When excess steam from a newly built cabin’s steam room resurrects a centuries old cannibalistic priest on Thanksgiving under the floorboards, a father (Tom) and his family find they have an unwanted guest for dinner. I’m being slightly flippant with that synopsis but I genuinely applaud the writer here – rather than force a convoluted reason to get the movie out of act one, he’s just like, fuck it, steam can bring the dead back to life. It’s a kind of nonsense that I can one hundred percent get behind, we know the priest has to come back to life somehow, why get too deep with it?
At first glance, The Priest – Thanksgiving Massacre appeared to be an Asylum-style knock off of Eli Roth’s fun 2023 slasher, Thanksgiving. The poster art is of the squint-and-you-could-confuse-the-two variety, both flaunting a pilgrim styled slasher front and centre. The Priest is definitely its own thing however with a small cast, a supernatural killer and the story of an estranged family that maybe takes itself a bit too seriously given the antics that ensue.
Tom has left his wife (and by proxy, his two grown children, Andi and Noah) and, in an attempt to heal wounds, has invited the family for Thanksgiving dinner at a cabin he is staying at with his new beau, Sara. The cabin is built on the old site of Reverend Fuller’s cabin, a man who killed himself centuries prior as penance for a foray into murder and cannibalism. The aforementioned steam brings the Fuller back to life and then nothing much happens. The film weirdly decides to keep Fuller in the crawlspace of the cabin for the entire movie and, weirder still, contrives ways to get the characters to go join him under the floor. It’s an extremely odd creative decision and makes Fuller the easiest slasher in movie history to survive – unless you happen to enjoy creeping about underneath floorboards.
I don’t know what to think about this one – it feels like the first draft went into production here. For all the first half chat between the broken family and hopes of reconnection, this isn’t paid off at the film’s denouement. And Fuller is as one-note as they come, his only words being a single sentence that he repeats before dispatching anyone. There’s no attempt to fill out the character at all and no-one is even aware he’s under the cabin until the third act.
Another problem with the Fuller character is that we only ever see him in the seconds before he swings his scythe. His lack of presence and the matter-of-fact way these scenes are shot contribute to a lack of scares. There’s zero tension to these moments despite a dark crawlspace being fertile ground for drawing suspense. And the kills don’t stand out either, with minimal gore and FX utilised. It just makes you wonder what the film was trying to achieve.
Despite that, I found the first and second kills surprising as far as order of cast goes and it did feel like the film was going to veer in a more interesting direction than a generic slasher, sadly it just didn’t go the whole way. And when the credits rolled, I was more confused than frustrated. It’s not a great film but it’s an intriguing one for how bizarre some of the turns it takes are. It’s one that I wouldn’t recommend based on the merits of the film but possibly would if you wanted to watch something that makes some wild choices and leaves you genuinely wondering what you just watched. But fair play to it, it’s a film I’ll remember which can’t be said for a lot of by-the-numbers stuff that’s out there.
