This slasher flick concerns a stampede at a Black Friday sale, a familiar image for anyone who has visited a Westfield or read the short story I wrote 3 years ago. I’m not saying Eli Roth ripped me off. That is for other people to say.

Thanksgiving actually originates from one of the fake trailers in Quentin Tarantino and Robert Rodriguez’s 2007 exploitation tribute Grindhouse, three of which have now been turned into feature films. And apart from tacking on the Black Friday intro, the movie adds nothing to the trailer except length, trundling past the 100-minute mark like a shopping trolley overloaded with rotting fruit and cheap DVDs.

A tribute to holiday horror (My Bloody Valentine, Love Actually etc), Thanksgiving sticks to the seasonal slasher script, where a masked killer visits revenge on those responsible for the town’s deadly health and safety violations. But the stock characters and long-expired premise prove about as entertaining as when they introduced self-service checkouts; fun for the first five minutes before quickly becoming another inevitability, a noisy reminder of our slow march to the grave.

Roth serves up a whodunnit without a plot and a comedy without any jokes, dry as a bone and dull from decades of overuse. Even the kills, the meat and potatoes of the genre, are largely forgettable and lazily paired with the same kiss-off line (“There will be no leftovers”) used more than once. The only real laughs come at the expense of the killer’s Pilgrim costume, which is presumably meant to be scary but just looks like William Shakespeare has risen from the dead to take revenge for the mutilation of the English language. There’s an idea. I hope Eli Roth is taking notes.