Blood Rage (1987)

Why so much hype?

Such a frustrating disappointment

Bad Acting and worse Bad Screenplay

One of the most extraordinary films you will see this year. Take that as you want.

"Blood Rage" begins with two twin adolescent boys at a drive-in with their mother on a date; the two slink off, and one of them murders a man in his car. Ten years later, the psycho twin is incarcerated in a mental institution. On Thanksgiving, the good twin and his mother go to visit, but find he has escaped. He returns to the woodsy community where his mother lives and begins carving up residents like turkeys.Let's face it—evil twins are to horror films what pumpkin pie is to Thanksgiving. It just works. "Blood Rage," a little-known slasher filmed in the early 1980s, knows this, and takes full advantage of the trope. The film fell into obscurity and wasn't even released theatrically until 1987; it made it to small theaters and B-movie drive-ins, and all but disappeared. What's interesting is that the film actually offers all of the hallmarks that genre fans love about these films: a holiday setting, corny one-liners, young adults copulating, and some impressive special effects set to a pounding synth score. You'd think the film would have at least garnered a cult following, but the limited availability of it until Arrow Video's 2015 release prevented it from ever really catching on.The film is admittedly a mess in areas; some of the performances are hammy and the dialogue contrived, while the pacing is certainly bizarre at times, but for a low-budget B slasher film, these are typically taken for granted, and if anything are part of the charm. Louise Lasser spends the majority of the film boozed out screaming into a telephone and eating Thanksgiving leftovers on her kitchen floor, while her good twin boy searches ruthlessly for his unhinged brother. Bodies start piling up, and elaborate gore effects take precedent over plot development at times. The script overall is vaguely sketched and doesn't completely feel rounded out, and the film does suffer from a frankly nonthreatening villain, but the final act is tongue-in-cheek and well handled.Overall, the film is a nice slice of eighties slasher pie that somehow got left behind. It's not a great film by any means, but it's also not a bad one when pitted against the genre standards. The ending is rather grim, and Lasser's turn as the mentally destroyed mother is hammy, Oedipal, and at times poignant. In many ways, the film reminded me of "Butcher, Baker, Nightmare Maker," another eighties slasher that never really caught on, in both tone and thematics. "Blood Rage" is most definitely worth a look for genre fans, and is a hokey, gory effort if nothing else. 6/10.

Variously known as Blood Rage (home video version), Slasher (original title card), and Nightmare at Shadow Woods (theatrical cut), this ropey hack-'em-up took four years to get a US release after having been filmed in 1983. It was hardly worth the wait but there's some fun to be had in its maniac twins setup.To be fair, only one of the twins is actually maniacal. When they were kids, Terry butchered a mid-coitus stranger and blamed it on Todd. 10 years later, Todd escapes from his psychiatric unit, apparently on the rampage. But in reality it's just Terry again, all grown up and getting jealous and enraged about his mom's engagement. Someone is slaughtering folks in the neighbourhood, and now Terry has the perfect alibi.Harking from a time when the mentally ill were definitely perpetrators rather than victims, here we have one of those slasher pictures where people are too busy going off into the woods alone to call the police and let them know a murderer is on the rampage.There's some cracking gore, although the anxious editing in the theatrical cut means we often get only a glimpse before cutting away to some half-assed Freudian exchange or another teenager soaping in the shower. Stick with the so-called "hard" version (included in the Arrow Video boxset I saw) for the real deal.While performances are consistently terrible, Mark Soper as the twins possesses an appropriately unsettling glare, and one-time Woody Allen fave Louise Lasser has an absolute ball as the cripplingly neurotic, boozing mother.As a work of filmcraft it's a notch above Troma, but sadly not funny, well-made, or scary enough to land itself a place in a camp Halloween horror medley.Possibly the film's greatest pull is the period. Locked in time by Richard Einhorn's elaborate synth score, the voluminous hair and bad sportswear are virtually sufficient in themselves to carry us through the 80-odd minutes.

Being a sucker for old posters and VHS-covers, I have to start by stating that the cover image displayed here on the website does not correspond with the actual movie. The image is that of another movie named "Blood Rage", although that one is a misogynic exploitation/thriller from the year 1979 and directed by Joseph Zito; creator of "The Prowler and "Friday the 13th The Final Chapter". If you're interested, the most frequently seen poster for this "Blood Rage" features a Rambo knife with the reflection of a terrified and screaming woman in it. But anyways, on with the actual review… This obscure and initially shelved (between 1983 and 1987) '80s slasher may have an incredibly dumb storyline and may feature some of the most absurd plot-twists in cinematic history, but it's inarguably entertaining and delivers just what the target audience for this type of movies craves the most: extreme gore and gratuitous nudity! With sickening murder sequences and reasonably well-crafted make-up effects like these, I'm actually even surprised that the film wasn't released in 1983, as there definitely must have been a market for it. Who cares if the script is retarded when blooded machetes are fiercely swinging and chopped off heads are joyously rolling, right? Somewhere in the seventies, during a night out at the drive-in with their mother and her latest lover, the twin brothers Todd and Terry decide to go for a little walk between the cars and look at couples having sex. For no apparent reason, Terry hacks up a guy's face and then quickly puts the ax in the hands of his brother who is just standing there looking stupid. Todd spends the next ten years in a mental asylum (although his mother refers to it as a "special school"), until he suddenly decides on Thanksgiving Day that it is time to escape and tell the world that he's innocent. When Terry learns that his brother is loose, he starts butchering the entire neighborhood in order to uphold the idea that Todd is a maniac. So, before you ask: yes, we are supposed to believe that Todd never bothered to deny that he was the killer for ten long years, or that Terry is perfectly able to control his maniacal tendencies the entire time but then slaughters all his friends and relatives without any moral constraints. The film also never undertakes any attempts to build up suspense or mystery, what with the identity of the killer revealed straight from the beginning and it doesn't feature that typical "which one of the twin brother is this?" sub plot. Instead, there are a lot of dumb dialogs and quotes, for example Terry who keeps repeating "it's not cranberry sauce" whenever there's blood on his shirt, and an incredibly over- the-top hysterical performance of Louise Lasser. The body count is high and the murders are nice & nasty, with plenty of machete action and severed body parts flying around everywhere. Director John Grissmer didn't do a lot of film work apart from this one. He made the good but obscure and underrated plastic surgery thriller "Scalpel" (a.k.a. "False Face") and wrote the early 70s psycho- thriller "The House that Cried Murder". By the way, the latter is playing at the drive-in theater during the opening sequence of "Blood Rage".

BLOOD RAGE a.k.a. NIGHTMARE AT SHADOW WOODS is a decent little slasher flick that is surprisingly underrated. It's about two young brothers who witness a couple making love in the backseat of their car while watching a movie at a drive-in. Terry, one of the brothers murders the guy and blames it on his twin brother, Todd. Todd is sent away to a mental institution, while Terry enjoys his freedom.15 years later, Todd escapes the mental institution and a series of murders begin plaguing the apartment complex where Terry and his mother now live with her fiancée. But is it Todd or Terry who is committing the murders. Don't worry, the filmmakers do not hold back the identity and you get to see who is doing the killing the entire time. I was quite surprised and pleased with how gory and brutal the murders were. We have a woman who gets cut in half with a machete, a steak fork that gets shoved in a young teenager's throat, a severed hand, a machete to the face and a decapitation, among many others. The gore was well-handled and brutal. The acting is typical 80s slasher with uneven performances. The ending is a bit out there.The only complaint that I have is the motive of the killer. It's never really explained. Maybe hinted at, but not completely explained. BLOOD RAGE has become extremely rare to obtain under it's video release from Prism Entertainment. However, there is a bargain bin DVD that I'm sure you can find on amazon or ebay under its original title, NIGHTMARE AT SHADOW WOODS. Ever slasher fan definitely needs to check it out. It may not be as well known as MY BLOODY VALENTINE, THE BURNING, THE PROWLER, or MADMAN but it's still worthy of recognition. It's woefully underrated.