It’s about time I give this series a proper review. Y’all are in for.. sigh… honestly I don’t even know what to call it.
ThanksKilling — the quintessential Thanksgiving horror classic. The story of an evil turkey (appropriately named “Turkie”) that seeks revenge on descendants of the pilgrims who killed him that first feast, then returning to kill some more is hailed as one of the worst movies ever; I won’t look up stats, just ask Twitter. But these holiday flicks managed to take puppetry, obscene jokes, and a buttload of profanity and stuff it all into one steaming hot fowl of a movie.
I had seen small snippets of ThanksKilling (2008) before, but had only recently gotten to watch it in its entirety. I had asked my husband to have a “bad movie” night with me, to which he obliged. He barely lasted 15 minutes before leaving the room, opting to browse his computer instead. As a matter of fact, he left in a pretty shitty mood — annoyed and slightly aggressive. It wasn’t hard to see why. The first few scenes have pilgrim boobs and a crude turkey puppet exclaiming “Nice tits, bitch!” before killing the woman with a tomahawk. I realized then that this movie was special.
While my husband was almost offended by how bad this $100,000 movie was, I was elated. I laughed at the silliness of the turkey puppet. I jammed to the theme song. The plot was hanging on by threads, but just janky enough to make everything worth while to watch. Kills weren’t bad either. Don’t even get me started on the same JonBenét Ramsey joke they said THREE DIFFERENT TIMES. The audacity this movie has is unparalleled: the audacity to joke about the murder of a 6-year old, the audacity to feature a killer turkey, the audacity to have such shitty writing and acting, and the audacity to even call this a movie. Yet I was hooked.
It’s almost a badge of honor to watch these movies through to the end. Among movies like Jack Frost and The Gingerdead Man (and their sequels), ThanksKilling reigns supreme. With that status, of course they had to do a “worse” sequel. ThanksKilling 3 (2012) ramped up the camp and creativeness to a million-and-five! Turkie is back, trying to recover the lost copy of ThanksKilling 2 (so it’s canon, there just isn’t one in real life), and he’s killing people, rapping grandmas, mindless puppets, and space worms. Way more tacky, this sequel is absolutely nuts. If my husband didn’t see the first movie, he sure as hell wouldn’t sit through another second of this one.
The ThanksKilling movies are terrible. Horrible. Ghastly and childish. They’re not good. But in a way, that does make them good. When this black hole of a month gets trapped between the spookiest time of the year with Halloween and the grimmest (or happiest, depending on how you look at it) holiday — Christmas — Turkie and his wonderfully brash quips save November from becoming lost. Thanksgiving is often a forgotten holiday, especially being sandwiched between two of the big ones, but the ThanksKilling movies come up every year like clockwork. How can we argue that something so infamous is a bad thing? Turkie didn’t kill anyone in real life. The movies are loud and boistrous, exactly what most low-budget movies fail to be. It clearly doesn’t give a fuck, which is awesome to see — something trying to be bad and not taken too seriously. Sure, it can be a pain to sit through if you’re not in the right mindset, but to me, it’s an awesome and funny way to bridge the gap between holidays. I don’t even have to think about it, just listen to the outrageous things going on that no other movie is daring to do.
If you ask me, ThanksKilling and Thankskilling 3 are some of the best holiday movies we have! Nothing compares to them, and years later, we’re talking about them still. So I encourage everyone to at least give them a try, knowing they’re going to be terrible. I’m of a camp that thinks horror doesn’t necessarily have to be scary all the time. There are plenty of bad things that are horrifying, and with ThanksKilling, it’s a murderous puppet named Turkie.
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