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.

DOES A BEAR SNORT IN THE WOODS?

Opening in theaters this weekend...

Cocaine Bear--This shocker has at least as much right to claim "true story" status for itself as Fargo or The Texas Chainsaw Massacre. There really was a Cocaine Bear: back in 1985, an American black bear was found dead in the Chattahoochee National Forest in northern Georgia, just south of the Tennessee line. The poor creature had OD'd, having ingested more than 30 kilos of cocaine, valued at tens of millions of dollars.

The stuff had been dropped from an airplane by a smuggler who then died himself in a parachuting mishap. The unfortunate ursine, dubbed "Pablo Eskobear," was stuffed by a taxidermist and ended up on display in a shopping mall in Kentucky, where it reportedly still stands.

The movie, directed by Elizabeth Banks from a script by Jimmy Warden, is set in 1985 and uses some real place names and at least one real person's name (the smuggler's). But it's still a load of gleeful b.s., a highly entertaining sick joke. Unlike the real animal, the movie's bear--arguably the newest addition to the stable of Universal Monsters--turns into a drug-crazed spree killer, mauling and dismembering hikers and park personnel, as well as the drug traffickers that enter the forest in search of the lost product.

Cocaine Bear is as violent and gory as any big-studio movie you're likely to see. But it isn't scary, and isn't meant to be; the splatter is played entirely for gruesomely slapstick laughs. Indeed, the exuberance with which the blood and brains and guts fly is the central recurring and escalating gag.

Except for a single mom (Keri Russell), searching the woods for her daughter and the daughter's friend, most of the major characters are scoundrels or cretins or both, though not necessarily unlikable scoundrels and cretins. All of them are broadly played caricatures, so Banks invites us to leave our empathy at the door, take a cathartic break from compassion and hoot at the horrors which befall them. I indulged, and so did the audience with which I saw the film.

The title character, generated through some reasonably seamless combination of virtual and practical effects, has a guileless personality that contrasts with the bloody mayhem. Indeed, you're more likely to feel for the blameless beast than for most of the humans.

The cast is nonetheless excellent, even if most of them are not employing ten percent of their talent. I've long thought that Russell is one of the more underrated and underutilized lead actresses now in movies. I also don't understand why Alden Ehrenreich hasn't become a bigger deal; he's comically muddled yet sympathetic as an elaborately bereaved drug operative. So is O'Shea Jackson as his weary partner, Aaron Holliday as a dimwit would-be mugger they encounter, and Isiah Whitlock, Jr. as a cranky detective.

The film was one of the last in which the late Ray Liotta appeared. He's in his usual strong form as Ehrenreich's father, the heartless local boss of the drug dealers. It's not a rich enough role to be a worthy swansong, but it's a good performance, and the film is dedicated to him. The great Margo Martindale nails every line and facial expression as a hard-up park ranger trying to get the attention of a naturalist (Jesse Tyler Ferguson). Maybe the best of all are Brooklyn Prince and Christian Convery as the two kids, who get across a genuine affection behind their mild, familiar ragging and posing and their dares of each other. They, along with Russell, offer us somebody to unambiguously root for.

Banks has a lot of fun evoking '80s-movie atmosphere, not only with the costumes and cars and posters and overheard pop songs but with her direction. From the full opening credit sequence to the leisurely camera movement to the driving synthesizer score by Mark Mothersbaugh, the film is as much a throwback to the decade in which it's set as last year's Top Gun: Maverick, and the response to both of those films suggests that maybe today's audiences wouldn't object to a return to that style.