Thanksgiving

A fake trailer from Grindhouse turned into a real slasher sixteen years later, and it is a very good one.

A Black Friday stampede at a Massachusetts store kills several people. A year later somebody in a John Carver mask starts working through everyone responsible.

Eli Roth plays it completely straight as a 1990s-style whodunnit with a suspect list, red herrings and a masked killer with a motive, which is a form nobody had made properly in twenty years.

The kills are elaborate and the trampoline sequence and the oven are the two the film builds to.

The opening stampede is the best-directed thing Roth has done and is truly uncomfortable because it is entirely plausible.

It is far more disciplined than his earlier work and it is funny without being a parody.