I thought that type of shit was hilarious when I was young. For example, the poodle with the mohawk was half the reason I liked ELVIRA: MISTRESS OF THE DARK.
That image made me expect a horror comedy, so when the movie started with a very legitimate horror score (by John Lee Whitener [RAGIN’ CAJUN]) I was impressed because it makes it feel pretty serious. And then I slowly realized that it is mostly serious, so those FRIDAY THE 13TH-esque violins are appropriate.
I’ve known for decades that Ice-T was in one of the many movies called BODY COUNT, but I never considered watching it until my friend Laird 
Into the Dark is a series of low budget holiday-themed horror movies that Blumhouse produced for Hulu. IMDb and Wikipedia classify them as an anthology TV series like Masters of Horror, but Hulu presents them as individual movies, and they’re feature length. (For some reason I assumed they’d be shorts.) I decided to try out last year’s FLESH & BLOOD, one of the two Thanksgiving movies in the series so far.
BLOOD RAGE, aka NIGHTMARE AT SHADOW WOODS, wants to be the identical twin brother of HALLOWEEN. Same genetics, separate souls. It kinda seems like somebody wrote down a summary of HALLOWEEN, then went through line-by-line crossing out each part and writing something else next to it.
