Rotten Cranberry: ThanXgiving (2006)

ThanXgiving (2006)

Rating: 0

Starring: Ari Lehman, Suki Peters and Jaxon Stanford

...The flying fuck did I just watch here?

I heard about ThanXgiving all the way back at 2008 and I recall wanting to see it very badly then, thinking it's a rarity as it has barely anything about it online. Welp, I finally have my chance recently thanks to some shady video sharing site and I think I now understand why this shit has little to none online presence and how that's for the better.

As far as I can tell, the "story" of ThanXgiving is about a group of filmmakers going into the woods around the Traunton Riverbend camp grounds to shoot a horror movie, but the production is as problematic as this film's very existence as everybody seems to have some beef with one another and one of them even bled to death during the project when his leg got caught on some spikes and had to be amputated because...

Any way, filming continues (?!) and during an evening around a campfire, a local played by Ari Lehman (Yeah, Friday The 13th (1980)'s "lil' Jason Voorhees" Ari Lehman. I'm just as surprised as you are) joins the crew and tells them that a lot of people have been disappearing into these woods and many suspect it's the work of a deranged group of killers. And sure enough, our troubled filmmakers soon encounter a family of hillbillies who are hospitable at first until, that is, all the weird shit starts happening and everybody is getting in touch with their murderous side.

Mixing documentary and standard filming presentation with an obnoxiously surreal amount of editing effects, horrendous audio quality and truculently grained picture format, ThanXgiving is probably one of the hardest horror movie to sit through for the dumb reason that it's nearly incomprehensible as a whole. Its direction feels a lot like just random horror shit happening left and right, with a sense of structure that's one random home invasion footage away from falling atop the "Am-I-on-acid-right-now?" tree and hitting every branch on the way down. Nobody here acts normal too, so it's hard to figure out which crap is happening for real and which is just footage from the damn movie the characters are supposed to be filming, thus further adding to the overall aggressively confusing nature of the film.

It's disappointing, really, as I can tell this should have been a very easy plot to follow with a generous helping of blood and gore to boot. Perhaps the people behind this film wanted to make something more than just another backwoods killer-on-the-loose type and if that is the case, I wholly respect that, but the level of ineptitude done in this movie is just too much that it ain't even hilarious. In fact, it makes me mad! So MAD that someone out there thought this indecipherable garbage is good enough to be called a movie! Like, dude, ThanksKilling (2008) is more intelligible compared to this and that movie is a slasher with fucking killer turkey! Killer! Turkey!  

All in all, I'm thankful this Thanksgiving that I'm able to muster enough brain power to still write this review after the blow ThanXgiving did to my brain. Heed my warning, do not give this travesty a time of your day. Don't. Just don't.

Bodycount:

1 male had his chest flayed open

1 female had her throat crushed with a tree branch

1 male had his leg amputated with a machete, bled to death

1 male brained to death with a hammer (film within a film)

1 female ran neck-first through a line of barbwire, presumably killed

1 female seen dead in a lake

1 female hacked to death (film within a film)

1 male dismembered with knives 

1 male knifed in the head, disemboweled

1 female had her throat cut with a sickle

1 male had his throat cut with a sickle while being drowned

1 male falls into a lake and gets electrocuted with live cables

1 female had her neck crushed

1 male strangled with a line of barbwire

1 female seen hanging dead, gutted

1 male decapitated with an axe

1 male dismembered with knives

Total: 17