Ten years after director John Grissmer’s only other film Scalpel
and predating what would or would not become Eli Roth’s Thanksgiving for
decades, the filmmaker’s short-lived career capped itself off with the 1987 Thanksgiving
set slasher horror film Blood Rage which saw itself facing distribution
delays before being heavily recut and retitled for theatrical release.Made in 1983 but unreleased for another four
years before facing heavy cuts to appease the censors and title card changes
including but not limited to Slasher and Nightmare at Shadow Woods,
this tightly bound dose of slasher movie madness and mayhem comes to Arrow
Video in a deluxe edition featuring the edited theatrical version and the
complete unedited version VHS buyers came to know and love.For being one of the few official Thanksgiving
slasher movies, Blood Rage is one of the very best examples of the
slasher subgenre yet produced!
One night at the local drive in, identical twin brothers
Todd and Terry wander about the theater parking lot and spy on a young couple having
sex.Terry’s only logical response to
such activities is to take an axe to the illicit lovers’ heads before pinning
the crime on his brother Todd who takes the fall and is institutionalized by
his mother Maddy (Louise Lasser from Mary Hartman, Mary Hartman) while
Terry roams free.A decade later, the beleaguered
mother and family try to reunite for a nice Thanksgiving dinner when news
breaks that Todd has escaped the institution, putting the family on guard.Unbeknownst to Maddy and crew, the killer may
already be within their midst and soon, courtesy of Terminator 2 makeup
effects artist Ed French, the brutally violent and creatively gruesome
slashings begin.
Soaked in gallons of crimson, grisly gore and some of the
most imaginative death scenes in slasher movie memory (a doctor’s head split in
half replete with fresh brain halves visible), Blood Rage is a
startling, sometimes madcap exercise in blood bathing.Chock full of graphic sex and nudity followed
by the long-awaited slayings, a snarky sense of humor, a raging firestorm of an
electronic soundtrack by Don’t Go in the House and Eyes of a Stranger
composer Richard Einhorn and lush camerawork by Natural Enemies cinematographer
Richard E. Brooks, audiovisually Blood Rage is simultaneously angry and
deliriously tongue-in-cheek.For being
ostensibly a disposable slasher, there’s also a wealth of surprises amid the
horror tropes including but not limited to a recurring thread involving Maddy steadily
slipping into madness replete with her eating raw Thanksgiving dinner on the kitchen
floor. Featuring a splendidly nutty performance from Louise Lasser,
Mark Soper playing both twins in adult form while creating two distinctly
different characters, an early appearance by Ted Raimi as a condoms dealer and
coproducer Marianne Kanter who gets one of the film’s most memorably nasty deaths,
the ensemble horror slasher piece is surprisingly well acted with believable people
and not just throwaway stock characters to be slaughtered.Mostly though this is Mark Soper’s show
playing the twins’ personalities to realistic effect so you’re able to
differentiate them despite the victims’ ease in confusing the two.
As aforementioned, the film was heavily censored down to
achieve an acceptable R rating despite clearly being made for unrated horror heaven. While going on VHS uncut in the version fans
know and love, it was spotty for years after appearing on DVD again in censored
form while fans hastily tried to reedit their own homemade version of the DVD
with the VHS snippets. Thankfully the good
folks at Arrow Video have righted that wrong and made the original uncensored
version fully available in a new 2K restoration. Seen now, Blood Rage is one of the
quintessential ultraviolent 80s slasher epics, a short and sweet home run with
a crimson soaked machete, a film that could’ve been just another slasher but
winds up being among the best. The kind
of horror film you’ll be inclined to pick up the soundtrack album for after
seeing it, Blood Rage like its opening scene is in the spirit of
drive-in grindhouse joy where blood invariably will splatter on your popcorn
literally and figuratively.
