- Directed by Eli Roth
- Written by Jeff Rendell, Eli Roth
- Stars Patrick Dempsey, Ty Olsson, Gina Gershon, Lynne Griffin
- Run Time: 1 Hour, 46 Minutes
- Trailer: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KbU50SdL8zA
Spoiler-Free Judgment Zone
It starts out with a pretty awesome opening scene, setting things up. Then it’s a masked killer slasher who-is-doing-it kind of movie. The gore is top-notch, and there’s a large cast of potential victims and suspects to keep things interesting. It wasn’t the best, but it was pretty good.
Synopsis
We’re in Plymouth, Massachusetts on Thanksgiving. Sheriff Eric comes to see Amanda and Mitch for dinner. There are a number of people there for Thanksgiving dinner, and Mitch gets called in to manage at RightMart, which is having a Black Friday sale one day early. The crowd outside is getting crazy, with people riling each other up.
The teenage crowd is in the car, being obnoxious. They all stop at RightMart to get a new phone. They all gather around the insanely crowded parking lot and wait for the store to finally open. Jessica, Bobby, and the crew go in through the employee entrance since Jessica’s dad is Thomas, the owner of RightMart. When the crowd sees Bobby and the kids already inside, they go wild and stampede. One of the two guards runs for it.
It’s— retail carnage! People get trampled on, throats sliced, kicked, punched, and otherwise assaulted. The free waffle irons go fast! It’s a full-on riot. Amanda, Mitch’s wife, is killed by a shopping cart. There are at least two other fatalities. Bobby, the baseball pitcher, gets his arm destroyed.
Credits roll.
One year later, the video of the Thanksgiving Massacre taken by one of the teens is all over the Internet. We see newspaper clippings that say there were no arrests for the disaster. Mitch calls out the owner of RightMart, who only hired two security guards last year, and he blames him for all that.
The sheriff’s got a new deputy. At the diner, they’re giving away masks of the town founder, John Carver, a pilgrim-looking guy. Thomas complains that someone trashed a local landmark and stole a historic ax.
We cut to someone looking at the recorded video and focusing in on certain recognizable people who were misbehaving the night of the slaughter. The first of these is the lady who runs the town’s diner; she’s entertainingly cut in half by her dumpster.
The next morning, they find half of her the next day on RightMart’s “50% off” sign. It’s all on the security footage, but the guy is wearing a Carver mask, so they have no idea who it is. The sheriff questions Jessica about anything she might know about the people who were there that night.
Bobby’s back in town, and he says his arm might eventually be back to normal. Jessica says it was Kathleen, Thomas’s wife and her stepmother, who deleted the security cam footage. Jessica wants to see what’s on that footage.
Manny, the security guard who ran away from the crime scene last year, is up next. He’s stabbed with an electric knife and beheaded. The killer does stop to feed the dead guy’s cat before leaving. He poses Manny’s head with the upper half of the diner woman. He’s staging a Thanksgiving feast!
Everyone starts to suspect Ryan, who was also there that night. Lonnie and his girlfriend, who basically incited the original riot, are next.
The killer comes after Jessica after hours at the school. She gets away, and the sheriff questions her afterward. There’s a whole thing where Ryan and Bobby argue over Jessica.
The whole gang then decides to go to a party being put on for profit by a guy who’s old enough to know better. He also sells guns to teenagers, and Jessica and Scuba want one. They call Yulia, who has corn-cob handles stuck in her ears, as the killer torments her. She soon winds up on a rotary saw, which is quite a message.
Thomas decides that he’s going to close the RightMart store on Thanksgiving this year; it’s just all been too much violence. Kathleen is against the idea, but Thomas agrees with Jessica that they need to fight back.
They are, however, going to go ahead with the bug parade, and all the characters have a part to play in that. At the parade, there are dozens of people wearing Carver masks, and it freaks out Jessica.
Things go south very quickly from a direction they weren’t expecting. Very quickly. Someone in a clown costume sedates Thomas, Scuba, Kathleen, and Jessica.
Kathleen wakes up on a kitchen table, and the killer is there. He bastes and spices her. She briefly gets away and finds Ryan’s body and Gabby. He catches her quickly and puts her in the oven– a very big oven.
The police watch the killer’s livestream of his big Thanksgiving feast, with all his victims on display. They trace it, but there’s nothing there but a phone retransmitting a video– it’s a trick.
The killer unveils the turkey– a headless Kathleen. After the screams, he asks, “Is that any way to thank Kathleen? She’s been cooking all day!” He then bashes Evan to death with a meat tenderizer.
Jessica and Scuba untie themselves and make a run for it. Jessica runs and eventually spots Bobby and figures that it’s him. Luckily, the sheriff is there, and he shoots at Bobby offscreen. Bobby’s gone, but they find his phone, still logged into the Carver streaming account. The sheriff congratulates Jessica for being so brave, and she notices dirt on his boots and burrs on his pants from the wooded area he was chasing her through. She remembers what he said about noticing the small details, and now she realizes he’s the killer.
The sheriff locks the door and smiles. Yeah, it was him all along. He’s been using her for information this whole time. He was having an affair with Mitch’s wife, and she was pregnant with his child. When she died, he lost his family and his big chance to get out of this little town. It was about revenge.
Except… Jessica has been livestreaming his whole confession from Bobby’s phone that she got out of the evidence bag on the desk. Bobby breaks in, and they run away with the sheriff in pursuit. Jessica loads up a blunderbuss of all things and shoots the giant turkey float full of, apparently, explosive hydrogen.
The cops search every inch of the place, but they can’t find the sheriff’s body.
Commentary
It’s essentially a whodunnit with a ridiculous premise for an opening scene and a slasher format. The opening, in the store, is really good, but the rest of it is pretty standard slasher stuff. There are some pretty good one-liners and puns.
It was good. Nothing I’m going to make a holiday tradition out of, but it’s no turkey, either.