Widely acknowledged as the greatest Thanksgiving slasher movie, Blood Rage is also one of the best non-franchise slashers of the 80s–one with few artistic aspirations, yet brisk and idiosyncratic enough to elevate it above other under-the-radar splatterfests like The Mutilator.
Blood Rage opens in flashback with a slaughter at a drive-in. In 1974, identical twins Todd and Terry watch from the backseat as their single mother necks with her date, and, triggered by this primal scene, one of the boys grabs a hatchet from the backseat and slays another couple. Todd is found guilty and sent to a juvenile criminal asylum. Cut to 1984, in the idyllic if ominously named housing development Shadow Woods, as cool jock Terry and his friends prepare to celebrate Thanksgiving. But Terry’s copacetic demeanor is unsettled by the dual revelations that his twin has escaped detention, and his mother plans to remarry. As the true evil twin Terry snaps spends Turkey Day carving his way through friends and neighbors while delivering lines like "It's not cranberry sauce!"
Blood Rage is unbridled gonzo oedipal madness, elevated, above all, by the great Louise Lasser, who goes all-in as Terry and Todd's beleaguered, heavily medicated mother who takes sanctuary in wine and leftovers as the body count rises. And what of Thanksgiving? Do Todd and Terry represent the dueling id and superego of a nation founded on colonial violence, which fissures under the mental collapse of the ego, the mother? Is the vengeful arc of Terry's machete the return of that which is repressed by founding lies and national myths? Or is Blood Rage’s Thanksgiving Day setting just a pretext to squeeze that cranberry sauce line in? It's almost certainly the latter, but Blood Rage is no poorer for it.
Bonus recommendation: director John Grissmer's only other feature, the even more oedipally warped Scalpel (think Eyes Without a Face meets Vertigo with the feel of a go-for-broke tax shelter production).
Blood Rage is streaming on Shudder, Tubi, Kanopy, and the Arrow channel.
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