{"id":4316,"date":"2024-10-05T17:55:22","date_gmt":"2024-10-05T17:55:22","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/movieguy247.com\/MovieGuy\/?p=4316"},"modified":"2024-10-12T22:03:50","modified_gmt":"2024-10-12T22:03:50","slug":"blood-rage","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/movieguy247.com\/MovieGuy\/2024\/10\/05\/blood-rage\/","title":{"rendered":"Blood Rage"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"Blood Rage <\/strong>(1987)\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Film Concept Group\/Horror\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 RT: 82 minutes\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Rated R (gory slasher violence, language, nudity, sexual content, drug use)\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Director: John Grissmer\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Screenplay: Bruce Rubin (as \u201cRichard Lamden\u201d)\u00a0\u00a0 Music: Richard Einhorn\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Cinematography: Richard E. Brooks\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Release date: March 29, 1987 (US)\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Cast: Louise Lasser, Mark Soper, Julie Gordon, Jayne Bentzen, Marianne Kanter, James Farrel, Chad Montgomery, Lisa Randall, William Fuller, Douglas Weiser, Gerry Lou, Ed French, Dana Drescher, Ted Raimi.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Box Office: N\/A\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Body Count: 11<\/p>\n

Rating<\/strong>: *** \u00bd<\/p>\n

\u00a0Let\u2019s talk about holiday-themed slasher flicks. Most of the major holidays are represented in this genre- New Year\u2019s Eve (New Year\u2019s Evil), Valentine\u2019s Day (My Bloody Valentine), April Fools\u2019 Day (April Fools\u2019 Day-1986), Mother\u2019s Day (Mother\u2019s Day-1980), American Independence Day (Uncle Sam), Halloween (duh!) and Christmas (Silent Night, Deadly Night). It could even be argued that Leprechaun is a St. Patrick\u2019s Day movie. What about Thanksgiving? For years, I asked that question. The closest I ever came to finding one was Eli Roth\u2019s faux trailer for Thanksgiving in 2007\u2019s Grindhouse. I didn\u2019t know that a Turkey Day slasher flick already existed. Blood Rage<\/strong> has been around for more than 30 years and I had no idea. And I call myself Movie Guy 24\/7?<\/p>\n

\u00a0Made in \u201983 but not released until four years later, Blood Rage<\/strong>– aka Nightmare at Shadow Woods and Slasher (the title that appears in the credits on the Blu-Ray)- played at only a handful theaters in a heavily-edited cut that truncated the gory scenes, the movie\u2019s main raison d\u2019etre<\/em>. The version seen on the Arrow Blu-Ray is the complete movie with all the gory scenes intact. You can color me blood red impressed. Ed French, who also co-stars, does an amazing job with an obviously limited budget. To that end, Blood Rage<\/strong> is much better than one would expect from a cheap horror flick especially one that managed to stay under Movie Guy\u2019s radar for more than three decades.<\/p>\n

\u00a0The 1974-set prologue has identical twin brothers Todd and Terry at a drive-in movie with their promiscuous mother Maddy (Lasser, Mary Hartman, Mary Hartman) and her date. They sneak out of the car and go exploring. Terry spies on a couple having sex before taking a hatchet to the guy\u2019s head. He then frames his brother for murder causing him to be committed to a mental institution. Ten years later, Todd comes out of his catatonic state and realizes he doesn\u2019t belong in an asylum. Later at Thanksgiving dinner, Maddy gets a call informing her that Todd has escaped and is likely headed home. While she has a booze-induced emotional meltdown, Terry casually resumes his murderous ways in order to set Todd up again and have him sent away for good. Todd\u2019s surprise return home couldn\u2019t have happened at a more convenient time; it\u2019ll provide Terry with a fall guy when he kills his mother\u2019s fiancee, building manager Brad (Fuller, Porky\u2019s II: The Next Day).<\/p>\n

\u00a0Why don\u2019t we get right to what you\u2019re all dying to know? Let\u2019s talk about the kill scenes. THEY ROCK! A guy gets it with a hatchet to the head. One has his hand chopped off. It\u2019s seen twitching while still holding a beer can. A woman is cut in half. A severed head is seen hanging by an electrical cord. A head splits open. Somebody meets their end via a carving fork to the neck. People are stabbed, slashed and hacked to death. All of it is accompanied by generous amounts of fake blood and lots of S&S (spurt and splatter). Blood Rage<\/strong> definitely lives up to its name.<\/p>\n

\u00a0Director John Grissmer (Scalpel) injects a healthy dose of humor into Blood Rage<\/strong> starting with Lasser\u2019s campy performance as the increasingly unstable mother reduced to pleading with a telephone operator to help her find her MIA fiancee. It\u2019s not every actress who can pull off a scene like the one where she sits on the kitchen floor shoving handfuls of leftovers into her mouth.\u00a0 Lasser brings an OTT seriousness to a role that fits in perfectly with the insanity going on around her. Mark Soper, who also played the unfortunate lover in The World According to Garp, plays the dual roles of Terry and Todd. Although his line readings are inconsistent, he does a good job creating different personalities for each twin. He\u2019s equally convincing playing awkward and innocuous (Todd) as he is personable and homicidal (Terry). He also gets the movie\u2019s trademark line: \u201cThat\u2019s not cranberry sauce.\u201d LOL! It\u2019s a good one, no?<\/p>\n

Blood Rage <\/strong>wouldn\u2019t be a true slasher movie without sex, nudity and cliched characters- e.g. obvious final girl, slutty girl, frat boy jocks, concerned psychiatrist, etc. Nobody is particularly intelligent; it\u2019s their only excuse for putting themselves in dangerous, deadly situations time and time again. Their performances are on the lower end of the spectrum but that\u2019s to be expected. Things are helped by Grissmer\u2019s peppy directing and a witty script by Bruce Rubin (NOT the one that wrote Ghost). They wisely take a tongue-in-cheek approach to the material without undermining the story. You could even say Blood Rage<\/strong> is their love letter to the slasher genre. It\u2019s a lot of good bloody fun. The best thing is I now have a new Thanksgiving tradition. HOWEVER, I\u2019m still waiting for some ambitious filmmaker to tackle Arbor Day. Any takers?\"\"<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Blood Rage (1987)\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Film Concept Group\/Horror\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 RT: 82 minutes\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Rated R (gory slasher violence, language, nudity, sexual content, drug use)\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Director: John Grissmer\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Screenplay: Bruce Rubin (as \u201cRichard Lamden\u201d)\u00a0\u00a0 Music: Richard Einhorn\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Cinematography: Richard E. Brooks\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Release date: March 29, 1987 (US)\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Cast: Louise Lasser, Mark Soper, Julie Gordon, Jayne Bentzen, Marianne Kanter, James Farrel, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":4572,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"nf_dc_page":"","_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[8],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-4316","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-scary-gory-wild-i-love-it"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/movieguy247.com\/MovieGuy\/wp-content\/uploads\/2024\/10\/Blood-Rage-PIC.jpg?fit=620%2C348&ssl=1","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/movieguy247.com\/MovieGuy\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4316","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/movieguy247.com\/MovieGuy\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/movieguy247.com\/MovieGuy\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/movieguy247.com\/MovieGuy\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/movieguy247.com\/MovieGuy\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4316"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/movieguy247.com\/MovieGuy\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4316\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4573,"href":"https:\/\/movieguy247.com\/MovieGuy\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4316\/revisions\/4573"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/movieguy247.com\/MovieGuy\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/4572"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/movieguy247.com\/MovieGuy\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4316"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/movieguy247.com\/MovieGuy\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4316"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/movieguy247.com\/MovieGuy\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4316"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}