Movie Review: Thankskilling

“Peck on someone your own size.”

Thankskilling is a cheap, efficient, mediocre horror movie about an ancient Native American shaman, who lives within the body of an undying turkey, coming back to wreak vengeance for the theft of his people’s land by killing a group of college students going home for Thanksgiving break. That may be all I need to say about it. But I promised Fangirl a review last year, and this week seems like the perfect time to fulfill my promise.

Here's what you need to know: the first shot of the movie is of naked breasts, and the first line is “Nice tits, bitch.” That line is spoken by the aforementioned turkey. Like I said, it’s efficient: no one expects Citizen Kane after an opening like that.

It’s also, as all horror movies must be these days, slightly meta. A character says “Don’t be silly. That kinda stuff only happens in movies.” It has all the cliché horror characters: the jock, the hick, the slut, the virgin, and the nerd (aka exposition delivery device). They all die except for the virgin, who really womans up over the course of the film. None of those facts feel like spoilers, because this is, in a way, a movie about bad horror movies, in that odd recursive way that derivative works always wind up seeming to be commentaries on the things they aspire to be.

It’s a crass film, with some slang that’s outdated enough if feels crasser now than it would have twenty years ago. At one point the slut is having sex with someone. The turkey kills him, and…let’s say “stands in for” him in the sexual act. Then the turkey says “You just got stuffed” and beaks her to death. Prior to that, three different characters describe the slut as having “legs that are harder to shut than the Jon Benet Ramsey case.”

There’s some truly bizarre comedy. The turkey visits the virgin’s house wearing glasses as a disguise. The virgin’s father lets him in for coffee. The turkey kills him. Then the turkey peels his face off and wears it over his own face. When the virgin returns home, she mistakes the turkey for her own father and compliments his haircut.

Later, the turkey disguises himself as a cooked turkey and convinced the hick to eat him. Then the turkey erupts out of his stomach, alien style. When the group discovers his body, we get a montage of the hick and the nerd being best friends, eating ice cream, playing on swings (as adults, to be clear), all shot in sepia tone with an original song playing.

Where the film falters, though, is in being not bad enough…Wait, I should explain that sentence, because obviously this film is one long falter. What I mean is that, absurd as all of that sounds, these scenes probably sounded better on paper than they wound up being on screen. The acting isn’t good, so the comedy doesn’t quite land, so the satire is more of a goal than a mood. It all feels stagey and amateur, like when someone with poor delivery attempts to tell a complex joke. Or, in this case, even just a simple joke.

I’m tempted to do a little “Josie gets theoretical” section here, but I’m not in the mood, so I’ll just list some concepts I considered discussing: Rene Girard’s idea of the scapegoat, with a sidebar on Peter Thiel’s fixation on that theorist; Tzvetan Todorov's The Conquest of America: The Question of the Other; Gerard Genette’s Architexte, which I think is the book where he talks about Bakhtin and how all novels are really about being novels, but honestly that might have been something else I read recently; colonization as a never-ending process that requires occasionally pop culture moments to reassert the right to dominion over stolen land; Charles Mills’ The Racial Contract for its exploration of "signatories" and beneficiaries" of racist practices; Greg Grandin’s recent doorstopper America, América; David Treuer’s The Heartbeat of Wounded Knee; and Nick Estes’ Our History is the Future: Standing Rock versus the Dakota Access Pipeline and the Long Tradition of Indigenous Resistance.

Anyway, you didn’t come here for that. Or, if you did, there’s a reading list all ready for you. You clicked on this review because the name of this movie drew you in, because if you’re American you’ve probably got a bit of free time for the Thanksgiving holiday, and if you’re not American you’re wondering why your country has started celebrating Black Friday’s sales.

So I’ll wind up with this: what stands out most about this movie is how it spotlights the freakish lack of emotion among our characters. Aside from the nerd montage-mourning the death of his friend the hick, the other characters are fascinatingly unaffected by the deaths of their parents and friends. Only a random hermit gets much actual emotional context after his dog is killed. But the jock, for instance, says “I guess I just have to roll with it” about twenty minutes after his parents were killed by the turkey. And that’s twenty minutes in the character’s experience of time; it’s about three minutes in movie time.

If all movies are somewhat about movies, and derivative movies are more obviously about all movies, this is a fascinating commentary on how horror on screen, due to the compressed time, can’t permit the true expression of emotional reaction, and thus results in near-sociopathic characters capable of dusting themselves off, stepping over their slaughtered loved-one’s body, and uttering a clincher line like “Roast in hell” to the monstrous, radioactive turkey who slaughtered everyone they know and love.

If all of that sounds good to you, or at least an interesting way to spend some time, I have good news: the final title card promises a sequel set in space. Or, as the turkey himself says: “I always come back for seconds.”

Three out of four cups of coffee with poop in them. Because that, too, is a thing that happens here.

Josie Kafka is a full-time cat servant and part-time rogue demon hunter. (What's a rogue demon?)

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