I’m trying to get better at looking at the calendar when deciding what movies to talk about. In honor of [American] Thanksgiving happening tomorrow, I’m going to enjoy a lovely time with all of my family members. Just kidding! I haven’t seen my grandma since February! Instead we’re going to talk about ThanksKilling, a low budget film about a group of young adults who get killed off by a turkey. Named Turkie. It’s exactly the kind of movie you think it is.

We open in 1621 with the bare breasts of a porn star, then after that pointless scene we jump to the present where five college kids are super pumped for Thanksgiving. Their names don’t matter so I’m calling them the Jock, the Nerd, the Fat One, the Slut, and The Other Girl Who Isn’t the Slut. Eat your heart out, Feast. After their car breaks down they end up camping in the woods where the Nerd explains that hundreds of years ago, a Native American shaman reanimated an evil turkey to kill the Pilgrims. Turkie is awakened by a dog peeing on his totem pole (which is weird since he was scheduled to wake up now anyway) and he begins killing and spouting one-liners. The Other Girl sees Turkie, but no one believes her. Turkie kills the Jock’s parents, then a guy having sex with the Slut, then… the evil turkey has his way with her before killing her. Lovely. Realizing the threat is actually real, the remining characters turn to the Other Girl’s dad’s library for a book on how to stop the evil creature, not realizing that Turkie has killed her father and is wearing his face as a mask. In case you haven’t seen this movie, this is not a man in a turkey suit; it’s a hand puppet wearing a face like a mask. Anyway, the Nerd figures out how to stop Turkie but the Fat One dies before they can stop him. A special chant removes Turkie’s immortality, and a hobo’s shotgun blast seemingly kills it. But oh no! Turkie fell into a vat of radioactive waste and is still alive! He kills the Nerd and mortally wounds the Jock, but the Other Girl manages to survive and kills the turkey. We end on what appears to be the director’s family having Thanksgiving dinner, but the cooked turkey is revealed to be a still living Turkie. “Do I smell a sequel, BEEYOTCH?!” Yes. Yes, you do.

This is a bad movie, but it’s also fun? Don’t get me wrong, it’s got a lot of problems and implications, but it knows how dumb and cheap it is and leans into it. The random line that got the biggest surprise laugh out of me was the Other Girl saying to the Slut, “Your legs are harder to close than the JonBenét Ramsey case!” What a very specific and dated remark. Hell, the odds are good that a number of people reading this have no idea who Ramsey was. The Other Girl says it again later and the characters laugh as if they hadn’t heard it the day before, and the joke is put out of its misery by the Nerd trying to say it but fucking it up. Maybe the stupidity of the thing was getting to me, but that was funny at the time! Oh god, do I have brain rot from watching this?! Enh, probably not; I’ve seen way worse horror comedies.

Next: ThanksKilling 3

---

Follow Me Elsewhere

• WordPress
• Twitter
• Facebook