Three Films Make A Post: There will be no leftovers.

Thanksgiving (2023): This is probably Eli Roth’s best horror film – I haven’t seen his kids movies, so I can’t speak to that very different part of the man’s career. But then, this really isn’t saying much, given the things he has inflicted on us, and consequently, Thanksgiving is not much of a movie. It really, really wants to be a knowing modern version of the nastiest kind of grindhouse slasher, but apart from the misanthropy, it never gets at the specific charms of these films. And the “knowing” part mostly consists of the kind of jokes Roth finds clever, and which thusly isn’t.

Otherwise, this is just a boring mediocrity lacking in suspense, mood, characters, or even enough cleverness to understand that this specific filmmaker simply doesn’t have the abilities to make a decent whodunnit slasher.

There’s Something in the Barn (2023): The astonishing thing about Magnus Martens’s horror comedy is how by the numbers and utterly predictable in every detail it is despite concerning the Christmas fight between an American family and Norwegian barn elves, which is not something I’d call by the numbers or ordinary.

There’s not a single plot point, nor development, not a single damn joke that isn’t so obvious you’ll make it yourself a second before the movie gets around to it. It’s mind-boggling how obvious this thing truly is in every aspect of its script, and truly astonishing that nobody involved in the production seems to have had a single even half-original idea once the barn elves were scribbled onto a napkin. This makes Roth’s film look like a work of deep creativity and intelligence, which it isn’t.

Death Forest aka Desu foresuto kyoufu no mori (2014): So it is left to this unassuming little Japanese movie to save this triple post. Not by being terribly original either – though it certainly beats the other two movies by the sheer power of possibly having had at least an hour or two of thought invested in it, and by not hiding behind the “comedy” label. The characters are cardboard, the structure pretty old hat, but then, there’s really not much you can squeeze into an hour of runtime. What makes Death Forest and its tale of various characters stumbling through a, wait for it, deadly spooky forest, fun are some pleasantly creepy and disturbing monsters that carry the genuine weirdness of the dark side of much of Japanese folklore. Which is more than enough for a direct-to-home-video movie based on a web game.

There aren’t too many movies whose characters find their end getting their upper bodies chomped off by a creepy, cheaply digital, flying head, at least.