Blood Rage (1987)

Save your money for something good and enjoyable

Excellent, Without a doubt!!

A Masterpiece!

This is one of the few movies I've ever seen where the whole audience broke into spontaneous, loud applause a third of the way in.

Four years in the editing room! Why? Nonetheless, The slasher for me is still Blood Rage and the one that made me tolerate the genre enough to move onto other wonders like Nail Gun Massacre, Memorial Day Massacre, Switch Killer, A Night To Dismember, i could go on. You think slasher films like these only existed in Adult Swim cartoons, but here they are. And no parody compares. It is a pipe dream of mine to make a film as car crash reckless yet relentlessly entertaining as John Grissmer and co's seen to be believed effort. No campfire story crap here. No conceited effort at all to justify the main attraction bloodshed in an aesthetic sense. No fairytale nonsense. A sharp, sensual contrast between the exploitation angle of the production and the sincere attempt to craft a haunting, Marnie-esque psychological thriller. This could always be seen as a case of a meandering screenplay being picked up by an opportunistic producer seeking to capitalise on a current trend. Easy, if plebe standard answer to the question of why Blood Rage is. Psychotronic, or cult, or niche, or whatever, is never by design. A creator will never create this shade of appeal. Circumstance is the law in regards to this. As the theory goes and is still the best yet so far to explain the counter-culture, the true culture, that closest to nature. Conscience creates pop, instinct, what's in your blood, creates Blood Rage, a raw example of cinematic, capitalist art. The chance to make a real progressive difference (potentially launch southern fried gothic horror headlong into the 90's) compromised by what you've got to pay the piper (mould into a sub-genre that at the time was seen by the intelligentsia as lower than shot on video stag). This very familiar, very tiring conflict of interest is what lies at the heart of Blood Rage's appeal, enough so to warrant a truly definitive blu-ray release from Arrow Video. The relationship here between creator and patron ( the mass public in this case ((That never was for Blood Rage)) ) is not a tame and obedient exchange, but rather a lively and entertaining argument. We all know why this film was made, but the end product is a little more opaque. I haven't found an angle i'm content with. Grissmer's stately, atmospheric direction, Louise Lasser's performance, Ed French's fantastic FX, and just, all the 80's. The best and worst of the golden age slasher period is on display here. It's so baffling and yet entrancing to be given THIS precisely what you expected, but that's what Blood Rage does and why it is so re-watchable for me. Whereas most of it's mid-80's contemporaries either played it safe and excused gore for monotonous hide and seek (House on Sorority Row) or have cancerous fanbases murking up their charm (take a wild guess), Blood Rage, with a patchy production history aiding it, just cannot be pigeonholed. 60-70's psychotronic mania coupled with the hyper-reality of a culture awaiting angrier, more politically aware trends just on the horizon. Full circle almost what with the aforementioned Alice in Acidland types conning increasingly worldly moviegoers craving 'ahem' "liberating enlightenment" in the first place.The sense of something important about psychopathy being said combined with escapist sadism makes Blood Rage an anomaly. I haven't seen any film i could compare it to. I recommend Blood Rage as the best entry into the slasher film as it whether's your expectations perfectly for this on this surface formulaic, but on closer inspection, radical canon of films that was American exploitation's final cycle.

Two ten year old twins sneak away from their parents at a drive-in. One of the boys viciously slaughters a man and blames the other for the crime. The latter is sent to a facility for the criminally insane and ten years later he escapes and returns to the family fold while the evil twin sees this as an ideal opportunity to begin a mass killing spree.Blood Rage is one from the vast selection of slasher movies that came out in the golden period of the genre, the 80's. I was pretty surprised to learn that it was made in 1983 but actually sat on the shelf for four years before being released in '87. My surprise comes from the fact that I have seen a few slasher movies from this time-period and this to me was definitely one of the better ones! So lord only knows why it was deemed unreleasable until the late 80's, when the slasher craze had begun to wane. Anyhow, for what it's worth, this one was somewhat entertaining and I was never truthfully bored. It has a typical dumb story-line naturally but what can really be expected? More to the point it contains quite a commendably copious amount of OTT violence, including bloody slashings, a woman cut in half, someone getting a fork in the neck, while we also have hands and heads being lopped off. So, points allocated for effort I would say. It's also probably worth acknowledging too that Mark Soper does pretty well with the dual role of the weak and crazy twin brothers, I mean we're not talking Jeremy Irons in Dead Ringers (1988) levels of thespian emoting but he did well enough with what he was given I thought. All-in-all, this is not a bad effort at all for this kind of thing.

"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.

A man (Mark Soper) is blamed for murders actually committed by his evil twin (also Mark Soper).This film is written by Bruce Rubin, the Oscar-winning creator of "Ghost" and "Jacob's Ladder", and stars Woody Allen's ex-wife Louise Lasser. Even Ted Raimi makes a small cameo towards the beginning.This film, part of the 1980s slasher cycle, is awfully bloody and gory, but seems to be largely forgotten. It has not seen a proper release since the 1987 Prism Entertainment VHS, and now has to be viewed on CrypticTV or YouTube in less than great quality.Who owns the rights? At this point, if a negative is available, it should be relatively cheap, and would be a solid investment for Scream Factory or a similar distributor.