jadavix "Blood Rage" is a slasher remembered only for its being quite a bit more gory than most other films of its endless subgenre.I realised toward the end that, interestingly, most of this gore is actually only the aftermath of the violent acts the homicidal maniac commits: there is very little on-screen violence, but a lot of gruesome shots of damaged bodies.This lack of real 'violence' sometimes features to amusing effect. Take for instance one of the movie's few memorable moments: a lady in approached in the woods by the slasher with sword in hand. The lady screams, recognizing the danger she's in. The camera cuts away to something much less interesting, and then cuts back a few seconds later, to the sight of the woman, or rather her top half, as she screams on the ground - as well she might, since her lower half in over a few feet away from her.Are we expected to believe that, in only a few minutes, the not particularly strapping bad guy was able to cut her completely in half? The sword thing he's got doesn't even look that sharp or dangerous; I'm reminded of a much larger version of a butter knife.The plot is something to do with a twin who kills someone when he is a child and frames his brother for the crime. Ten or so years later, the good twin escapes from prison, while the bad one starts thinking about killing again.There's only one reason why they bother with the 'twin' angle: so you can be confused, at a climactic moment, about which is which. Even in 1987, was anyone surprised by that twist?

mpaulso "That's not cranberry sauce..."Blood Rage has some GREAT kill scenes and practical effects (machete through the back) and it's filled with 1980's nostalgia from the can-opener beer cans, drive in movies, old video games and short shorts.I was really tempted to give this movie 4 stars. It has a cool unique story of a brother who framed his twin brother for a murder he committed and when his brother breaks out of the mental institution he see an opportunity for another killing spree to frame his brother and get him thrown back in the mental institution again.

rooee 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.

Coventry 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".