Davenpoe leads us in…

Please join hands and bow your heads for the blessing.

Dear Heavenly Father,

We thank you for this day, a day when we can all be together to marvel at your works and the bounty you’ve set before us.  We are humbled by this feast and we ask that it be a blessing to our bodies as we partake of it together.

But above all, oh Lord, we, like so many other families gather together around dinner tables this Thanksgiving Day, thank you for Mr. Sam Raimi; a man who, in this world of imitators, hacks and fast-food cinema, is a true auteur, whose influence can be felt in whatever project he touches, whether directing, writing or producing.

We thank you for his roots, working in shared editing rooms with the Coen Brothers, while taking his homemade horror flick “Evil Dead” from theatre to theatre by hand all the while earning the cult classic status it still enjoys today.

We give thanks for the genius that is “Evil Dead 2: Dead by Dawn” and “Army of Darkness”, films that taught us that a chainsaw, a shotgun and a high school physics textbook are all the tools one needs to defeat the denizens of the damned.  We especially give thanks for the “Medieval Dead” director’s cut which gives us a glimpse at Ash’s fate as the last man on earth.  We love the extra drop of sleep potion gag, oh Lord, as it remains a classic to this day.

We are grateful for his succulent side dishes, “Hercules: The Legendary Journeys” and “Xena: Warrior Princess.”  And we are even grateful for the vegetarian lasagna-like offerings of “Jack of All Trades”, “M.A.N.T.I.S.” and “Cleopatra 2020.”  We realize that although no one seems to enjoys those dishes, they were still made with love.

We thank thee for appetizers “Darkman” and the genre-bending western “The Quick and the Dead.”

And finally, Lord, we thank you for “Spider-Man,” my all-time favorite super hero brought to life on the big screen in a way that not only honors the source material, but improves upon it – we’re lookin’ at you, organic web shooters.  We also thank you for “Spider-Man 2”, one of the undisputed greatest comic book movies of all time.

To hell with “Spider-Man 3.”

Heavenly Father, I could go on and on about all the wonder, style, laughs, scares and iconography Mr. Raimi has brought into our lives, but people are hungry and I’m starting to get the stink-eye from my nephew Darrion as well as my pregnant wife who is impatiently waiting to eat for two.  So I’ll just wrap this up by paraphrasing a line of dialogue written by the man himself, which I think, summarizes nicely how this quirky, Hollywood outsider became one of the most beloved creative minds of a generation:

“Sure, I coulda been king.  But in my own way, I AM king.  Hail to the king, baby.”

Amen.

Oh, and please bless his weird brother Ted.

Amen.