The Rage (2007)

[runningscared]

Movie: The Rage (2007), directed by Robert Kurtzman

Watched on: Amazon Prime

Ran: 8.03 miles, 9’09”/mile, 01:13:36 (long recovery run)

 

Oh man, where to start with The Rage? I came across it while browsing for something a little more off the beaten path, and said to myself, “Oh, hey! I saw that like ten years ago! That’s the movie about… um…” To my consternation, I found I couldn’t remember anything about The Rage except that it was yet another zombie-virus flick and that it starred Erin Brown. Granted, my memory ain’t what it used to be (and what it used to be wasn’t all that great), but I find the fact that I watched this movie and was unable to recall anything about it to be somewhat alarming. So I gave it a spin.

 

Well, it turns out that my worries about early-onset dementia are likely unfounded, and that my brain simply repressed any memory of this movie as a self-protective measure. In short, it’s not good.

 

The Rage begins in a remote cabin in the woods, which a demented Russian scientist named Dr. Vasilienko has turned into a grungy lab of horrors. He’s got a cage of shambling zombies eating a little girl in the background while he’s busy at work cutting open the skulls of a couple of (still-living) unfortunate victims and infecting them with his homegrown Rage virus, which both turns people into crazed cannibals and causes massive rapid deformities—you know, standard mad scientist stuff. Unfortunately, Things Go Wrong™ and a Rage-infected test subject escapes into the woods… but not before infecting Vasilienko himself.

 

From there, it writes itself: the test subject kills a couple of people having sex in a car and then manages to get himself eaten by vultures, who themselves hulk out and also gain the ability to infect people with Rage by (of course) projectile-vomiting on them. Said vultures then attack an uncle who’s fishing with his niece and nephew; after taking a stream of bird-yench straight in the face, he winds up eating the girl’s vulture-mangled corpse and killing the boy before getting splattered over the road by an RV full of bickering nu-metal fans who spent the night taking drugs and having three-ways. (A tale as old as time; it’s pretty much Beowulf but with slightly more group sex.)

 

Anyway, the nu-metal fans do their best to fend off attacks by Rage Vultures and the survivors flee through the woods… right into Vasilienko’s Science-’n’-Murder Shack. They’re captured and treated to—and I swear I am not making this up—a pond-ripple wipe to an extended sepia-toned flashback in which Vasilienko narrates his entire backstory. Apparently he cured cancer, but it was all covered up by Big Pharma and now he’s trying to infect the country with Rage and hold the antidote hostage until his brilliance is acknowledged (like ya do). Will the last few survivors escape Dr. Vasilienko and his band of Raged-out zombies to save humanity? More importantly, do you care?

 

Clearly I didn’t, since I saw all this ten years ago and didn’t remember any of it. While I’m a big fan of Ms. Brown (the erstwhile Misty Mundae), that wasn’t enough to get me invested in a script with, effectively, zero characters in it other than the mad doctor, whose story we aren’t told until the movie is almost over, and which is pretty hackneyed anyway. So yeah, don’t expect The Rage to deliver anything close to a satisfying narrative.

 

If, however, all you’re looking for is a whole lotta splatter, buddy, you have come to the right place. That opening scene alone is a total gorefest free-for-all, and it pales in comparison to the final reel. I thought the start-at-110%-end-at-150% approach felt familiar, and it turns out that The Rage was directed by Robert Kurtzman, the guy who directed Wishmaster. That film followed a very similar curve, with the side-effects-laden parties from hell at the beginning and end. Notably, Andrew Divoff stars in both movies as well, here as Vasilienko, there as the djinn. I initially thought Vasilienko had a bad Russian accent, but Divoff is actually Russian; apparently terrible melodramatic dialogue will make even real Russian accents sound fake.

 

The practical special effects are really compelling, which is perhaps no surprise, since Kurtzman is first and foremost an effects wonk. However, every time the movie uses CGI, the results range from simply bad to downright appalling. The worst is the excrement fountain in the final battle, which I would say “looked like crap,” but of course the point is that it didn’t. At all. I will say, however, that at least the CGI vultures seem considerably less-awful if you’ve seen Birdemic. (“Birdemic: The Movie That Makes a Z-Grade Zombie Flick From Three Years Earlier Seem Like a Frickin’ LucasFilm Production!”)

 

So that’s that: gorehounds may get a kick out of The Rage, but don’t expect anything more, even if you’re an Erin Brown fan (though she does get to kick some zombie butt in the final battle). I’m actually a little curious about the script, because the movie starts out maybe taking itself seriously and is just bad, but I get the distinct feeling that at some point everyone just kind of gave up and let it collapse into a total self-parody with cheesy one-liners and gimmicky zombie boss-fights. Or maybe it’s just really uneven and was always meant to be that way. Who knows? Not me—and if I did, apparently I’d forget soon enough anyway.