The original Thanksgiving trailer that played during Grindhouse was so memorable that for years, people have asked when a real one was coming. After all, Machete and Hobo With a Shotgun — which won a competition of fake trailers and actually played with the movie in Canada — got made.

Director Eli Roth said of the trailer, “My friend Jeff (Rendell), who plays the killer Pilgrim — we grew up in Massachusetts, we were huge slasher-movie fans and every November we were waiting for the Thanksgiving slasher movie. We had the whole movie worked out: A kid who’s in love with a turkey, and then his father killed it, and then he killed his family and went away to a mental institution and came back and took revenge on the town. I called Jeff and said, “Dude, guess what, we don’t have to make the movie, we can just shoot the best parts.” Shooting the trailer was so much fun because every shot is a money shot. Every shot is decapitation or nudity. It’s so ridiculous, it’s absurd. It’s just so wrong and sick that it’s right.”

Directed by Roth and written by Rendell, it took 16 years to make it to screens. Could it ever live up to the trailer?

Yes. It totally does.

As people line up for Black Friday at the RightMart in Plymouth, it’s obvious that something bad is going to happen. Should Thomas Wright (Rick Hoffman) even open the store and be greedy? Shouldn’t there be more than two security guards? Should Jessica (Nell Verlaque) have let her friends Bobby (Jalen Thomas Brooks), Evan (Tomaso Sanelli), Gabby (Addison Rae), Scuba (Gabriel Davenport) and Yulia (Jenna Warren) into the store early, which causes people in the crowd to see them and push through the doors, killing one of the two guards? Could anything have calmed these lunatics and kept them from killing manager Mitch Collins’s (Ty Olsson) wife Amanda (Gina Gershon) and several others? How can the town ever fix things?

A year later, they have tried. Jessica is now dating Ryan (Milo Manheim), as Bobby left everyone when his baseball arm was broken in the tragedy. As Right Mart gets ready for another Black Friday, images of the teens are shared on social media by John Carver, the first governor of Plymouth Colony and one of the people credited with the first Thanksgiving, as well as video of the riot itself. Sheriff Eric Newlon (Patrick Dempsey) works with Jessica but people are killed left and right, like the other security guard Manny (Tim Dillon), students Amy (Shailyn Griffin) and Lonnie (Mika Amosen), and waitress Lizzie (Amanda Barker), all people involved in the evening.

That’s pretty much all you need to know. This is a film closer to Happy Birthday to Me than the most crass of the slashers, as the killer means more than the kills. That said, this is a movie that does not shy away from some incredible moments of gore and explosive violence, perhaps the most that’s been in a slasher since the end of the classic era in 1981.

There haven’t been many Thanksgiving horror movies — Blood Rage, Home Sweet Home, The Boneyard, Amityville: A New Generation, The Granny, Intensity, Alien Abduction: Incident in Lake County, the 2005 Boogeyman, Seance, ThanksKilling, Kristy, Escape Room, Blood Harvest, Fractured, The Last Thanksgiving, Happy Horror Days, Thankskilling 3,  Deadly Friend, Derelicts and Blood Freak — so this is probably the best one there is by default. However, I have to say that this is the closest to an actual slasher I’ve seen in decades. It gets things right because it’s made by someone who actually loves slashers. It feels authentic and true.

It’s the best movie I’ve seen Roth make, way beyond his Knock Knock, Death Wish and can we all just admit he was the Makinov that made Come Out and Play? Instead of remaking something, he’s making something new taken from what has worked in the past. The stalking, the slashing, the idea that so many people could have been the killer are all perfect. It’s something that every praised slasher of the past few years — the revived Scream and Halloween movies, I’m staring a bloody hole through you — should learn from. By this point, just give Roth the Halloween franchise. It can’t get worse after the last five movies.

My favorite actor in this movie is Tonic, one of the cats from the remake of Pet Sematary. That whole scene is incredible, as John Carver kills a man and still feeds his cat.

A movie that has scenes from Krull and Death Wish 3, a rant about Dio in Black Sabbath, songs from Sorcery and Sammy Hagar’s “Three Lock Box” on the soundtrack, multiple heads exploding, a turkey timer stabbed into someone, an opening that references Halloween, The Car‘s horn during the parade…I am so happy with this movie.

When do we get Don’t and Werewolf Women of the SS?