by: Dr. Boogie

...CONTINUED

Later that night, Terry stops killing for a bit to hang out with his friend Andrea. She does everything short of mounting him to get his attention, but he blows her off in favor of TV. They opt to watch a crappy horror movie, which was making things a little too real for me.

Of course, for every loose girl in a horror movie, there has to be a boring chaste girl, and that girl is Karen. I think she appeared at the dinner earlier in the movie, but that might've just been the wallpaper.

She meets up with Todd, thinking he's Terry. As chaste as she is, not long into their conversation she practically insists to Todd (Terry), "I want you to make love to me." Todd immediately admits he's not Terry. Wouldn't want our slasher movie getting bogged down with a lot of unnecessary tension over who's the real killer.

When he tells her, "I've never kissed a girl before," she goes from humid marsh to arid desert real quick, if you know what I mean. That's something people say when they're talking about sex, right?

Anyway, it's hard to say whether it's the awkwardness or the fear of being murdered that drives her away from Todd. She runs off to find some more cast members.

Meet Greg and Artie. They're a couple of jocks or something, I don't know. They're two big idiots, that's the main point. Artie goes off to look for Todd while Greg tries to calm Karen with some makin' out. Amazingly, neither man succeeds and neither one is killed. Thank goodness I bothered to learn their names!

Back with Terry and Andrea, we learn that Andrea was babysitting for a single mother named Julie. Not only does Julie not have an issue with Andrea drinking while babysitting, she actually encouraged it! Her date Bill has some objections, but it's okay. They're all neighbors, so what does it matter if the person watching your kid is a little buzzed and/or horny?

Those two knuckleheads meet up with the other three knuckleheads outside. Karen tells Terry about how she ran into Todd. Andrea proposes they go back to her places for some more drinking. I guess all that babysitting booze was just pregaming.

Terry, incensed when Greg suggests his whole family is crazy, opts to track down Todd alone. The nerve of that guy, Greg. It's only one member of his family that's crazy.

Mom just has a bit of drinking/housecleaning problem.

Terry swings by to tell her Todd is on the premises. She tells him to wear a sweater. This is all perfectly normal behavior, I cannot stress that enough.

Speaking of Todd, he finds his therapist's remains and tries to reassemble her. Boy, think of the movie we would've had if Terry was obsessed with killing and Todd could just stuff them back together like the Scarecrow from Wizard of Oz!

He pointedly asks the corpse why she didn't do something about him being falsely imprisoned. If he had seen her final moments he would know just how far her do-nothingness really went...

Amount the therapist's remains is a small handgun. No sign of the tranq gun, though. Todd pockets the gun and skulks off.

Before long he runs into a girl looking for her cat. He advises her to go home, lock her door, and not let anyone inside, "no matter what they say." Talking to strangers, though, that's perfectly okay.

At Andrea's place, the boys play video games while the girls drink tequila and dish the latest gossip about who had the best encounter with a murderer. Karen is at the top with her story of the evil twin with no game.

Girl talk comes to an end all too soon. Now the big hand and the little hand are saying it's "split up and screw" o'clock. But let's let this bit of fate-tempting simmer for now.

Julie and Bill are working their way up to it, and it is not going well. Julie is way too forward with a guy who looks and sounds like someone Mr. Rogers would've wedgied in high school. She goes off to slip into something more comfortable while Bill goes to answer the door.

Terry's refractory period is over. It's time for things to start happening again.

Doors opening is kind of Terry's thing. You could be forgiven for thinking he uses doors as a crutch. However, as Julie finds out when she goes to answer the door herself, Terry still has a few tricks up his vest.

These Christmas decorations are going up earlier and earlier every year!

Julie panics and runs back inside to grab a coat. And probably her crying baby at some point, hopefully. She's a little too frazzled to get her coat. Thank goodness she has help.

A key part of being a proper serial killer: move really, really fast.

Todd, in stark contrast, moves very slow. He returns to his mom's apartment to break in and paw around his brother's room. He marvels at all his brother's great stuff: his Yoda statue, his trophies, his gun, all of it great. He reaches for the eye-level machete on the shelf... wait, nevermind. He grabs a baseball glove instead.

Out in the hall, Maddy passes out from her hard night of drinking and cleaning. Todd tucks her into bed and, mistaking him for Terry, she gives him a kiss. What an adorable drunken angel.

Back with our young coeds, we saw a couple getting hot and heavy. You know what that means.

That's right: JUMP SCARES.

Greg and Andrea put on some makeup to add some excitement to another boring night of hiding out in your apartment because you just saw a murderer outside. Classic prank. Cleaning it off takes a bit more effort than Andrea anticipated, so she hops in the shower.

Again, the movie taunts us by refusing to have these characters die, even when Terry breaks into a fully-lit apartment with four people inside.

Incidentally, I'm not saying a shower scene is uncalled for in a horror movie, but after Terry sneaks back out, the camera goes back to filming Andrea in the shower. And for as long as it goes on after that, I have to wonder how long it took before the director said "cut".

Here's where Maddy begins what I call "The Couch Scenes". You see, she needs to talk to Brad, and she cannot believe that he would be in a situation where he wouldn't answer the phone. She cannot accept that. She CANNOT. You and I, we might dial a number, get no response, and try again later. Maddy, she dials him, dials him again, calls the operator, gets mad at the operator for not being able to ring him up, and then starts the whole thing over again. And we get to see every minute of it! God forbid we miss any one-sided phone conversations in the middle of our horror movie!!!

Is there any way we could cut away from this eye-melting action to, I don't know, go back to following that guy who's killing everyone? Might there be some narrative paydirt there!? No? We need to watch an old woman yell at the implied character of a telephone operator instead? Well, let's hammer away at that point, then. Wouldn't want any Telco happenings to go unscreened. What if the audience was left wondering if the operator really did check to find out if they put in the right number!?

Hey, director John Grissmer, is there any way that we could have a little picture-in-picture of a switchboard operator plugging and unplugging shit the whole time she's on the phone!? Wouldn't want any aspect of this exchange to go unexplained! You FUCK!!!

Okay... I'm calming down now. It's just been about eight minutes since I saw someone get murdered and I'm starting to get antsy. Maybe we can expect more from the next scene.

And the teasing continues. It's blue balls and tennis balls as Greg and Andrea start running the bases in reverse from third to first, and what must have seemed like a touchdown to Greg has been downgraded to an off-sides with less than four seconds in the fourth quarter. Checkmate.

Terry watches their match play out. It looks a lot like he might kill them when a ball gets hit out of the tennis court, but still nothing. Then another Couch Scene popped up out of nowhere, now with Maddy laying out her history with Todd to a disinterested audience. I mean operator!

...I mean audience.

When Maddy's Oscar reel concludes, we jump back to Greg and Andrea doing it on a diving board. Terry takes this as the signal to move in.

Terry tries out another catchphrase, "You stop that." It doesn't have that cranberry sauce punch, so he has to kill his two-person focus group. Luckily, Terry isn't the type to let one setback disrupt his brainstorming session.

"You're bad Greg. Bad!"

He's got so many great catchphrases to choose from!

Then there was another Couch Scene and I blacked out. When I came to, Terry was in the middle of his most brutal kill: allowing Karen to tomahawk dunk Artie into the friend zone before jumping in to remind him she's his girl.

Now completely emasculated, Artie storms off to warn Gregg and Andrea not to have sex in a way that would entice a murderer to pay them a visit.

As if his night couldn't get any worse. Todd wants Greg to know he isn't crazy. That's why he had to hide in his car and stick a gun in his face. He forces Greg to lead him back to his mom's apartment to lure Terry outside. Inside, we see that Maddy has abandoned the couch long enough to Terry and Karen to start making out, but the moment is short-lived. Time for a family reunion.

Todd takes aim at Terry... and immediately wimps out and runs off. If Terry is bothered by his friend Greg leading him into an ambush by his brother, he doesn't show it. Not outwardly at least.

The two of them pursue Todd through a nature walk. There, Artie makes a shocking discovery, and Terry offers some sage advice:

"That isn't cranberry sauce, Artie. That is NOT cranberry sauce."

What, are you workshopping your catchphrase?

Suddenly, Terry spots someone in the distance. At first I thought it might be the guy who wandered into the background of the shot and then quickly dove off camera, but it was someone different. Someone in the middle distance, far enough that you can't quite make them out but near enough to make you lift your head up and get stabbed in the neck with a fork.

Here's how you know Terry is a good killer: any killer can grab a weapon and hunt down some isolated victim. Terry made his victim come to the murder weapons, made him select one, and then killed him with it before he knew what happened!

"It's not cranberry sauce, Artie. It's not cranberry sauce."

At this point, Terry does not give a single fuck. He strolls through the woods in a blood-stained vest and doesn't even bother to hide the bloody machete when Karen walks up. And when she asks why he has a bloody machete, he tells her it's Todd's.

You know what? Maybe I've got this whole film wrong. It's not a slasher movie; it a pro-eugenics movie, telling us that it's perfectly okay to euthanize the terminally dumb.

Even Terry starts to get frustrated with how easy it is to bamboozle his dimwitted, blood-filled friends. Instead of bothering with a distraction, he just takes a lazy swing at Karen.

Honestly, I'm more surprised that Karen finally realizes Terry is trying to kill her.

She runs off hoping to find help at Andrea's place, but it's all locked up. She hides in the outdoor storage closet. Perhaps she was thinking that Terry might suddenly forget seeing her duck into that very closet. He doesn't, but it does make him a little cocky.

Or maybe he just realizes he's almost out of principle cast members to kill.

There's still plenty more of Blood Rage to see!
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