Blood Rage (The Last Drive-In)

Onscreen Title:  "Slasher"
Film Year:  1987
Genre:  Horror
Director:  John Grissmer
Starring:  Louise Lasser, Mark Soper, Julie Gordon, Jayne Bentzen

The Movie

Originally titled A Nightmare in Shadow Woods, Blood Rage begins when woman takes her twin sons, Terry and Todd, to the drive-in with her new boyfriend.  Secretly, the twin boys sneak out and watch a couple have sex in a neighboring car, when Terry takes an ax and kills the man, while the woman escapes into the woods in the buff.  Terry accuses Todd of the crime, resulting in the institutionalization of the innocent child.  Years later, Todd escapes from the asylum, which Terry uses as an excuse to go on a bigger rampage, intending to kill his mother's fiance and any fornicating teen he stumbles upon.

Watching Blood Rage I found myself feeling that it was made by people who seemed to have an appreciation for the slasher genre and realized that there were cliches in it, but they didn't really seemed to know why those cliches worked.  Blood Rage has a lot of gore, nudity, sex, and a psychotic killer, but there's a childish nature to it.  It's somewhat indulgent in that they wanted to group all these aspects in every corner of their movie, and it hardly ever seems to want to pull the brakes on itself, even when it feels like it should because it's losing a grip on its coherence.  I can rag on a movie like Friday the 13th pretty hard for being poorly constructed, but the people making those movies were at least smart enough to not just throw everything at the viewer at all times (except maybe Jason X).

The movie is so simplistic and eager to please.  It has people being dismembered left and right, getting disrobed in an instant to have sexual intercourse, and just enough story to give the killer a clearly insane motivation to do what he's doing.  It doesn't really do any of this all that well, but you can sense that it's heart is in the right place.  The gore looks gloriously phony, and the movie goes out of its way to make it as hyperbolic as possible.  The sexual content isn't really all that titillating or sensual, but rather showing skin for the sake of showing skin.  And it's a lot of skin.  The performances range from wooden to scenery chewing with no in between, and with a lot of this dialogue the movie can make you laugh with simple line reads like "I want you to make love to me." and "Put on a sweater, it's cold outside."

Oh and my personal favorite moment, after the main "final girl" is trying to flirt with who she thinks is Terry but discovers it's his (presumed insane) brother Todd, she says in an almost comically hurried tone "I'GOTTA'GO BYE!"  I laughed for days.

I'm tempted to think this movie is trying to be funny, maybe a parody, but there is something genuine about the way it's put together that makes me second guess that.  It feels like it was put together by a child, one who has this idea of what the craftsmanship of a horror movie should be and then tried to make one by their rudimentary understanding of the format.  There is no weight to the movie, despite having a potentially psychological premise at its disposal.  It never explores a theme that it could potentially have, it just exists for kills and boobies.

If you want kills and boobies, Blood Rage is worth your time.  It's also good for a laugh.  Whether that laugh is intentional might be a tricky question to answer.

The Drive-In

The Dinners of Death have reached their final dinner, and it's what Joe Bob dubs the only Thanksgiving themed horror film in existence.  But, Darcy has used her time in this marathon to prove Joe Bob wrong, and he gracefully admits defeat.  But Joe Bob does close out with a slasher flick on Thanksgiving night, and it's a pretty interesting one.  Our host claims that people claim it to be a rediscovered gem that was called "awesome and amazing," then asks if there was any film that was rediscovered that wasn't considered so.  Not to prove him wrong twice in one night, but my mind immediately bounces to The Dead Talk Back.  I don't think there was anybody praising that one when it was dusted off.

Joe Bob spends a lot of time trying to figure out the logistics of the movie, and even spends one segment recapping the movie so far, each additional sentence more insane than the last.  I wish I could put my hand on his shoulder and tell him "Don't bother trying," but I appreciate the effort.  Joe Bob also spends a bit of time analyzing Louise Lassier, star of Mary Hartman, Mary Hartman, who he says made her career built on nervous breakdowns (and even got that series cancelled by having a nervous breakdown).  He points out that her performance in the film doesn't come alive until she begins to have a nervous breakdown.  He doesn't really spend much time on anybody else, because very few had careers before or after this movie.  He also spends a lot of time dissecting the concept of oversexed 80's women in slasher movies, probably because there is little else to talk about in this movie.

Joe Bob concludes this episode with an interesting theory that the movie is secretly about pedophilia and incest, claiming the Lassier's mother character was having sex with her son Terry, which would explain why Terry targets teenagers having sex and why he can't stand the idea of his mother having a boyfriend.  I don't think this was ever spelled out in the movie, but it's an angle that's interesting to think about in retrospect.  I highly doubt the filmmakers really had that much on their minds while making this movie though, which would probably be giving them too much credit.

Blood Rage concludes Joe Bob's Dinners of Death with a film that is far less popular than the three that proceeded it, and in my opinion that made this episode a little more interesting.  Seeing films that I've never heard of is why I watch shows like these, and that makes Blood Rage a potential highlight.  But Joe Bob saved his juiciest film info for his openers then got a bit sparser as he went on, so the best Joe Bob sections were saved for his earlier films.  Which episodes were the bigger successes in this marathon depends on what you want out of a Last Drive-In episode, though this marathon was worth watching as a whole.

One last note worth tackling:  In this episode, Joe Bob opens with what I think is an important tangent as to why streaming marathons like this live are important:  community.  He argues that a collective experience in this increasingly more instant gratification streaming world is something that is dying but should still try to be maintained.  As someone who has joined the live Tweet storms of the other Drive-In Mutants on social media, I can agree with him 100%.  Bringing the fans together is a one-of-a-kind experience that can never be replaced.  I feel like Shudder has been handling The Last Drive-In in a way that Netflix fumbled with the new Mystery Science Theater, which they just drop all at once.  Everyone watches those episodes in a rush and/or at their leisure, but the experience of everyone watching a new episode at the same time, then discussing it as a group is gone.  Thank you, Shudder, for doing this right.  I'm sure Netflix doesn't care what with it's huge success and all, but it probably should start to look at this picture in a three-dimensional way.

Joe Bob's Rating

⭐⭐1/2