Review of ThanksKilling (2008) by Spencer D — 01 Oct 2010

To summarize the film, ThanksKilling is your typical low-budget, funny because it's terrible horror movie (by my guess, made by a film student who's a fan of horror movies). I'll break it down.

1) The Story - It's a joke (literally). It starts off with shameless gratuitous nudity as a pilgrim lady is topless while being chased by a killer turkey, who is the spawn of some Native American curse designed to kill white people. Then of course it flashes to modern day where five college students are pumped for Thanksgiving Break? Through a series of horror cliches, they end up being chased by the killer turkey, who goes on a murderous rampage. Point is, this story is flirting with the line between parody of horror movies and just gigantic amounts of suck.

2) The Acting - The acting in this film is completely devoid of human emotion. I understand that this is low budget, but with the way this movie worked, I could have expected the filmmaker to find random people off the street who could be more convincing than these people. Of course, part of it is due to the story, which totally contradicts itself when trying to establish emotional moments.

3) The Turkey - Now, I must mention that the Turkey can talk, and because of such, the turkey is the only thing this film has going for it, as it can be entertaining. The turkey makes a lot of puns, which I'm a fan of, and everything else is either an outrageous one-liner that will inspire laughs or an outrageous one-liner that a person completely deprived of wit wrote.

So, whether or not this film is a hilarious parody/homage to cheesy horror films or is a waste of 66 minutes written by a someone with the IQ of a gorilla, it depends on your sense of humor and how much you're willing to forgive. Personally, I'm going with the later. I give it more points than it deserves for some entertaining moments with the turkey and being funny because it's terrible.

I rate ThanksKilling a 3.6/10, placing it in the bottom 4% of all movies I've seen.