Season 1, Episode 3 Recap: A Homicide on the Brink of Civilization
Jessica (Nell Verlach), her boyfriend Bobby (Jalen Thomas Brooks), and their friends decide to go out on Thanksgiving night and stop at her father’s (Rick Hoffman) department store, but they get rowdy. teenagers accidentally start a deadly Black Friday riot. -A hungry crowd. A year later, the city of Plymouth, Massachusetts still feels the pain of that night. Bobby, injured in the riot, disappears soon after, Jessica’s father is planning another big sale, and someone wearing the mask of John Carver (the alleged founder of the city of Plymouth) is bloody. They began slaughtering everyone who died in connection with the incident. From a year ago. Will the teenagers, townspeople, and the sheriff (Patrick Dempsey) be able to stop the killer before Plymouth becomes a ghost town?
Some will loudly lament the loss of the aforementioned T&A and the seedy grindhouse vibe that Roth gave us in the first trailer, but once you see the movie, your laments will be over. Thanksgiving may not have that clarity, but it’s packed with fun for horror fans in the form of gory deaths, some genuine scares, and an obvious love for the slasher subgenre . Roth and screenwriter Jeff Rendell pack all kinds of charm into this movie to ensure that it’s both a holiday horror movie and a movie that fans will want leftovers from. (even if the villain claims there’s nothing).
But this is a moot point, since Thanksgiving is a joyous time designed to discourage repeat visits. The pre-title sequence turns the real-world Black Friday crowd nightmare into a true horror short film. There, greed and chaos leave behind battered and broken bodies. It’s a horrifyingly comical setting, but like the rest of the film, Roth maintains a darkly humorous tone without focusing too much on horror. But the killings are sometimes accompanied by a knowing wink, as elements of Thanksgiving are utilized, from the corn cob holders to the poor souls being disciplined, cooked, and served for dinner. Sometimes. You smile at the humor, but at the same time you gleefully gobble up the horror thrills the movie generously pours on your plate. To this end, he also does some jump scares. This works beautifully because it suddenly appears out of nowhere, rather than arriving according to an expected setting. The cast does a solid job between familiar faces (Dempsey, Hoffman, Gina Garson) and relative newcomers, with Verlag providing a charismatic and convincing lead role.