RETRO REVIEW: BLOOD RAGE (1987)

MARK SOPER as Terry in JOHN GRISSIMER’S BLOOD RAGE.

Thanksgiving at the best of times can be an emotional minefield. It’s only natural when family and extended family get together to stuff themselves silly every year that the inevitable arguments and issues would once again come bubbling to the surface. You voted for WHO? When are you going to get married? When are you two going to have a baby already?

At its best, it is a day to collectively remember to be “thankful” for the things you have in your life (though I think some indigenous people might argue with that). At its worst, it’s a chance for your family to pull apart and judge all of your life choices- to remind you over dry turkey and lumpy mashed potatoes that you definitely aren’t getting any younger. And by the end of it, you are left dazed- not only by the glut of carbohydrates and tryptophans churning their way through your digestive tract, but also by the endless bombardment of questions and criticisms lobbed at you by your relatives. Thanksgiving can be tough, but when your Thanksgiving is overshadowed by your murderous twin brother escaping from a mental facility, it can be downright scary.

BLOOD RAGE centers around a family’s turmoil at Thanksgiving.

PLOT:

In 1974, Terry (played by MARK SOPER) framed his identical brother, Todd (also played by MARK SOPER), for the murder of a man at a local drive-in they went to with their mother Maddy (LOUISE LASSER) and her then-boyfriend. Subsequently, Todd was institutionalized at a mental facility while his murderous brother went free. Now, ten years later, as the family gathers for Thanksgiving dinner, they learn that Todd has escaped and Terry will do anything to protect his bloody secret, even if that means murdering everyone one by one and pinning it all on Todd again.

The Thanksgiving holiday can make anyone lose their head.

KILLS:

BLOOD RAGE opens with the kill that ends up setting all the rest of the events into motion. Terry and Todd are with their mother and her boyfriend at a local drive-in. The brothers are seemingly asleep in the backseat as Maddy and her boyfriend get frisky in the front. The boys wake up, see their mom in full snog-mode, and decide to sneak out of the car. They walk along the other cars with other couples in various states of undress. Terry spots a hatchet in the bed of a truck and grabs it, going over to a man and woman having sex in one of the cars and proceeds to hack the man to death when he tells Terry to get lost. The woman runs off, and Terry immediately rubs his bloody hands on Todd’s face and thrusts the hatchet into his hands. Maddy finally realizes her boys are gone and finds them surrounded by a crowd of people, Terry yelling at her that Todd did it, and Todd just standing there, stunned and silent.

It’s only ten years later that Mark finally starts to remember the events of that night, as his therapist (who dumps a pant-load of exposition via an ADR-riddled scene), explains to us that Todd essentially went into shock and could not remember the events of that night until just recently. When Maddy comes to visit Todd for Thanksgiving, the therapist also explains this to her, and that it was Terry who actually did it, but Maddy refuses to believe it. She returns home to Terry and her new fiancé, Brad, to celebrate Thanksgiving, but Terry is less than thrilled with the news that she has gotten engaged to Brad, and once they all get word that Todd has broken out of his mental facility, Terry sees this as an opportunity to once again slake his bloodlust and to frame his brother yet again.

Once Todd’s therapist makes it to the apartment complex the family lives at, all hell breaks loose. She and Maddy’s fiancé Brad, make a plan to try and cover as much ground as they can to find Todd, but Terry is hot on their heels, disposing of both of them quickly and in extravagant fashion. When Terry’s friends rally to help him and his mom locate Todd before he can kill anyone else, the film descends into a slaughter-fest, where people are hacked into like so much overcooked turkey. And in perhaps the best line from the film, Terry and his friend Artie come across Terry’s stash of weapons he’s used so far throughout the night, and as Artie holds up the bloodied machete in horror, Terry calmly jokes, “that’s not cranberry sauce.”

The kills are plentiful and fun in this film, mostly because Terry is such an exuberant killer. Karen, Terry’s sort-of girlfriend, eventually finds out that it’s Terry doing all the killing and not Todd. At one point, she hides from him in a storage closet and when she finally emerges, Terry is sitting on a chair with one of their friends' dead bodies in front of him. He proceeds to laugh delightedly at her horror, and claps the corpse's hands together like a macabre puppet. When she screams and runs away, he sulkily remarks, “you’re no fun.” Terry is a psychopath of the highest order, a killer that revels in terror and bloodshed.

VISUALS/SFX:

The special effects, while not exactly realistic, are definitely fun in this film. Early on, when Terry kills the man in the car at the drive-in, there’s a great shot of the blood splattering over the popcorn that sits in their car that would be at home in any DARIO ARGENTO film. But it’s there that the similarities end. When Terry comes upon Brad in his office at the apartment complex, he chops off one of his hands that just cracked open a beer and the hand (still holding the frosty beverage) falls to the ground still wiggling around the can comically. In another scene, Todd’s therapist is searching through the woods around the complex for Todd, but Terry comes upon her first. While we don’t actually see the kill, we do see the aftermath of her severed torso still moving and screaming while the lower half of her body is a few feet away. It would almost be amusing except that Todd stumbles across her severed body, and in a quite solemn and disturbing moment, reverently attempts to “piece” her two halves back together. It’s a rather touching act for someone who’s been the only person to really know Todd and what he has been through all these years, an attempt to give her back some of the dignity in death that she deserved.

LOUISE LASSER as Maddy pours herself some liquid courage.

PERFORMANCES:

MARK SOPER has the difficult task of doing double-duty in this film, portraying both Terry and Todd, and it is no easy feat considering how different these brothers are in personality and actions. Soper does pull this off with considerable aplomb, creating distinct mannerisms and affectations for both brothers. Terry is confident and cocky, a swaggering, gleeful ball of narcissistic psychosis, while Todd, is a slumped, foot-dragging introvert - stunted physically and mentally by the trauma of not only witnessing his brother murder someone, but bearing the punishment for it all these years. The makeup and costuming team also further enhance the differences between the two brothers by giving Terry a styled, slicked-back hairstyle, while Todd’s hair hangs in limp, messy curls in his eyes and over his ears. Terry’s wardrobe also reflects his hubristic attitude - plenty of tight jeans and tight t-shirts with no sleeves, while Todd drowns in his oversized polo and baggy khakis, looking like he’s constantly wearing the weight of the world on his thin frame.

However, it’s LOUISE LASSER that is really the one to watch in this film. As Terry and Todd’s mother, Maddy, Lasser portrays a mother wracked with both grief and utterly resolute denial at the monster one son is and what the other has become at the other’s (and her own) expense. Maddy’s journey throughout the film is the most compelling to watch, because she falls apart in such spectacular fashion. At the beginning of Thanksgiving day she is seemingly blissfully happy - she has her boyfriend Brad, who she is now engaged to, and her “good” son Terry home for the holidays. But we also know that it's a façade, as she visited Todd in the mental hospital that morning, where Todd said he started to remember the events of what really happened that night at the drive-in. Maddy refuses to believe that Terry actually did it, and Todd, frustrated at his mom’s deference to Terry, smashes up the slice of pumpkin pie she brought him.

Once they get wind of Todd escaping from the hospital, she goes into an emotional spiral, and interspersed between kills, we see her disintegration unfold between the walls of her apartment - eating leftovers on the floor in front of an empty fridge (oh man, I FELT that), cleaning her oven, vacuuming, and drinking so much she’s left in a stupor on the floor. It’s a performance that felt akin to ELLEN BURSTYN’S drug-fueled descent into psychosis in REQUIEM FOR A DREAM. Maddy is a woman torn apart by her seeming failures as a mother. She failed to believe and protect Todd and also failed to stop Terry from his murderous libido. While she ultimately is the one to finally end Terry’s killing spree, it’s only done through the haze of denial about who Terry really is, and the realization of that is absolutely heartbreaking, not only to Todd but also to the audience. It’s only finally, at the very end, that the veneer of her denial finally cracks, and she realizes that ten years protecting and defending a very sick and disturbed son has come at an enormous cost to both Todd and herself. Though I won’t spoil that ending here, it’s a very shocking and somber end to what, on paper, is a pretty typical 80’s slasher film.

JULIE GORDON and MARK SOPER in BLOOD RAGE.

OVERALL IMPRESSIONS:

Though we never really understand why Terry kills (though Oedipal issues are definitely at play here), we aren’t really meant to. It’s clear that Terry is just an unrepentant, murderous, sociopath and always has been. What gives this film any depth (and it does have some), is the family dynamic that has been put into play ever since Terry framed Todd all those years ago. More specifically, it’s about the dynamic between mother and sons, and how warped and twisted it has become through years of denial and trauma. Their mother, Maddy, is a desperate woman - desperate for love, for a happy, ideal family, that she continues to push aside what she is told about who Terry really is. She cannot face the truth about him, because to do so, would be to face her own actions and inactions when it came to Terry. Once that membrane of denial has been pierced though, Maddy suddenly has to bear the grief of two sons lost - one to madness, and the other to years of imprisonment and mental trauma at both her hands and at the hands of her other son.

Family is messy and complicated. Holidays can often be the tinder that ignites the flame of long-held issues and resentments between relatives. This Thanksgiving in particular will definitely look different to all of us, as we celebrate with friends and families from a distance, but distance will never change dysfunction. Our families still know how to get under our skin, even through the webcam of a Zoom call or via the window of a Skype screen. But, we can’t control what they do, only what we can do. So, this Thanksgiving, as you help yourself to more of that Marie Callender pumpkin pie, biting your tongue when your mom yet again asks when you are going to settle down with someone, go ahead and put on BLOOD RAGE, because hey, your family couldn’t be any worse than this one is.

THE GORY DETAILS:

The film was originally titled SLASHER before it was released as BLOOD RAGE. I can attest to this, as I watched the film on Tubi and it had the title SLASHER in the opening credits. The cable television version of the film was called NIGHTMARE AT SHADOW WOODS, and was heavily edited, omitting a lot of the gore, but it still contained one of the swimming pool scenes not found in the 1987 VHS BLOOD RAGE version released by PRISM ENTERTAINMENT. That version contains all the gore and includes an early scene missing from the NIGHTMARE AT SHADOW WOODS version where Maddy visits Todd in the mental hospital.
The film was shot in 1983, but it wasn’t released to theaters until 1987.
BLOOD RAGE features the film debut of actor TED RAIMI (SAM RAIMI’S brother), who has a cameo in the opening of the film as the kid selling condoms at the drive-in theatre.