When Black Christmas and Halloween hit it became a big deal to make a film based on a popular holiday. For quite sometime every single holiday got it's own horror film. They even made a film for Mother's Day which to me was odd considering they hadn't even touched on Thanksgiving yet. Recently however because of some fan outcry Eli Roth made arguably the best faux trailer for Grindhouse based on the holiday. Around Thanksgiving last year we stumbled upon an indie feature called Thankskilling which looked way to good to be true. So did it live up to the trailer?

Well the story is played out much like a bad horror movie. A group of very unlikely friends set out after school is let out for break to head back home. On there way back however their Jeep breaks down and are forced to camp out in the middle of nowhere. One of the group stumbles upon a sign that sparks a memory of wronged Native American witchdoctor who cursed a thanksgiving turkey to kill those that had wronged them. Around the campfire that night he tells the story to the group which makes some of them a bit uneasy. Of course this is when the "fowl" mouthed bird makes his entrance and the over the top, almost Troma-esque film really takes off.

Now one part of me really wanted to like this movie because we had finally had a Thanksgiving horror film. Unfortunately though they tried WAY too hard to make this movie "bad". Rather than just putting the actors in a ridiculous and over the top situation the actors are also in on it. The intention of the film was to be a "so bad its good" movie. In my opinion that never works and you really have to just play it straight. As I mentioned above it is very much like a Troma production but not the good stuff from around 20 years ago. It has a lot more in common with some of the recent things that they have been churning out. So unless you are a die hard Troma fan you will more than likely have a lot of issues with the film.

The turkey really is the saving grace of the film at least in most of the scenes involved. He had some great lines and came across really well on camera in that "Gingerdead Man" way. It's obvious that he is basically a sock puppet but the personality that they gave him was really on point. Even the best stuff from the other actors comes from punch lines involving the turkey. If maybe they could have had the actors play the entire movie straight and have the turkey be the only over the top character we could have had a really great holiday flick on our hands. That is something else that is really frustrating about the film is that as you sit there you can think of what could have been.

I tried really hard of a way to explain this movie or give an example of what you could expect most of which I have already mentioned above. If you could picture Troma making Gingerdead Man only using Thanksgiving as the backdrop you would be on the right track. So die hard Troma fans who have stuck by them through all the films even past the 90s may enjoy this one. Unfortunately everyone else will see this as totally absurd and disappointing. All I can say is that we will have to wait until someone else picks up the Thanksgiving holiday before we get a must watch for the holiday.

- Luke Franklin