However, sometimes I surprise myself, and I ended up watching it this past Thursday night.
(At least it was on a Thursday, if we're looking for themes -- though that was unintentional.)
And as I was watching, I realized there was something familiar about it.
No, it wasn't that I had seen an abbreviated version of it back when I saw Grindhouse, back when Planet Terror and Death Proof were considered to be one movie, the two halves separated by fake trailers. One of which was Machete, which has already been made into a movie (a movie that got a sequel), and one of which was Eli Roth's initial pass at Thanksgiving. Without watching that fake trailer again, I don't know if his fake trailer had anything to do with the direction Roth ultimately decided to go with his movie.
Rather, it was familiar because I have seen other movies set in a small Massachusetts town that's famous for being associated with a particular holiday.
That's right, Plymouth is the setting for Thanksgiving, as it contains Plymouth Rock, the location the Mayflower landed in 1620, disgorging pilgrims everywhere and ultimately destroying the future for Native Americans. Appropriately, it is a celebrated with all sorts of Thanksgiving-related hoopla, at least according to this movie. (I didn't check to see if the real Plymouth has a Thanksgiving parade and is lousy with oversized turkeys and people dressed as pilgrims, but it is easy to imagine that they do and are.)
The commercialization and celebration of Thanksgiving in Plymouth, whether it is real or imagined, gives it something in common with nearby Salem, which has the same sort of relationship with Halloween.
As you would know if you have visited -- or if you have watched movies like Hocus Pocus and its sequel, or The Lords of Salem -- Salem, Massachusetts is all about selling the occult to tourists. There is a regionally famous witch trials museum that has a sort of "show" about the trials that uses light animatronics, and every second shop will sell you potions or Harry Potter stuff. At Halloween, this town goes crazy.
The fact that Massachusetts would have two towns that are closely associated with major holidays that fall during the second half of the year seems rather unlikely, and is nothing I had ever thought of before. It's not just that the towns are closely associated with the holiday, but rather, that no other town -- in the entire U.S. -- has more of a claim to either of these holidays than these two towns have.
They're only about 60 miles apart from each other, at that.
Burying the lede here -- about halfway between these two towns is the town where I grew up, Lexington, which makes it all the more interesting for me personally.
The funny thing is, while I know where Salem is because I've been there twice in the past 15 years, I actually had to look on a map just now to remind myself that Plymouth was actually south of Lexington, not north. Some Massachussetsan I am. (I think it should "Massachuten," but that does not appear to mean anything.)
Guess it's been a while since I've been there, or maybe it's just an indication of which of these two holidays I like more. I can tell you that while my Australian wife is always interested in stopping in Salem -- my not-yet-14-year-old son has been there twice, and we don't even live in that country -- she has never expressed any interest in seeing where the pilgrims landed, directly or indirectly leading to centuries of European imperialism and mass murder on that continent.
As for the movie, a few inventive Thanksgiving-themed kills aside, I found it to be a fairly generic slasher flick where a serial killer wears a mask, and it is ultimately the last person you think it's going to be. Too bad Roth couldn't lean more into the silliness of the opening Black Friday riot at a big box store in which people are trampled to death in outrageously bloody ways. Or better still, have given us the grindhouse version of a serial killer movie set in the 17th century -- like, historically ambitious and deeply pulpy, all at once.
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