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Director: John Grissmer
Screenplay: Bruce Rubin
Cast: Louise Lasser (as Maddy);
Mark Soper (as Todd/Terry); Julie Gordon (as Karen); Jayne Bentzen (as Julie);
Marianne Kanter (as Dr. Berman)
A Night of a Thousand Horror (Movies) #72
Blood Rage is an exceptionally dull slasher. At this point it's a crapshoot
which actually stand out of interest for me, but like in a lot of cases the
initial premise is interest. Despite the fact that it doesn't try in the
slightest as an eighties film to do an accurate depiction of the seventies in
the prologue, it starts well enough with a single mother (Louise Lasser) in the car with her boyfriend and her twin sons Todd
and Terry (both played by Mark Soper)
at a drive-in theatre. One son, as the twin trope in horror films usually are,
is evil killing a random patron in another car and incriminating the brother. Years
later, the evil son is living with their mother about to celebrate Thanksgiving
only for the innocent brother to have broken out of the mental institution he's
been locked in and for a body count to begin.
And soon after that prologue the
film suddenly changes pace to a crawl. Uninteresting characters cannot help as,
when news of his brother escaping out into the public is known, the evil one
decides to carve up the friends he's pretended to like in a random moment where
his sociopathic tendencies weren't kept hidden, proceeding to grab a random set
of various weapons and go on a spree with little dramatic tension. This means
many bog standard moments of the killer cutting through people one-by-one
whilst frequently making the same comment over and over that blood isn't like
cranberry sauce, even going as far as lick the blood to prove this theory.
Baring how this is probably what
the eighties was probably like for most people, large hair but with warm wooden
panel decor for homes rather than pastel and neon colours, it's only really the
gore that stands out in the stalk and slash scenes. It's certainly memorable
from special effects artist Ed French - severed hand clutching a beer can,
someone being bisected from the waist sidewards - but it's no longer appealing
by itself after seeing so many gore horror movies, to the point the
desensitisation is from the point that merely having it isn't enough of
interest, the same you can say for the brief moments of nudity as without
anything else to bolster it, it's an empty thrill with little else. In terms of
Thanksgiving slasher films, the more shambolic Home Sweet Home (1981) with its giggling, PCP addicted hulk killer
and an annoying pest with a backpack guitar amp wearing mime makeup is far more
compelling than a young girl wandering around in the dark looking for her lost
cat or a good twin who looks literally damp as well as figuratively when he
appears.
The only exception within the
film that stands out is Lasser. Her
performance cannot salvage Blood Rage in
the slightest, but she's compelling in her own scenes, a character visibly
affected mentally by all that's happened and lives in her own world. Some of
the performance may come off as unintentionally funny, vacuuming while drinking
from a bottle of wine, or chewing the scenery, calling random telephone
operators trying to find her boyfriend's line as she becomes more and more histrionic,
but that flamboyant and almost ridiculous portrayal is still the sole emotional
connection you attach to the film. Her denial of which of her sons is the
guilty one, alongside the bleak ending for her character, does redeem the film even
if the rest of Blood Rage is not
that interesting.
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