DR. RAGE

Michael Dare, during an encounter/clash with a homeless man, is sentenced to serve a penalty for assault in Dr. Straun's clinic due to a misunderstanding. It won't take long for him to realize that he is just a guinea pig for the doctor's crazy experiments and his very particular team, somewhat radical experiments on anger control. The TV edit of this film, whose plot strangely reminds us of the comedy "Anger Management" with Adam Sandler and Jack Nicholson, immediately makes us understand that we are dealing with a Z-movie; the character actors who perform in this shoddy film do their best, but they are always over the top and excessively excitable in their acting. Our Dr. Rage is played by a limping Andrew Divoff, always on the verge of a nervous breakdown, now a slave to the serum he himself created, and with which he controls his frequent outbursts of anger. An actor we remember in the role of the Djinn in the first two chapters of the series "Wishmaster". The film begins and unfolds in the most absolute predictability: a homeless man now dependent on the serum attempts a raid on the clinic and encounters the monstrous inhabitant of the basement, who we will later discover is closely tied to Dr. Straun, there are some plot twists, with revelations that can already be deduced in the first minutes of the film, therefore useless for the purpose. As for the rest of the cast, the new "Igor", the doctor's assistant and factotum, wanting to give a cartoonish tone to the character, only characterizes his schizoid side, the sexy assistant is the most contained, the freak hidden in the basement, apart from some grunts and the performance in the unlikely ending, gets lost in the meanders of the soporific screenplay. The poor protagonist Michael wanders around the clinic aimlessly, undergoes the injections and discovers himself more angry and irritable than before, spends his time following the strange movements of Dr. Straun's assistants, is intrigued by the strange noises coming from the basement and tries in every scene to seduce the doctor who is explaining to him the procedure of the anti-anger cure and the laughable philosophy of the Straun Foundation. Notable is the phosphorescent serum that reminds us of Dr. West's in "Re-animator", the ridiculous machine to inject the aforementioned serum to the patients, which looks like a nightmare made with DIY, and some splatter effects, which are limited to the end of the film... a bit little for a film that defines itself as horror. Even considering the obvious budget limitations and the attempt to rely on humor to compensate for an involuntarily demencial atmosphere, one cannot find a single positive side in this mess, whose viewing could cause real attacks of anger!