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.
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.