TROUBLE WITH THE CARVE

Opening this week:

Thanksgiving--Slasher movies of the '70s and early '80s were often holiday-themed. Black Christmas, Halloween, My Bloody Valentine, Silent Night, Deadly Night, New Year's Evil and April Fool's Day are all examples, while Friday the 13th and Happy Birthday to Me, though not strictly about holidays, are still tied to special dates and the convenient unity of time they provide. But Thanksgiving was somehow the major holiday the genre seemed to miss.

There actually were a couple of little-remembered attempts--Home Sweet Home in 1981 and Blood Rage in 1987. But neither seemed to count, perhaps because they didn't use the holiday in the title, or perhaps because they didn't sufficiently exploit the gruesome possibilities offered by the day's rituals. Whatever else may be said about it, the newly-made but self-consciously old-school slasher picture Thanksgiving works hard to include every classic Turkey Day trope.

A shoppers' riot and stampede at a store that shouldn't be open on Thanksgiving leads to bedlam and grisly death in a small Massachusetts town. "One Year Later"--as a subtitle traditionally informs us--a figure in the mask and garb of a Pilgrim skulks around exacting vengeance on those deemed responsible for the disaster. Everything eventually converges in a ghastly sit-down dinner.

The film traces its inception back to 2007, when two movies, the Robert Rodriguez shocker Planet Terror and Quentin Tarantino's stunt thriller Death Proof, were released as a double feature under the joint title Grindhouse. In and around the two features, the show included several "fake trailers" for fictitious grindhouse-style movies. Two of these have already wagged the dog as the basis for real features, Machete (2010) and Hobo With a Shotgun (2011); Thanksgiving marks the third.

Directed by Eli Roth, the Thanksgiving trailer in Grindhouse captured the nastiest, most low-rent atmosphere of a vintage gore movie, complete with scratched, faded footage, some really sleazo shocks, and the smarmy, glottal tones of the narrator (Roth himself?). You could almost believe it wasn't a put-on.

The new feature, directed by Roth from a script by Jeff Rendell, doesn't try for this level of faux-authenticity. The setting is contemporary, the budget clearly comfortable, and cell phones and social media figure prominently in the plot. But the movie still has a nice old-fashioned pace and structure and flavor, and the nostalgia of this is much of what makes it unsavory fun.

I'll admit that in recent years I've largely lost my stomach for slasher flicks. Moreover, I thought Roth's 2002 debut feature Cabin Fever was an interesting misfire at best, and I took a pass on his 2005 torture flick Hostel. But he strikes an affectionate tone here, and he employs techniques that distance us from compassion for the victims. Most simply and effectively, he makes many of them, especially the early ones, deeply and amusingly unsympathetic.

The cast is livened up by some veterans, like Patrick Dempsey, Rick Hoffman and Gina Gershon, and the "final girl" (Nell Verlaque) has a lovely presence, and unlike so many heroines back in the day, she fights back, resourcefully and successfully. It was also great to see Lynne Griffin, the first victim from 1974's Black Christmas--and the Hamlet figure in the Bob and Doug McKenzie movie Strange Brew--in a bit here.

Most notably, the film keeps it light. As with two other movies from earlier this year, Cocaine Bear and Renfield, Thanksgiving goes in for extreme, over-the-top splatter effects, and they aren't scary, nor do they seem meant to be. They aren't even all that gross. There's no visceral substance to them; the bodies of the victims go to pieces like gingerbread men, and the effect, seemingly deliberate, is cartoonish slapstick. We're about as likely to take their suffering seriously as that of Wile E. Coyote.

Maybe it's how entertainment like this works best: as a sort of anarchic Punch and Judy show, using humans instead of puppets. Like Thanksgiving dinner, it wouldn't be healthy to consume this sort of thing every day, but about once a year, it can hit the spot.

MOTHER JONES

Opening this weekend:

Bridget Jones’s Baby—It’s been twelve years since the film version of Bridget Jones: The Edge of Reason, and fifteen years since Bridget Jones's Diary. It didn’t seem like audiences were clamoring for one more movie iteration of Helen Fielding’s hapless chick-lit heroine, but maybe they were. In any case, here she is.

As our story begins, Bridget (Renée Zellweger) is celebrating her 43^rd birthday alone in her flat, with a candle in a cupcake, she and her beloved Mark Darcy (Colin Firth) having long since split. Through some rather laborious contrivances, she has two one-night stands—one with a rich American online-dating mogul (Patrick Dempsey) and the other with Darcy himself—within a week of each other. So when she turns up pregnant, owing to the unreliability of her “Vegan condoms,” whichever of the nice fellows might be the baby daddy? And however will she break the news to the non-daddy, since both gents are enthusiastic at the prospect?

As this synopsis may suggest, there’s little to be said for the carpentry of the script, credited to Fielding, Dan Mazer and Emma Thompson, and the direction, by Sharon Maguire, is no more than efficient. As always, the focus is on hoisting Bridget into slapstick humiliations, which is a bit more problematic now that Zellweger is pushing fifty. She looks great, but rightly or wrongly, seeing her fall face-down in the mud has a different vibe now—less cute, more cringe-inducing—than it did when she was in her thirties.

That said, this trivial movie is full of pros, and I enjoyed them. Zellweger remains good company, and so is Firth, though it’s uncertain whether his dour, discomfited manner derives from the character’s feelings or the actor’s—it’s jarring, somehow, when he smiles. Dempsey’s role, a stereotypical platitudinous American, does him no favors, but he comfortably fulfills the requirements of a mature hunk.

The real fun is in the supporting cast. The regulars from the earlier films, like Jim Broadbent and Gemma Jones as Bridget’s parents, make mostly token appearances, but there are a few new adds that are funny. As Bridget’s ob-gyn, Emma Thompson nips her terse lines off smartly but with just the right tinge of underlying kindness, and Kate O’Flynn is amusing as Bridget’s noxious new boss. I’ll also confess that Sarah Solemani’s mischievous sidelong smirks, as Bridget’s wacky anchorwoman pal, left me with a slight crush.