Welcome to the holiday season!
In honor of the encroaching festivities, these next few columns will be dedicated to the garbage cinema brought to us by the holiday spirit — or in the case of today’s abomination, some horrifying mix of holiday spirit and an unexamined fetish … or six.
“Thankskilling,” released in 2009, follows the adventures of a murderous turkey and five college students heading home for Thanksgiving. Marketed as a comedy-horror film, and featuring the immortal phrase “boobs in the first second” on its poster, this movie is a special kind of crap.
The kind of movie that defies belief.
Within the first three minutes, there are upward of five references to boobs, an extended sequence of boobs, the stereotypical idiotic sorority girl lifting her shirt and the introduction of the remaining horror stereotypes.
The easiest way to describe “Thankskilling” is incongruous. The acting is “The Room”-level bad across the board, with dumb jock Johnny taking the garbage-coated cake. Though Ali, the resident village idiot in our merry band of misfits, comes in close behind him, with her affected valley girl voice and copious amounts of eye shadow.
Our murderous fowl is named Turkie, because of course he is. Created by an Indian chief in a wonderfully uncouth expository animation, he rises again after 505 years to murder things because the movie says so. He is a “fowl-mouthed” murderer, in the immortal words of the creator.
His first line, and the first line of the film, is: “Nice tits, bitch!”
I believe that is all that needs to be said about the character.
So many of the events in the movie happen without any context or sense that it’s pretty astounding. The best of these is probably when we meet “final girl” Kristen’s sheriff father, when his wife kind of just decides to quite literally take a dump in his coffee.
Why? She wants a divorce. I’d usually recommend a conversation, but you do you, weird Southern stepmom.
Ultimately, there’s little that can be said about this movie with only words. It sits above “Sharknado” on the evolutionary tree of filmic crap, trying to capture the so-bad-it’s-good zeitgeist and failing on the level of broccoli-flavored vodka. While “Thankskilling” is wildly funny, it’s not funny in a way the creators intended.
The lines that are supposed to be laugh lines aren’t funny, since most of the humor devolves into mammary glands and profanity.
What is funny is how ludicrously awful absolutely everything is. At least “Sharknado” has some degree of professionalism, and the actors are actually trying. That’s right, this is what it takes to make “Sharknado” look like competent cinema. A murderous, profane, boob-obsessed bird. I hope you’re proud of yourself, movie.
Ultimately, there’s not much else to say about this mountainous pile of garbage. There’s more entertaining bad movies, there’s better movies about unlikely murderous animals and there’s better Thanksgiving movies. For your own sake, please just don’t.
