Yesterday I found what I think is the only public copy of Thanxgiving, featuring Ari Lehman, an extremely obscure Thanksgiving-themed slasher film. Enjoy.

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• My girlfriend informed me of a series of slasher films called Thankskilling, which are about a turkey monster that murders people. There’s a musical, the movies go in sequence straight from the first to 3 with no second one ever actually having been made, all normal low-budget wink-and-grin horror stuff that I’m excited to watch. That isn’t what I’m here to post about.

  In the course of reading up on Thankskilling I began exploring other Thanksgiving-themed horror films. Not as underrepresented a theme as you might think, and some of them I’d actually heard of without realizing that they were Thanksgiving movies. (We’re going to check out Blood Rage soon!) There was one film that I saw on several lists that jumped out at me, though, and that was Thanxgiving.

  Thanxgiving is…hm. If you go to the Wikipedia page for Thanksgiving movies and explore the horror section, you’ll note that it’s one of two in the sub-list without its own page. Again, not unheard of for obscure genre movies…except that Ari Lehman, who portrayed Jason Voorhees in the original Friday the 13th, is in it! What the hell?

  If you bludgeon a search engine into giving you information on the film instead of repeatedly trying to correct its obnoxiously-spelled title you can find mention of it on the official Friday the 13th blog. You can see Thanxgiving discussed by some Twitter people, who seem to have been trying to find a way to watch this thing for a while now, grumbling that it is not only absent from streaming services but also has seemingly never been listed in a physical form on the likes of eBay. You can find a tiny smattering of reviews, some of which mention that this was screened in Chicago in (if I am remembering correctly) late 2007. With some work you can find that a director’s cut subtitled “Rebirth” was released, somehow, in some form, in 2010. And…that’s about it.

  I don’t know how or why this thing fell through the cracks to the extent that it did. I haven’t watched it yet so I don’t even know if it’s any good. (It is almost certainly not, but that’s not really why I did this or even why I like this type of movie.) Finding this YouTube post took me, a huge weird loser, about 45 minutes of digging around and finding a subtitle, Fresh Cut, on what I think was an Eastern European movie message board. That subtitle is mentioned nowhere on the IMDB page but it was the final piece I needed to dredge this son of a bitch up.

  I am thinking, based on the fact that at the time of this post that it has 352 views in four years, that it is effectively unfindable. As this might be the only public extant copy of this thing I figured I should link it here for other people to see. (If you’re a Plex sort or into digital archiving, it might be worth making a copy, because who knows how long this will stay up?) Again: is it bad? Very probably. You haven’t seen it, though. I’m very, very sure of that.

  November 18, 2022 at 3:52 pm

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