Thanksgiving Horrors: "That's Not Cranberry Sauce"

 

Last year I decided to watch some Thanksgiving horror movies (read about it here!). This year I decided to make it a tradition. I re-watched one of last year's films (Blood Rage), watched a sequel to one of last year's films (Thankskilling 3), revisited an old favorite (Addams Family Values), and found a new film partially filmed in the city where I live (The Last Thanksgiving).

Apologies to those outside the US, this is going to be focused on US Thanksgiving. But I hope everyone reading this is staying safe and doing their part to avoid spreading COVID whether they observed US Thanksgiving this week or not.

Blood Rage

If there are classics in the small genre of Thanksgiving horror movies, Blood Rage is one of them. Is it the best 80's slasher movie? No. Does it have all the cheesy fun you expect from 80's horror movies? Gravyboats full. A murderous twin escapes from the mental hospital to visit his family for Thanksgiving, and plenty of kills and 80's cheesiness ensues. Plus: Blood Rage gives us the greatest line of any Thanksgiving horror movie: "That's not cranberry sauce."

Thankskilling 3

Thankskilling 3 is the sequel to Thankskilling, which I watched last year. "What happened to Thankskilling 2?!!" you might ask. Well, that topic does come up and in fact comprises a lot of the plot of Thankskilling 3 (and I do use the word "plot" loosely). If you liked Thankskilling (and I had mixed feelings myself), you'll probably like Thankskilling 3. I'm honestly at a little bit of a loss of what to say about this movie. There are more raunchy puppets, more gratuitous nudity, more incomprehensible goings-on, more jokes that probably go a bit too far... But maybe it's best to leave the rest unsaid for those readers who dare delve into the world of undead Turkey puppets to experience for themselves.

Addams Family Values

I really, really loved this movie when I first saw it back in the 90's. I've seen it again a couple times over the years, but I was keen to watch it again as part of my new Thanksgiving horror tradition. It holds up pretty well. The wall-to-wall jokes and innuendos are sheer Addams Family goodness. The performances are all exactly as over-the-top as they need to be. I was particularly impressed by Joan Cusack as the villain trying to murder Uncle Fester (Christopher Lloyd). Wednesday Addams (Christina Ricci) is one of my all-time favorite characters.

But is this really a Thanksgiving movie? This very question comes up in the next movie (stay tuned), but while Addams Family Values doesn't take place during Thanksgiving, it does have the scene that I've always loved most: Wednesday and Pugsley rewriting the script of a vapidly racist Thanksgiving pageant at summer camp.

This scene is not at all Native American representation (as far as I know no Native people were involved). There are a lot of think pieces about this scene out there, including this one from Elisa Washuta. Still, for all the legitimate criticisms of the scene, it's at least trying to make the point that the old, white Thanksgiving myth is not worth perpetuating. 

A 1993 Hollywood comedy is not the place to end that investigation, but it might be an invitation to begin an investigation of the historical origin and legacy of that myth, or to understand why some call for a National Day of Mourning instead.

 

The Last Thanksgiving

The Last Thanksgiving is the newest entry this year (having just been released in 2020). As I was watching the opening credits, I thought, "Those mountains look like our mountains around here." And then there were shots of a park and the river in downtown Chattanooga, Tennessee, and it was unmistakeable. This movie had been filmed in the city where I live!

Well, not quite. Most of it was filmed in Hollywood, Florida and around the Miami area. This makes for some amusing (to me) scenes where the main character leaves her place of work surrounded by palm trees in Florida and then immediately walks down a street in North Chattanooga, which for those who are unfamiliar with my part of the world, does not have palm tress. My guess is the filmmakers came to Chattanooga for the weekend or passed through on their way to Nashville from Florida and thought, "let's get a few shots here."

As for the movie itself, there's a family of cannibals out to kill as part of their long-standing Thanksgiving tradition. Our protagonist Lisa-Marie (Samantha Ferrand) and her work friends are stuck working on Thanksgiving Day at their mind-numbing food service jobs. As you'd expect, the cannibals show up, targeting our protagonists because they're working on Thanksgiving and aren't at home with their families, so I guess there's some sort of moralistic lesson or maybe they're just homicidal cannibals? That part was unclear to me. Oh, well.

Overall The Last Thanksgiving is a solid low budget entry into the small genre of Thanksgiving horror movies. At one point two characters are discussing whether there are any Thanksgiving horror movies (while inside a Thanksgiving horror movie, of course), and the only example they can come up with is... Addams Family Values (as foretold several paragraphs ago).

Another link between these two films: they both make the point that just because something is a tradition does not mean we have to keep doing it, especially if it hurts people. It's part of a deceptively difficult lesson, but one that might ease a lot of suffering in the world: the way things are and the way they have been is not they way they have to continue to be.

On the other hand, my own tradition of Thanksgiving horror movies seems like one I will continue next year (hopefully without the pandemic, but who knows at this point?).