Author's Note: As with Alien Abduction, this film was shot on video, so the quality of a lot of the pictures is bad, and the availability of pictures was even more scarce in this instance, so I did what I could. Like I said in previous articles, there's not a lot of Thanksgiving-themed horror flicks out there, and what movies there are, aren't great for the most part, with a few notable exceptions. Oh well- I did what I could.
First off, let me just say, for those thinking ThanXgiving might be a valid alternative to the few Thanksgiving-themed horror films out there, you should know that Thanksgiving itself plays a very limited role in the movie itself. It's mentioned a few times, and the film within a film (or one of them, at least) is called "Turkey Day: Apocalypse," which sounds awesome on paper, but once again, none of the trappings of the holiday are on display, either there or in the film proper.
About the only remotely Thanksgiving-esque feature of the film is that there's a feast of sorts at one point, in both the film and the film within the film, but turkey is definitely not on the menu. So, yeah, not much in the way of a Thanksgiving mood going on here, least of all with the vast majority of the film taking place in the woods, Blair Witch-style. It's best if you think of the film as a horror flick that just happens to take place around Thanksgiving time, rather than one with a Thanksgiving theme overall. But is that film worth seeing, regardless? Let's take a closer look.
What we have here is one of those films that looks to either be a student film, or a student short that was later expanded into a feature-length film, a la The Sitter (which became the classic When a Stranger Calls) or Within the Woods (which became The Evil Dead). If I recall correctly, Evil Dead is also name-dropped, but really, as aforementioned, this has more of a Blair Witch vibe, with Evil Dead elements (i.e. zombies and/or ghosts and/or the demonically possessed) grafted onto the basic format.
The premise is that a group of filmmakers and their acting cast go to an isolated locale in the woods (which is rumored to be haunted) to finish shooting the director's final thesis film, which, if he doesn't complete to their satisfaction, he won't graduate. I've been there, having had to do last minute reshoots my own damn self for both my projects and other people's. I could also relate to the professor doing an unscheduled "pop-in" to see how things were going, and not exactly being enthused by what he saw- as happens here. (In my case, one of the male leads dropped out and I had to play the role myself, which my professor was none too keen on- and he wasn't wrong to be, as I'm no James Dean, lol.)
However, what comes off here is that the IRL director, Bobby Ray Akers Jr. (Night Terrors, Monsterpiece Theatre Volume 1) wanted to mask the fact that he didn't quite have enough coverage the first time around, so he came up with the whole film-within-a-film concept as an excuse to pad out the film to feature-length. Ironically, it's the film-within-a-film that comes off the best, so I suspect that it was shot later on, and that the main plot of the filmmakers doing reshoots when everything goes south was the original idea and the rest of it was the actual reshoots, if that makes any sense.
I've somewhat verified this by the fact that I found an article online in which the director confirmed that new scenes were added to the original film for the newest cut, aka 2011's "Fresh Cut," which is the version I watched. I don't know that I needed confirmation, though, as these scenes stick out like a sore thumb in the most recent cut, and are clearly the work of a slightly more mature, more accomplished filmmaker. I mean, it's not exactly Orson Welles, but it is noticeably better than a lot of the rest of the film.
Stand-out scenes to this end include the intro, which is a classic slasher movie opening-type set-up, which eventually pays off later on in the film, when we find out who did it, at least to a certain extent. TBH, because of the sort of thing I'm talking about- the fact that reshoots were required to pad out the film to feature length- it inherently leaves the film more than a little disjointed and hard to follow at times. Most of the exposition we get feels a bit tacked on- because it likely was.
On the one end, we get Delbert Eaton (Ari Lehman, aka the O.G. Jason Voorhees, the one that jumps out of the water at the end of the original film), who tells one version of the events that took place in the past, as he stumbles across the cast and crew one night. According to Del, the area used to be home to a fishing camp, with several cabins that were rented out to people to stay in while they hunted and fished. One day, the owner's son went crazy and burned down the cabins, and the owner subsequently moved away, hiring a caretaker to look after his land.
Then, that caretaker also went crazy and killed a couple of tourists, and apparently cut them up and cooked and ate part of their bodies, right around Thanksgiving. Rumor has it that the ghosts of past settlers possessed the son and the caretaker, causing them to do what they did. Lehman has a grand old time camping it up in the scene, looking like Primus' Les Claypool and affecting a redneck-type accent and a goofy laugh. He's probably the best thing in the film overall, for whatever that's worth, along with the occasionally effective gory special effects.
Later on, we get another explanation. Before the fishing camp guy bought the land, it belonged to a family called the Perkins. One winter, they all froze to death, one by one. Just like the Donner Party, they had to resort to cannibalism to survive, feeding on those who died first. The son of the fishing camp owner and the caretaker both claim that they were possessed by members of the Perkins family, who forced them to do what they did- we see examples of this in the newer opening scene, which dramatizes one such attack, though it looks to be a little more modern than implied by the back-story the guy who gives the director a ride back to the set implies.
According to the film, the Perkins died in 1935, the fishing camp guy took over a few years after that, then the caretaker. Even by conservative estimates, that would have been much earlier than what we see in the opening, which features a more modern car than would be implied by the stories told by the driver. I mean, it wouldn't have been that hard to get an older car to sell the moment, so that's kind of on the director. Then again, the back-story is so loosey-goosey that maybe the event at hand did take place in, say, the 90's, which would be passable for the car we see. Who knows?
Which brings us to the main problem here. Because different parts of the film were made at different times, the continuity is often terrible, and it gets pretty confusing trying to figure out what's really going on. I basically had to piece it all together after the fact. That last bit of info from the guy that gives the director a ride comes really late in the film, so most of what we've seen happens out of context and it's hard to tell what the hell's going on at times.
Some people just randomly die, and we only see the aftermath, others seem to die accidentally, such as when one guy steps on... something. A bear trap? A steel post? Whatever it is, it causes him to lose a leg and bleed out. Others in the group just randomly go crazy and start killing people out of nowhere, and there seem to be zombies and ghosts as well, or maybe zombie ghosts? Who can say? I did the best I could to summarize, but I could still be way off. Whatever the case, the end result is heavily disjointed and the haphazard editing doesn't help.
On the other hand, I've been there myself, and it's clear that the filmmakers did the best they could with what they had, and I certainly sympathize there. I get that sometimes you don't get the coverage you need, and you have to make the best of it, and hell, at least they're trying, which is more than a lot of us can say.
Be that as it may, it's by no stretch of the imagination a good movie, but it does probably qualify as entertainingly terrible, at the very least. All the bad movie hallmarks are there: bad acting, scripting, editing, obvious day-for-night shooting (and vice versa), terrible continuity, and flawed storytelling in general. If it could go wrong, chances are it does.
There are flashes of a good movie in here: the other movie-within-a-movie- yep, there are two, all the better to incorporate more film school short footage- Hatchet Job, actually doesn't look half bad, and packs more thrills into the limited bits we see of it than the entire rest of the movie as a whole. (We also get a bit more of that short in the post-credits trailer for the faux film.)
The film also has the occasional clever sense of humor about itself- when the professor watches the crew shoot a scene from the film that features some people running, he asks one of the camera operators what they are running from: "The critics," the camera guy deadpans. There are also any number of filmmaking in-jokes that should put a smile on anyone who ever went to film school's face, though some of them may be a bit too "inside baseball" for neophytes. In other words, the jokes may fly right over some people's heads that aren't in the know.
I'm sure, if you're a longtime horror fan, you've occasionally come across one of those films that looks professionally done, only to get it home and realize it's basically a shot-on-video disaster. It happens, and like I said, I'm loathe to shit on these would-be filmmakers' parade, especially as I've been in their shoes and know how hard it is to make a movie on a next-to-nothing budget, using only what you have access to and what limited locations you can secure- or even just shoot at without permission of any kind (i.e. so-called "guerrilla filmmaking").
Given all that, it is impressive that the FX isn't bad at times, and, as I mentioned, that they managed to land a name actor, at least among horror fans, in Lehman. So, yeah, it's no Night of the Living Dead, much less Evil Dead, but hey, they tried, which is more than most of us can say. The end result is admittedly pretty bad, and hard-to-follow, and terrible for all the reasons I mentioned, but it's also what makes it kind of endearing, in the same way as, say, an Ed Wood film or early John Waters was.
Mind you, it's nowhere near even that good (or that so-bad-it's-good, as it were), but it's entertaining in a kind of train wreck kind of way. Like, I can see where those involved would have found it amusing to shoot and watch later on, knowing that it was no great shakes overall, deep down, but not really caring because, hey, at least they tried to create something fun.
And it is kind of fun at times, in a slipshod kind of way. Just don't go in expecting anything remotely professional-looking in any way, shape or form, and try your best to have fun with it, or else skip it altogether if this sounds like something you'd normally avoid like the plague. The film is available on DVD, and you can view it in its entirety on YouTube at the time of this writing, here, if you want to get a sense of whether or not it's for you.
Maybe if you enjoy it enough, you can put a little money in the pocket of the filmmakers accordingly. Either way, you should know within the first 15-20 minutes if it's the type of film you'd enjoy or not. Just don't expect too much, and certainly don't expect any major Thanksgiving vibes overall- this is a film you could definitely watch whenever, as the holiday element is purely arbitrary, much more so than any of the other films I've reviewed to that end.
Check it out, if you support indie filmmaking- all others need not apply. It's silly, to be sure, and won't rock anyone's world, but hey, at least they tried. Can you say the same? 😏
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