Review #354: ThanksKilling (2008)
October 2025 Holiday Horror Review #27 - ThanksKilling (2010)
This movie begins with an extreme close-up shot of a woman's bare boob. We are then shown that this is apparently a pilgrim woman in the year 1621, but instead of the conservative outfit you would normally expect a pilgrim woman to be wearing, her chest is inexplicably bare so as to show off the aforementioned boob. She begins running through the woods in fear, and trips and falls. We then see a rubber puppet resembling the head of a turkey pop into frame and say "Nice tits, bitch!" before he kills her with an axe, cut to title card.
Just so you know what kind of movie you're in for.
ThanksKilling is a low-budget, shot-on-video movie about a group of college kids who go on a camping trip for Thanksgiving break (as you do). Along the way one of them shares a folk tale about an evil turkey who rises from the dead every 505 years, and would you believe it, the evil turkey is back to take revenge for the first Thanksgiving. Or something. I don't know, the story doesn't really make sense but that's kind the point. Anyway, the turkey starts killing the characters off one by one, and they have to try and figure out how to stop this immortal magic turkey- or die trying.
It's always difficult when I watch a movie like this because, without a doubt, this movie is intentionally bad. It's clearly meant to be more of a parody of slasher films than an actual slasher film itself, with specific moments that lampoon popular tropes and conventions of those types of films. To that end, I can tell a great deal of skill and effort went into making this movie (though not a great deal of budget)- so the question then becomes, what metric do I use to judge this movie? Do I rate it low, because the end result is cheesy and stupid and low-budget? Or do I rate it high because of the skill that went into making it intentionally bad? I feel like the obvious answer is to just rate it based on how much I enjoyed watching it, but what if my enjoyment comes from poking fun at how bad something is? I would feel awkward giving something like this a 9/10 only for someone to take that to mean I think this movie is almost as good as, say, Cabin in the Woods or something. (This movie IS a very fun watch, but it's not even on the same playing field as most of the movies I've given high ratings to. One of its reviews on IMDB is titled "Unbelievably bad, but still pretty good" which is a startlingly accurate nutshell.)
Because here's the thing: this movie has like 80% of the ingredients needed to be a fantastic low-budget horror-comedy. Without exaggeration the cinematography is amazing. (I'm shocked to see that the director and cinematographer both have fairly limited credits on IMDB.) The special effects are a bit cheesy, but they're impressive for the low-key comedic style this movie seems to be going for. And the dialogue is actually... kind of brilliant? I mean, it's bad, but it's clearly intentionally bad. All of the lines are exactly what someone would write if their goal was "make some boilerplate dialogue you would find in a slasher film, except make it also poke fun at itself and the ridiculous situation the characters are in without making it too obvious". There's a scene in this movie where the villain (to reiterate, an immortal turkey played by a rubber hand puppet) kills the sheriff, and then wears just the skin of his face to pose as the sheriff, and none of the characters notice anything is amiss but all of their lines are subtle jokes about how the sheriff totally doesn't look like a rubber puppet of a turkey wearing a leatherface human mask. The problem- really, the ONLY problem stopping this film from being a low-budget masterpiece- is that all of the actors are uniformly terrible at acting.
I really waffled back and forth trying to decide if I thought the acting was intentionally bad, since the rest of the movie very obviously is intentionally bad. But the thing about acting is that, it's almost impossible to act badly on purpose. You have to be a virtuoso-level actor to convincingly pull off bad acting, and ALL of the acting in this movie looks and sounds like this was every actor's first performing role. So either ALL of them are secretly world-class actors (despite most of them only having one or two other acting credits nearly twenty years later), or they actually are just bad actors. And it's a shame, because seriously, this kind of writing put into the hands of some genuinely skilled actors playing their roles straight would have elevated ThanksKilling to something legitimate. But with the acting being so bad across the board, it really makes the whole production feel cheap, in a way the best technical work just can't make up for.
Anyway, I'm going to rate this movie pretty high because it really was a fun watch. But be warned, it's terrible. And it knows it's terrible. But like I said earlier, that's kind of the point. But unlike a Mulva: Zombie Ass Kicker or a Carnage: The Legend of Quiltface, this one actually put in the work to still be worth watching.
Overall Rating: 8/10 Books on Dad's Single Bookshelf
A Good Starting Point: According to the IMDB trivia, the movie's tagline of "Gobble gobble, motherfucker!" was thought of before the movie's actual plot. Nobody should be surprised by this information.
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