Monthly Archive: November 2023

Thanksgiving

Thanksgiving (2023)

Directed by Eli Roth

Wait wait wait, this is the second of two holiday-themed slasher movies coming out in the same month, barely a week apart? Was this planned or just a huge coincidence? At least Thanksgiving, a very creative title by the way, is much closer to the holiday it’s named after than It’s A Wonderful Knife, so it feels a little more appropriate to see it in a movie theater knowing that the holiday is less than a week away. Anyway, you might be familiar with the story of Thanksgiving, which is that about 15 years ago a series of fake trailers were made for a movie called Grindhouse, trailers playing on the exploitation days of yore with titles like Machete and Hobo With A Shotgun. Thanksgiving was one of those trailers, a movie with a premise so absurd that it was a literal joke and following the original film by more than a decade. It’s not a recipe for success, but I did like both Machete and Hobo With a Shotgun, so let’s see if Thanksgiving is quality or just another turkey.

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It’s A Wonderful Knife

It’s A Wonderful Knife

Directed by Tyler MacIntyre

I’ve made no secret over the years how much of a soft spot I have for slasher movies. I also have a huge soft spot for movies that are aggressively weird and out there, so how could I not go see a slasher movie that’s functionally a remake of the Christmas classic It’s A Wonderful Life? Somehow, somewhere, someone thought that it would be a good idea to reimagine this Christmas movie as a violent slasher film, and I have to admit that it is a great idea. We’ve all seen It’s A Wonderful Life, or have heard enough about it through cultural osmosis that we basically know what it is, and playing with that by making it about a particularly non-jolly topic could lead to some good jokes. This isn’t totally unexpected because the writer of this film also wrote Freaky, the slasher movie remake of Freaky Friday, but let’s tackle this one at a time and see if this truly is a wonderful knife.

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