Directed and written by Bakeeba Ruffin, who is also known as rapper Tef Kaluminati or Cinematic Ref, has also made Savage Genesis and The Day After 19. He also appears as a character named Teflon in this, the lead character, a gangster from a small town who only has one friend named Prince (Joshua Bullock).
Shot in Rocky Mount, North Carolina, as well as Raleigh, Princeville, Whitakers and outside a Marriott in Tampa, Florida, this is about the twists and turns of life on the streets and the fact that whatever you’ve done in the past is never really over and can never be erased.
All movies are miracles and it’s incredible that this movie has the opportunity to be seen on streaming platforms. A lot of it looks to be shot like Curb Your Enthusiasm and the actors are improv reading their lines. Sometimes, that makes it seem like simple conversations go forever. That said, the end of the movie has a huge gun battle that seems like it was so much fun to shoot, even if the computer-added flashes take away from it. I assume this was shot with no permits and guerilla style, which is pretty great.
This feels pretty authentic to me, but hey, I’m a white kid from a small town in Pennsylvania, so what do I know? I was entertained.
You can learn more about this movie at the official Facebook page.
Ruja Plamenova Ignatova is the founder of a fraudulent cryptocurrency scheme known as OneCoin, which was called “one of the biggest scams in history.” Since 2017, she has been hiding from various international law enforcement agencies and has been charged by U.S. authorities for wire fraud, securities fraud and money laundering. She was added to the FBI Ten Most Wanted List in 2022.
This documentary shows how she was part of several multi-level marketing cons before getting into OneCoin. She built a $4 billion dollar Bitcoin empire that was all based on lies. When the law closed in, she went on the run. There was a report that she was murdered on the orders drug lord Hristoforos Amanatidis but the FBI is still investigating and believes that she is alive.
What is bitcoin? It’s a virtual currency designed to be a form of payment outside the control of any one person, group or entity. This takes away any need for third-party involvement in financial transactions. It’s part of a blockchain and the network required to power it. So what’s a blockchain? It’s a ledger or database that stores transactions, secured by encryption. When a transaction happens, information from the previous block is copied to a new block with the new data. This is encrypted and the transaction is verified by miners in the network. A new block is opened, a Bitcoin is created and it is given as a reward to the miners who can use, hold or sell the Bitcoin.
This is based on the game Fiendish Thieves, which is described as Home Alone meets Frankenstein. They say it’s “filled with lots of laughs and slapstick humor. You choose the actions of the bungling burglars who search an abandoned warehouse for a rare vintage pocket watch, and the obsessed film fan munching on snacks watching the events unfold.”
From what I can see from this video that was posted on Steam, the game is pretty much the same as the movie.
It’s directed and written by Nick Box, who also has Amityville Tea Bag, Amityville Elevator and Amityville Job Interview coming out next year. I don’t know how much longer I can keep up this pact with a demon to watch every Amityville movie, because this one is as painful as they get. It may also be the tenth Amityville movie where Shawn C. Phillips sits on a couch in front of his DVD collection and just yells about nothing while watching a Frankenstein movie that mainly consists of the monster getting shocked for what seems like five minutes non-stop to the point that I thought that my internet was screwed up.
Directed by Victoria Duley and written by Anne Garofalo Paterno, this is all about how 22-year-old Gabrielle Venora Petito was killed by her fiancee Brian Christopher Laundrie while they were traveling together in a van across the U.S. Laundrie then drove the van from Wyoming back to his parents’ Florida home and refused to discuss where Petito was.
Within a matter of weeks, Petito’s body was found in Wyoming’s Bridger–Teton National Forest and an autopsy determined that she died by strangulation. Laundrie was found a month later — now a skeleton — in Florida’s Myakkahatchee Creek Environmental Park, killing himself with a gun before writing that he had killed Petito.
One of the strange things in this case is that the couple was pulled over by the Moab City Police Department for driving erratic after several people saw Laundrie abusing Petitio. Police body cam footage shows her in distress. Neither of the couple wanted to press charges as a result of the incident, which police reported as a mental breakdown rather than domestic violence, which would been cause for arrest.
This Tubi original will tell you all of that but honestly, if you watch any true crime TV, you know all of this. This is a good start, though, if you don’t. The two left so much info and content on social media, there will be documentaries about them for the rest of the time that there is true crime.
The Iron Claw faces the same issues as any adaption, except its real life.
The story of the Von Erichs is one that has obsessed not just wrestling fans but people throughout Texas, a state they owned for a large part of the 80s.
Fritz Von Erich (played by Holt McCallany) started his life as a discuss thrower and football player by the name of Jack Adkisson at Southern Methodist University. He married Doris Smith (Maura Tierney)– they had been teenage sweethearts at Crozier Technical High School – and their marriage cost Jack his scholarship. He transferred to Corpus Christi University before trying to play for the NFL and then heading to Canada to keep his dream of a football career alive.
There, he met Stu Hart, who trained him and paired him with Waldo Von Erich. The film glosses over the fact that the brother tag team did a Nazi gimmick, goosestepping in the ring in a time not much more than a decade after the end of the war.
The family’s first brush with tragedy was the death of Jack Jr. after he was electrocuted by touching a part of their trailer, slipped and drowned in a puddle of snow in Niagara Falls, New York.
Jack, Doris and their sons Kevin and David continued on, as Fritz travelled more in the Midwest and won the AWA title – both versions, Minnesota and Omaha – three times and the NWA U.S. title twenty times. He was also a huge star in Japan, where his “Tetsu no Tsume” bloodied Giant Baba. After a loss in NWA hotbed St. Louis against champion Gene Kiniski, he headed to Texas where he began his own territory.
He also had three more sons, Kerry, Mike and Chris.
The film is based around Kevin (Zac Efron), the brother who gets the first start in the world of wrestling in his father’s promotion, World Class Championship Wrestling. Taking a page out of the book of Jimmy “Superfly” Snuka, he wrestled barefoot, yet the legend is that someone hid his boots before a match and he just got used to not wearing them.
Soon, Kevin would team with his brother David (Harris Dickinson), named for Doris’ brother David, who died months before he was born. In case the tragedy of this movie is too much, real life is worse, as Doris’ younger sibling was just 14. The film takes the time to show a match between Kevin and Harley Race (Kevin Anton), the NWA World Champion, a belt that Fritz was obsessed with winner and now wants one of his sons to win. Upset with Kevin’s performance, he decides that David will get the next title shot.
What the movie doesn’t show was that at this time, David was the true breakout star of the family. He had already started working outside WCCW in Missouri, being groomed for a major babyface (good guy) role. On May 27, 1979, David wrestled Race in a non-title match and defeated him with the Iron Claw. Back then, these things didn’t just happen.
Another fact in real life that points to David being the real star of the family instead of Kevin was that he went off to Florida and teamed with Kendo Nagasaki, Jimmy Garvin and the Funks, managed by J.J. Dillon. By learning how to be a heel (bad guy), he would gain the skills that the NWA World Champion needed. The champ was used as a barnstorming draw, going from NWA promotion to promotion, working their local star and making them look good. That meant that champs – like Dory Funk Jr., Ric Flair and Race – had to be able to work face or heel.
The film also doesn’t show that WCCW’s TV really was ahead of its time. David brough Garvin back to Texas with him and had a memorable feud where he won Garvin and his valet Precious’ services for a month working on his ranch. He was also instrumental in bringing in the Freebirds, even teaming with them at the “Wrestling Star Wars” card at Reunion Arena on December 25, 1982. As Buddy Roberts didn’t make it, David, Michael Hayes and Jimmy Garvin won the WCCW Six Man Titles from Tom Sharpe, Mike Sharpe and Ben Steel. David gave his belt to Buddy, which he would regret when later that night, Kerry (Kerry battled NWA World Champion Ric Flair in a Steel Cage with Michael Hayes and David Manning as the referees ) fought NWA World Champion Ric Flair in a steel cage with Hayes and David Manning as the referees. At one point, Hayes knocked out Flair and tried to give the win to Kerry. Kerry refused the pin and instead, the Freebirds slammed a cage door on his head. The feud between the brothers and the Southern rockers — “This rivalry isn’t between Texas and Georgia, it’s between decency and filth!” – began. Most of this is shown quickly in the film and never touched on.
As for Kerry, the movie claims that he was training for the Olympics. The truth is he was a great high school athlete, but the story would always be that people took things from the Von Erichs. A bad tackle took away Kevin’s NFL career. The Russians took the Olympics from Kerry.
At this point, the film shows that Kevin was married to Pam (Lily James) and his brothers remained single. In truth, David married Candy L. McLeod and had a child, Natosha Zoeanna Adkisson, who died at 13 weeks of age due to SIDS. He married a second time to Patricia A. Matter. Kerry married Catherine M. Murray in 1983 and had two daughters, Hollie and Lacey, who wrestled for TNA. Mike married Shani Garz in 1985. None of these events are shown in the movie.
What is shown is that David was showing signs of being sick. Officially, his death was listed asruptured intestines resulting from acute enteritis. Kevin and Manning claimed it was a heart attack while Ric Flair claimed in his book that it was a painkiller overdose and Bruiser Brody and referee Joe Higuchi flushed all of the evidence.
Regardless, David was due to face Flair before he died. The angle began when he defeated Flair for the NWA Missouri Heavyweight Championship. The theory is that the NWA Championship Committee voted in January 1984 for David to win the World Title from Ric Flair in March or April of that year. David battled Flair at Reunion Arena on December 25, 1983, and Flair retained the NWA World Championship. Flair then did an interview where he commented on how Mike Von Erich was not a good wrestler and how he could beat him in 60 seconds with one hand tied behind his back. On January 30, 1984, Mike and Flair would battle at that year’s Wrestling Star Wars in a 10 Minute Challenge Match. If Flair beat Mike in that time, David would never again ask for another shot at the NWA World title, but if Flair did not beat Mike in ten minutes, David would get to name the place, the time and every stipulation for his match against Ric Flair. Mike won, but then David died on tour for All Japan – defending the United National title that is now part of the Triple Crown – on February 10, 1984.
The movie then sets up that there was a coin toss between Kevin and Kerry. By skipping the Freebirds angle in the Kerry vs. Flair cage match, the movie makes it seem as if Kerry didn’t deserve the title match. In truth, Kerry was on magazine covers at this point – and even had shirts sold in the Northeast at Sears – as a major star. He’d already been close to beating Flair, so when they had their match in front of over 45,000 fans at Texas Stadium at the David Von Erich Memorial Parade of Champions – there was even a song made for the event, “Heaven Needed a Champion” – he had to win.
In real life, Kerry lost the belt 18 days later in Yokosuka, Japan to Flair, even though his feet were on the ropes.
In the movie, Kerry is in a motorcycle accident that night. This is false, as that accident happened two years after when it does in the movie, on June 4, 1986. According to Kevin, Kerry injured the foot following surgery by attempting to walk on it prematurely and ruined the foot, which caused the amputation. This was a huge secret even within wrestling, as he often showered with his boots on.
The movie also shows that this is when Mike started training. In truth, Mike debuted on November 24, 1983 against Skandar Akbar. While not the level of a star as his brothers, he did work a New Japan Pro Wrestling tour and was given a title match with IWGP Junior Heavyweight Champion Shiro Koshinaka. He also wasn’t injured in one of his first matches, but instead during a tour of Israel – the movie doesn’t get into what big stars the brothers were in that country – and had surgery on August 22, 1985. He was released from the hospital but later he developed a fever of 107 °F and was diagnosed with toxic shock syndrome. That’s how he got brain damage and lost so much weight. He did kill himself but not until two years later, four days after he was arrested for a DUI.
As for Kerry, at this point, he was involved in an interpromotional feud with Jerry Lawler that had its blowoff at SuperClash III in 1988, as well as working for Jerry Jarrett’s USWA, which bought World Class in 1989 (and not after Kerry died, as shown in the movie). His WWF run kicked off with him defeating Buddy Rose – his first ever opponent, a coincidence – on the July 16, 1990 Saturday Night’s Main Event. He was renamed the Texas Tornado and announcers gradually stopped calling him by his family name. He feuded with fellow second generation star “Mr. Perfect” Curt Hennig and defeated him for the Intercontinental Title at SummerSlam 1990 before another son of a wrestler, “Million Dollar Man” Ted DiBiase cost him the title and started another feud.
The movie makes it seem like a surprise that Kerry was heading down the cards. In truth, he was one of Flair’s first WWF opponents and was still opening on house shows. However, he was having pain killer issues and had even stolen a prescription pad from a doctor to make his own orders. His marriage ended, causing personal problems that hastened him leaving the company.
Back in Texas, he was arrested twice. The second charge would have violated his probation, which was leading to jail time, which is why many believe he killed himself with a bullet to the heart, using the gun he gave his father, on February 18, 1993. In his book, Bret Hart mentions that Kerry – who consoled the Hitman when his brother Dean died – often told him that his brothers were calling him to heaven, a scene that this movie shows.
As you can see, beyond the bad wigs, there’s a lot off with this movie. There are moments when people like Sam Muchnick and Jerry Jarrett are brought up. Fritz even mention that Kerry should get a shot at Hellwig – the Ultimate Warrior – a fact that seems like an inside joke but Fritz was a former NWA President. He knew how the business worked and that that would never happen.
The movie also doesn’t show just how bad WCCW got. In 1985, they used Mike’s near death to draw fans and death in 1987 to sell tickets to the David and Mike Von Erich Memorial Parade of Champions. Fritz also used the death of Gino Hernandez the next year to get over an angle where Chris Adams was blinded. This was only beat by an angle where Fritz had a heart attack in ring and depending on the ratings that week, he was either near death – after the loss of his children and a market numb to family tragedy – or getting better.
Nor does the movie talk about family friend Brian Adias, who saved Kevin’s life with CPR in ring and then was given the gimmick that he had an “oriental spike” that he would use when he feuded with Mike.
It’s impossible to get all of this in a movie this short, but most glaring is that Chris, another brother who also was too small to wrestle and killed himself, is not in the movie. Nor is the fact that Doris divorced Fritz on July 21, 1992 after 42 years of marriage.
Jack Adkisson died of brain and lung cancer at his home in Lake Dallas, Texas, pretty much all alone, on September 10, 1997. By that point, Kevin and his family had moved to Kauai, Hawaii. That’s where Doris died on October 23, 2015, surrounded by Kevin and her grand and great-grandchildren. Kevin’s daughter Kristen said, “I kissed her hand, and didn’t let it go. Those hands raised six babies, taught me how to crochet, made about a million cups of coffee and held each one of us at one time or another as we cried over the deaths of our brothers or uncles, her sons. I couldn’t stop thinking about how much comfort her hands had offered considering what grief she’d experienced, and that I’d never see them outstretched again for a hug or hear the words, “Come here, baby. Cry with Meme.” She was a rock, as cliché as it sounds, always willing to talk you through the sad times even though her own losses were so much greater.”
Doris once told an interviewer, “We hardly know who the Adkissons are anymore. We have been a wrestling family for so long. I suppose I want the family to know that when they are tired of being Von Erichs, there is a place they can come to where they can still be Adkissons. But I don’t know if you can ever stop being a Von Erich.”
Kevin would say of her, “Boys learn a lot from their dads. Things they’ll need as they grow. They may not realize it but they learn a lot from their mothers too. Life is not always about win this or defeat that, but also about mercy and understanding. I learned that from my mom.”
For all it gets wrong, the wrestling in The Iron Claw looks great. But what it misses is the sheer mania of The Sportatorium. It makes it seem like a small regional group instead of a wrestling company that was changing the sport. It doesn’t get across how wild the fans were, women of all ages charging the aisle just to touch one of the Von Erichs, people wanting to fight the Freebirds. It gets the idea but it doesn’t translate the feeling, the joy of watching good against evil.
The major downer? How did they pick Aaron Dean Eisenberg to play Ric Flair? This is one of the most important wrestlers of all time and they picked someone who doesn’t look, sound or appear to be him. The moment of his promo took all the air out of the room.
Director and writer Sean Durkin said that the story couldn’t withstand more tragedy. Yet that is life, a real life, lived and survived by Kevin who famously said that he used to have brothers and now, he’s the only one left. Holt McCallany is a great actor but he only gets across a little of how frightening of a human being Fritz was; the meanest he is in this movie feels like the nicest that he was in real life.
It’s worth seeing but there are so many great documentaries about the real story that I would watch afterward so you can see how it really was. Efron does a great job at this, he looks awesome and his wrestling basics — he runs the ropes better than most people today — are great. I just wish the movie got more of the basics correct too.
Dr. Valerie Cross (Louise Linton, who was in the 2015 remake of Cabin Fever) is one of those people who seemingly does it all. She’s a professor of literature and psychology at Berkeley. The author of two children’s books and two novels about an antihero serial killer named Jason Manson with a third — and a $3 million offer just to write it — on the way. She used to be the lover of her agent Leonard (William Baldwin, once the villain of an American giallo in Sliver, now just content to be the big name in the credits) but after disappearing for two months took up with David (Pierson Fode), the owner of a gym where everyone — Hannah (Christy St. John), Thomas (Quinton Guyton), Tori (Michelle Jubilee Gonzalez) and Angela (Jackie Moore) — are all investigating the Harbinger serial killer.
David seems creepy — he claims he doesn’t have to breathe — and Valerie seems fragile, but things get even stranger when Angela hangs herself after claiming she knows who the killer is. It seems like she suspects David, who she’s also sleeping with — David and Valerie don’t believe in the archaic institution of marriage — and she also has a boyfriend Matthew (David Wachs) who was planning on scamming her to pay back Ian (William McNamara).
As Valerie goes to a cabin in Tahoe — and everyone else at Mixtape Fitness, their gym, quits due to their fear of the killer — she nearly dies when the brakes fail. This brings her into the orbit of Sophia (Joana Metrass), a restaurant owner whose husband died in his sleep. And now Matthew has moved in next door to start scamming them.
Everyone is beautiful but everyone is crazy. If this were the 90s, we’d call this an erotic thriller. If it was the 70s, it would be a giallo. In 2023, it’s a Tubi original.
Directed by Brian Skiba and written by Sean Crayne, this finds Valerie and David being the suspects in the murder of Angela while more girls go missing. Matthew believes that everything that Valerie is writing about in her books is actually the true things that David tells her, proving that he’s the Harbinger. Matthew starts blackmailing them, asking for Bitcoin.
David starts wiping out everyone while they swim and rock climb all while Valerie sighs and hangs out with Sophia at ladies night. She nearly warned Thomas in time, but then David shows up when he starts his car and it blows up real good.
Man, Sophia has a lot of questions, getting out that Vanessa and David met on the Isle of Bondi when she was writing a children’s book. She was kidnapped and nearly murdered and then David saved her, which became the premise for her first Jason Manson book. Let’s take a break for a second here. She’s a best-selling writer and no one was like, “You named your serial killer character Jason Manson. A little on the nose?”
While our female protagonist is flirting with Sophia at the bar and dealing with the blackmailer, David is busy, knifing women. When she gets home, David accuses her of being the person blackmailing them. They argue, she shoves him and he hits his head, bleeding all over the kitchen. As she cleans up, the cops call to tell her that all of her gym team are dead.
Cut to Leo as Valerie calls him for advice on David’s injury. He brings his own doctor (James Moses Black) instead of dealing with a girl who just wrote a book, Confessions of a Cult. David gets stitched up and has a concussion. Also: David is such a sociopath that he chews he pills instead of swallowing them.
David then relates the story of how he had a dog named Luna as a child and instead of giving it back to its rightful owner, he set it on fire and watched it burn. He then tells Valerie that he will never hurt her and kisses her in a way that says, “I am going to set you on fire.”
While all this is happening, Valerie gets with Sophia as Leo comes with the contract for the book deal. Slicing limes for tequila turns into David stabbing Matthew but missing and killing Leo. He’s such a great serial killer that he leaves blood all over the place, then someone knocks out Valerie and duct tapes her arms behind her back. And oh yeah, Sophia did kill her husband.
Nobody in this seems human. Where is the Gregory Dark of today that can make these erotic thrillers and have tension, heat and an actual story? People just arrive, drop exposition or more mystery, and then either have PG-rated makeout scenes or get killed.
Anyhow…
Valerie finds Sophia being hung, just like how Angela got killed. Matt is behind it all and David is poisoned by the tequila that knocked everyone out. Meanwhile, Matt is getting his bitcoin and then Valeria reveals that she and David killed Angela. Somehow, David is able to throw everyone into a rowboat and take them all out onto Lake Tahoe, then toss them overboard with cinderblocks tied to them. How strong is this guy?
David wakes up and everyone goes into the water and we get the closed captioned description “muffled bubbles” which makes me laugh out loud. Val is saved at the last minute by Sophia as David and Matt go down together. Of course, David lives, Jason Manson is dead and the Harbinger is gone as well. There will be a new Jason Manson novel and Sophia is her new inspiration. Val is going to Rome and she invites David to win her back.
Oh man, what a goofy movie. Pretty people doing dumb things and having unsexy sex is a better genre when it has fog, neon and sax solos, as the 90s proved to us all.
From Fly Girl on In Living Color to being a diva whose name got shortened because it is so iconic, J. Lo has been a major force in entertainment since the 90s. Her first starring roles in Selena, Anaconda, Out of Sight and The Cell showed that she had a good eye for picking movies and yes, perhaps her career suffered after Gigli, but she’s always found a way to come back, whether its in music, television or films, as 2019’s Hustlers showed that she still was a solid actress.
If you’re a fan, you’ll know all this TMZ show has to tell you about her. But that’s what these Tubi TMZ shows are for, an overview on a star and their life. J. Lo has so much to get into, from her career to her many loves and how she’s owned herself throughout every twist. Even someone like me who barely watches popular movies can point several of her movies that I’ve seen. I mean, I have watched Enough so many times alone. If I even mention her to my wife, that means that I will have to watch it again. Some say she’s the Elizabeth Taylor of our era. Watch this and decide for yourself.
In the middle of a fire, the online world of the Citizen App spills into Los Angeles, which has been ignited in more ways than one as the calls on the app turn into a vigilante mob looking for someone who may not even be a suspect.
Directed by Paula Neudorf, who worked on the series Cyberwar, this VICE News show has someone who worked at the company saying, “If your app protects the world, you know, and you hurt one person, maybe it’s not the biggest deal.”
Using leaked Slack chats, company information and interviews with sources, this is all about how Citizen’s CEO Andrew Frame put a $30,000 bounty on information that would lead to the capture of an arsonist who started a fire in Los Angeles’ Pacific Palisades neighborhood. While police were looking for the same individual, they were innocent. Another person was arrested. A Citizen spokesperson called the incident “a mistake we are taking very seriously.”
Founded in 2016, Citizen is the first app to combine location information with 911 intelligence to keep you and your loved ones safe. The app was originally Vigilante and released in New York City. The ads for the app encouraged user vigilantism, as well as racial profiling and harassment. It was pulled from the Apple App Store within 2 days.
Citizen also released the subscription security feature Protect, the first paid feature. USA Today says that this feature “lets users contact virtual agents for help if they feel they’re in danger.” As of January 26, 2022, Protect had over 100,000 subscribers.
The idea of America becoming even more of a police state where people gain money because of turning each other in is yet another nightmare in this rapidly declining state that we live in. If this doesn’t scare you, you aren’t paying attention.
Fresh Meat: Jeffrey Dahmer (2021): Directed by Kevin Barry. this Tubi original documentary has drawn some ire online for featuring podcasters in the place of actual experts as well as several inaccuracies, including it claiming that Dahmer lived in the Oxford Apartments in 1988 when he didn’t move in until May 1990; that he accidentally took Halcion when he killed Steven Tuomi in 1987, but this actually happened in May of 1990 as well. They also are three years off on the Konerak Sinthasimphone incident which happened on May 27, 1991, not September 26, 1988. Thanks to IMDB user corbettc-23259 for pointing this out.
It also talks as much about other cannibals and killers like Ed Gein and Luka Magnotta when most are watching this to learn more about Dahmer. Then again, if you are watching this, you probably have already seen so many other documentaries all about him and will be upset by how little this gets into his homelife and reasons for killing, much less how much it gets wrong. Like how Ed Gein is from Plainfield, WI. Not Plainville. This is a simple editing issue that should have been caught and yet, like so much of this documentary, so much is just plain incorrect.
Unlike the first Fresh Meat on Dahmer and how he was arrested, this is more about how he became a victim himself within the walls of Columbia Correctional Institution in Portage, Wisconsin when he was beaten to death by Christopher Scarver. Through interviews — you know, as always in these Tubi docs, podcast experts but I guess that’s where journalism is — and dramatized re-enactments, this tries to get to the bottom and tell the truth of just how the most famous killer could be murdered when he should have been guarded.
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 Krulland 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?
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