As Gabriel Black's and Lance Ong's atmospheric synth pads growl over the opening credits, expectations are pretty high. Unfortunately this 1984 slasher is bungled in conception and execution.
Kelly (Daphne Zuniga) is haunted by a vision – possibly a memory – of her father attacking his wife's lover and setting him on fire. Or is it the other way around? Along with her sorority sisters, Kelly is in the midst of an initiation, and now it's "Hell Week". The big plan is to break into a shopping mall and steal the uniform of the security guard – the "Fright Night" toward which the story progresses. Along the way we are introduced, via the standard POV shot, to a fork-wielding killer, who's working his way through the kids, apparently to get to Kelly. Could it be the burnt man from her vision? (Spoiler: Yes, yes it could.)
Kelly goes to Peter (James Read), a psychology graduate with a penchant for blandly name-dropping Freud and Jung, and who's the kind of bore who goes to a college party and grumbles, "I, too, arrested my development for four years." She falls for him and he helps to unlock her madness. It is psychology as detective work, and this whole subplot drags an already quite ordinary film down in the most clunky and unconvincing way.
As Kelly, it's an early role for Zuniga (she was Princess Vespa in Spaceballs, remember?), and her wit and charisma carries the film while its other elements fail her. The Initiation simply isn't very well made. It's not the budget, or the workmanlike makeup effects, or the clearly moving corpses. It's not the typically leering camera-work, or the bland and sometimes unfocused framing. It's the lack of interesting ideas. And any deviations from the slasher formula – i.e. the aforementioned pseudo psychology – feel like dull digressions rather than adding depth.
Tonally it's all over the shop, with the tension too frequently punctuated by sub-Animal House frat pratting (all the boys are mindless jesters, by the way). At one point a dramatic crescendo is completely undone when one of the characters looks at the camera for a winking reaction. Sound like fun? Not when the film had shown zero signs of wilfully breaking the fourth wall up to that point.
The story culminates in an extended setpiece inside a deserted shopping mall, where there are at least some flashes of inspiration. There's some okay tension here – I like the scene where one character enters a lighting shop, and the lamps begin illuminating around her – but almost always the pay-off doesn't warrant the build-up. And that goes for the film in general, as it careens toward its lame twist: a revelation requiring so much exposition that it's more tiring than clever.
The Initiation doesn't excite as a slasher; doesn't titillate as an exploitation flick; and it definitely doesn't convince as a psychological horror. As a midnight movie, sadly, the only thing to fear is falling asleep.
Kelly (Daphne Zuniga) is haunted by a vision – possibly a memory – of her father attacking his wife's lover and setting him on fire. Or is it the other way around? Along with her sorority sisters, Kelly is in the midst of an initiation, and now it's "Hell Week". The big plan is to break into a shopping mall and steal the uniform of the security guard – the "Fright Night" toward which the story progresses. Along the way we are introduced, via the standard POV shot, to a fork-wielding killer, who's working his way through the kids, apparently to get to Kelly. Could it be the burnt man from her vision? (Spoiler: Yes, yes it could.)
Kelly goes to Peter (James Read), a psychology graduate with a penchant for blandly name-dropping Freud and Jung, and who's the kind of bore who goes to a college party and grumbles, "I, too, arrested my development for four years." She falls for him and he helps to unlock her madness. It is psychology as detective work, and this whole subplot drags an already quite ordinary film down in the most clunky and unconvincing way.
As Kelly, it's an early role for Zuniga (she was Princess Vespa in Spaceballs, remember?), and her wit and charisma carries the film while its other elements fail her. The Initiation simply isn't very well made. It's not the budget, or the workmanlike makeup effects, or the clearly moving corpses. It's not the typically leering camera-work, or the bland and sometimes unfocused framing. It's the lack of interesting ideas. And any deviations from the slasher formula – i.e. the aforementioned pseudo psychology – feel like dull digressions rather than adding depth.
Tonally it's all over the shop, with the tension too frequently punctuated by sub-Animal House frat pratting (all the boys are mindless jesters, by the way). At one point a dramatic crescendo is completely undone when one of the characters looks at the camera for a winking reaction. Sound like fun? Not when the film had shown zero signs of wilfully breaking the fourth wall up to that point.
The story culminates in an extended setpiece inside a deserted shopping mall, where there are at least some flashes of inspiration. There's some okay tension here – I like the scene where one character enters a lighting shop, and the lamps begin illuminating around her – but almost always the pay-off doesn't warrant the build-up. And that goes for the film in general, as it careens toward its lame twist: a revelation requiring so much exposition that it's more tiring than clever.
The Initiation doesn't excite as a slasher; doesn't titillate as an exploitation flick; and it definitely doesn't convince as a psychological horror. As a midnight movie, sadly, the only thing to fear is falling asleep.