In honour of Thanksgiving, it is time to look back on a much less popular American massacre. Blood Rage is a 1987 slasher flick about a Thanksgiving killing spree that they should have called The Silence of the Yams.

The film opens at a drive-in cinema in 1974, where Maddy (Louise Lasser) is canoodling with her date while her twin sons Todd and Terry are in the back of the car. A triggered Terry then murders a teenager, but he frames Todd, who is sent to an asylum. Ten years later, Todd (Mark Soper) escapes and makes a pilgrimage to the apartment complex where Terry (also Mark Soper) and Maddy are celebrating Thanksgiving, which soon descends into Black Friday levels of low-budget carnage.

Now known as Blood Rage, the movie was made in 1983 and eventually released in 1987 as Nightmare at Shadow Woods, despite the opening title calling it Slasher. This is a film with such an identity crisis it doesn’t even know its own name, let alone whether it wants to be a splatter comedy or a Freudian psycho-thriller. Yet for all its pillaging from Psycho, Halloween and Silent Night, Deadly Night, the result is much more interesting, innovative and ironic than anything in Eli Roth’s Thanksgiving.

Blood Rage is clucking nuts, from the wacky kills to the wildly inconsistent performances that put the kitsch in kitchen drama. Lasser spends the movie in her own terrific psychodrama as the unhinged mother traumatised by her past (and I’m not talking about her marriage to Woody Allen). The rest of the cast are plastic enough to be cheaply replicable by prosthetics, and Ed French’s kill effects are a gleeful mash of dummy heads and red paint (“not cranberry sauce” as Terry is fond of saying). Meanwhile composer Richard Einhorn swaps The Prowler‘s moody music for a synth score that fits the lurid ’80s aesthetic like a bload-soaked oven glove.

But it’s the movie’s satire that pardons it from the holiday slasher discount bin, skewering family, Christianity, and itself most of all. When one character observes that the massacre “has gotten totally out of hand”, the film’s parodic intent is clear to the audience if not the full production. This makes for an entertaining and surprising 80 minutes, though we should be thankful it is not longer.