This year, serve up Blood Rage for Thanksgiving
Football, schmootball, take Grandma & your favorite cousin on a trip to Shadow Woods.
Listen, Thanksgiving is going to be rough this year. Many of us are looking at year 9 of being forced to share table space with people who happily voted against our safety and well-being, or, in contrast, reminded of the friends and family we lost due to opposing politics. When every day warns of some new and potentially terrible thing Trump might do when he re-enters office, it’s hard to concentrate on whether to go with jellied or whole cranberry sauce for dinner. It all seems very unimportant at the moment.
But, it’s probably also not good to spend much of the holiday reflecting on how we’re on an express elevator to Hell (going down). So maybe it’s time to create some new Thanksgiving traditions. Maybe this is the year you stay home, make yourself a nice, Dagwood-sized turkey sandwich, and watch 1987’s Blood Rage, a Thanksgiving slasher that existed long before Eli Roth’s Thanksgiving.
Blood Rage, like all the best slasher movies, wasn’t released until four years after it was filmed, has existed at various times under three different titles (including Nightmare at Shadow Woods and the less creative Slasher), and its original VHS cover artwork looked to be for an entirely different movie. After doing a brief stint on USA Up All Night in the late 80s, it languished in obscurity for years until Arrow Video released it on DVD in 2015, where it could be fully appreciated for its bizarre sense of humor and a deeply weird performance from co-star Louise Lasser.
It opens with Ted Raimi selling loose condoms to horny drive-in theater customers, so you know you’re about to watch a genuine goddamn motion picture. Helping to support a small business owner is Maddy Simmons (Louise Lasser), who passionately tussles with her date while her young twin sons, Todd and Terry, are in the backseat, which concerns neither Maddy nor the anonymous man she’s spending the evening with. Suggesting that this is not the first time they’ve been subjected to such a thing, the boys get out of the car and wander around the drive-in. Though Terry just seems vaguely annoyed, he’s actually in a murderous rage (a blood rage, you might call it), and works it out by hatcheting a naked teenage boy to death. He then smears blood on a too-stunned-to-speak Todd and shoves the hatchet into his hands, and though several witnesses see this happen, Todd is framed for the murder.
Ten years later, Todd (Mark Soper with his hair combed forward), so traumatized from the event that he’s never able to speak up in his own defense, is living in a psychiatric hospital, where his treatment has left him a shambling mess and forced to take responsibility for a crime he didn’t commit. Meanwhile, Terry (Mark Soper with his hair combed back) is now an average young adult, straight-laced, popular with his peers, and with every single woman under the age of 40 who lives at his apartment complex eyeing him like they’re imagining him turning into a cheeseburger.
He only has eyes for one gal, however, and that’s dear old mom Maddy. Terry’s peaceful existence ends, however, when Maddy announces in the middle of Thanksgiving dinner that she plans to marry Brad, the owner of their apartment complex. Though he celebrates the news by toasting to the couple with a big tall glass of milk (the first sign that he’s a psychopath), it turns a switch in Terry’s brain from “act normal” to “time to kill.” Meanwhile (and very conveniently), Todd picks that very same night to realize that his sentence has been a huge miscarriage of justice and escapes from the psychiatric hospital, heading towards home. Terry takes this as a golden opportunity to go on a murder spree, planning once again to pin it on the hapless Todd. With both Brad and Todd out of the way, Terry won’t ever again have to compete with anyone for Maddy’s attention, and the rest of the people he kills are just delicious Thanksgiving gravy.
As a slasher movie, Blood Rage is mostly unremarkable, save for revealing the killer’s identity at the very beginning. Whether it was budgetary concerns or the filmmakers not wanting to conceal Soper’s blue-eyed good looks1 is unknown, but Terry goes without a mask as he leisurely wanders around the apartment complex hacking people to death with a machete that just seems to appear in his hand out of nowhere. Other than that, it fulfills the 80s slasher quota: gratuitous nudity, mangled corpses carefully arranged for the Final Girl to find, irritating characters you can’t wait to see die, and blood that looks like it was made with cherry Jell-O (and not cranberry sauce, as Terry clarifies in one memorable scene).
Where it shines, however, is as an off-the-wall domestic drama, and that’s entirely thanks to Louise Lasser. For anyone under 35 reading this (as if those people exist), Louise Lasser is best known both for being one of Woody Allen’s earliest muses, and for starring in Mary Hartman, Mary Hartman, one of the strangest sitcoms of the 70s. A dry satire of soap operas that skewered suburban life and consumerism, the titular Mary Hartman reacted to the increasingly bizarre things that happened either to or around her with an unsettling numbness that suggested she started each day with a bowl of Special K and a handful of Valium. Given how Lasser came off in interviews during that time, as well as her legendarily disastrous attempt at hosting Saturday Night Live, it seemed likely that that “Where am I? What am I doing here?” energy wasn’t entirely acting.
In Blood Rage, she tries for something a little different, and that’s acting as though she’s in a 1950s Douglas Sirk production, rather than an extremely low-budget slasher film. Wearing sausage curls and a frilly, cleavage-baring dress, Lasser makes a feast of even the smallest moments, like when Maddy brings Todd a single piece of pumpkin pie (not a whole pie, just a slice) for a holiday visit at the hospital, or even just offers a basket of hot bread to her Thanksgiving dinner guests. She reacts to the news of Todd’s escape not by fleeing to safety or even calling the police, but by drinking what looks like three bottles worth of Manishevitz Passover wine and stress-eating cold holiday leftovers on her kitchen floor.
Maddy spends much of the second half of the film alone in her tacky green shag- carpeted apartment, fretting and reaching out to anonymous telephone operators for some crumb of human contact. It’s a weirdly poignant choice for a movie in which a guy stabs someone in the neck with a barbecue fork, as is the mind-blowing climax, which places mother and twin sons (one of which always has his back to the camera, of course) in the same room together for the first time in over a decade. What happens must be seen to be believed, then seen again to make sure you weren’t hallucinating it in a tryptophan fog the first time.
Listen, I’m not telling you how to run your life, but you could watch Blood Rage, or listen to your shitty brother-in-law talk about how he knows someone whose son swears his middle school offers free makeup and lingerie for boys, while eating the dryest turkey you’ve ever tasted. You want to be thankful for something this Thanksgiving? Be thankful for having a choice, while we still can.
If you’re wondering if you’ve seen Mark Soper in something before, you might have: he played Michael Milton, who got his penis bitten off in a car accident in 1982’s feel-good movie of the year The World According to Garp.
Yes!! Blood Rage is so much fun.