The Initiation (1984)
When I posted on-line that I had received a screener for The Initiation for reviewing purposes one of my on-line buddies enthused about how much he loves the film. Upon watching the film, and finding stretches of it dragging, it got me thinking that sometimes we get very excited about older pictures purely for nostalgic reasons, or at least I hope so in the case of my on-line friend, as The Initiation maybe slightly above the average for an Eighties slasher but there’s nothing really to write home about.
Daphne Zuniga stars as Kelly Fairchild a college student who has suffered from a reoccurring nightmare since she was a child. In the nightmare her parents Dwight and Frances (Vera Miles and Clu Gulager) are attacked by a mystery man who ends up getting severely burnt. Help is in hand in the handsome form of an assistant professor who maybe able to help her recover nine years or memories that currently refuses to play ball. Having joined the Delta Ro Kai sorority at college, Kelly is roped into breaking-and-entering into her own father’s department store as the last pledge of their initiation ritual.
Once her and her sorority sisters have entered the empty mall they have to steal the watchman’s clothes. Too bad they can’t find him! Someone else has beaten them to the mall and snuffed out the Village People wannabe watchman and now has designs on snuffing out Kelly and her college buddies but why? Who is the killer? Could he be the horribly burnt man from Kelly’s nightmare who just happens to be the same bloke we’ve saw earlier in the film escape from a mental institution? Just you wait and see….
Writer Charles Pratt Jr. has fashioned an Eighties slasher that does not adhere strictly to the slasher template and for that to be commended. By the time The Initiation had been released the slasher film had pretty much run its course and was about to receive a much needed kick up the arse with Wes Craven’s original A Nightmare on Elm Street taking the genre in a difference direction.
Interestingly both Nightmare and The Initiation were released in 1984 meaning that the latter’s reoccurring bad dream element and its analysis is more of a coincidence than plagiarism. There is also a last minute twist, which is not bad; however the viewer had already been tipped off to this possibility in the opening scenes. The twist is reliant on how it is presented visually and to a degree director Larry Stewart pulls it off.
The film marked the first feature starring role for Daphne Zuniga following her cameo in The Dorm That Dripped Blood). Zuniga later appeared in the middling sequel The Fly II before slipping out of the limelight. She’s an agreeable lead if a little lacking on the charisma front. Vera Miles, as Kelly’s mother, is kind of slumming it though after the giddy heights of appearing in the film that started off the slasher genre, along with Peeping Tom, Psycho. She moves around slowly as in disbelief that her career has come to this. Clu Gulager, so good in the later The Return of the Living Dead, also seems a little bored but then neither has much to do. The focus is on the sorority ladies and their forthcoming date with a sticky ending.
As with a vast number of college-based movies a number of the actors spectacularly fail to look the younger age of the character they are playing. There’s minimal nudity and no titillation for male or female viewers. The women are all very nondescript and the frat boys’ ugly repellent types that would struggle to get a first date let alone be considered a top shag.
Refreshingly there isn’t a killing of a vacuous character every couple of minutes in a desperate attempt to appease the less discerning viewer. Instead it’s pretty much in the final segment that takes place in the shopping mall pausing only for some needless character development involving whether someone is a virgin or not. What would have helped The Initiation glide through its quieter moments would have been an element of tension and character empathy. Instead there’s none meaning that in the lead-up to the bloody final half-hour becomes a bit of a chore.
