The Initiation (1984)
One thing you can say for Daphne Zuniga, after Pranks (aka The Dorm That Dripped Blood) and The Initiation, yet another dead college student/slasher epic, she definitely paid her dues.
Zuniga is the poor, little, rich girl, the future heiress to a shopping mall chain. She's pledging the most powerful sorority at her college but she's haunted by a recurring nightmare. In this dream, a man is attacking her father, whereapon she stabs him he is set ablaze in the fireplace. Okay people, how long will it take before it's discovered that, hey, this ain't no dream, it's a repressed memory!
Now, it didn't take long to describe the setup to this opus, now did it? But the bulk of the film is devoted to this discovery, as if anyone with half a brain couldn't have seen it coming a mile away. Intercut with this drawn out mystery is the escape of a patient at the local mental hospital (who thankfully dispatches of the evil mental hospital nurse with a garden trowel). Who is this stranger? And what does he/she have to do with this enigma?
Anyway, after all of this, we finally get to the part where the title finally has some significance. As the final initiation to the sorority, the pledges must break into the mall Zuniga's father owns and steal the uniform off of the nightwatchman. But, gasp, something goes awry. The gals are accidently locked in, and there's a maniac on the loose. Time to carve up some co-eds.
Eventually the mystery is revealed and we find out who the maniac is. I wouldn't dream of telling you here, but it seems like the screenwriters wrote themselves into a corner and devised an old soap opera standby to explain everything away. To their credit though, if I had actually been paying veeeery close attention during the mental hospital scenes, I probably would have figured it out, but, who knew?
For the genre of mad slasher movies, you really could do a whole lot worse. The Initiation does succumb to the usual pitfalls in trying to make a horror movie; it's just ain't scary. And does everyone in every horror movie own a machete, just so the killer could have a cool new weapon? They did try to do a little more with a story here but they've bitten off more than they could chew. The performances range from horrid (Aged hams Vera Miles and Clu Gulager act with all of the energy of an eggplant) to actually pretty good (I really liked Zuniga here and acurately predicted that we'd see more of her in the future). Actress Deborah Morehart (who later changed her name to Hunter Tylo and became a soap opera queen), who plays pledge Alison, is also quite good. In fact, most of the young cast members are very natural and likable performers, leaps beyond the usual anonymous dolts that fill these kinds of films.
The Initiation is actually kind of goofy, bad, fun. But in an oddly convoluted way.
Zuniga is the poor, little, rich girl, the future heiress to a shopping mall chain. She's pledging the most powerful sorority at her college but she's haunted by a recurring nightmare. In this dream, a man is attacking her father, whereapon she stabs him he is set ablaze in the fireplace. Okay people, how long will it take before it's discovered that, hey, this ain't no dream, it's a repressed memory!
Now, it didn't take long to describe the setup to this opus, now did it? But the bulk of the film is devoted to this discovery, as if anyone with half a brain couldn't have seen it coming a mile away. Intercut with this drawn out mystery is the escape of a patient at the local mental hospital (who thankfully dispatches of the evil mental hospital nurse with a garden trowel). Who is this stranger? And what does he/she have to do with this enigma?
Anyway, after all of this, we finally get to the part where the title finally has some significance. As the final initiation to the sorority, the pledges must break into the mall Zuniga's father owns and steal the uniform off of the nightwatchman. But, gasp, something goes awry. The gals are accidently locked in, and there's a maniac on the loose. Time to carve up some co-eds.
Eventually the mystery is revealed and we find out who the maniac is. I wouldn't dream of telling you here, but it seems like the screenwriters wrote themselves into a corner and devised an old soap opera standby to explain everything away. To their credit though, if I had actually been paying veeeery close attention during the mental hospital scenes, I probably would have figured it out, but, who knew?
For the genre of mad slasher movies, you really could do a whole lot worse. The Initiation does succumb to the usual pitfalls in trying to make a horror movie; it's just ain't scary. And does everyone in every horror movie own a machete, just so the killer could have a cool new weapon? They did try to do a little more with a story here but they've bitten off more than they could chew. The performances range from horrid (Aged hams Vera Miles and Clu Gulager act with all of the energy of an eggplant) to actually pretty good (I really liked Zuniga here and acurately predicted that we'd see more of her in the future). Actress Deborah Morehart (who later changed her name to Hunter Tylo and became a soap opera queen), who plays pledge Alison, is also quite good. In fact, most of the young cast members are very natural and likable performers, leaps beyond the usual anonymous dolts that fill these kinds of films.
The Initiation is actually kind of goofy, bad, fun. But in an oddly convoluted way.