The Initiation, 1984.
Directed by Larry Stewart.
Starring Daphne Zuniga, Clu Gulager, Vera Miles, James Read, Marilyn Kagan.
SYNOPSIS:
When a college prank goes wrong a group of teenage girls find themselves at the mercy of a killer.
Originally released during the dying breaths of the first run of slasher films, The Initiation is a film that ticks all the boxes as far as slashers go but doesn’t do enough to raise the bar in any way, and seeing as this came out a month after Wes Craven’s groundbreaking A Nightmare on Elm Street changed the horror landscape forever it does look a little old hat when put up against that film and the Friday the 13th sequels that were proving popular at the time.
Kelly Fairchild (Daphne Zuniga – The Fly II) is a teenage student who suffers from bad dreams about a man on fire attacking her parents. She is also part of a group of teenage sorority girls about to undertake their initiation ceremony to grant them entry into the Delta Ro Kai sorority but the task that they have been given is to break into Kelly’s father’s department store and steal the security officer’s uniform. All goes to plan until Kelly and her friends find themselves locked in the huge shopping mall and one by one they get picked off by a mysterious assailant who may have something to do with Kelly’s dreams.
Pretty standard slasher stuff and that is quite a concise but accurate description of The Initiation. It tries very hard to set up something approaching a sense of mystery during its opening scenes but it is quite clear fairly early on that there is a little more to Kelly’s parents Frances (Vera Miles – Psycho) and Dwight (Clu Gulager – The Return of the Living Dead) than your average slasher movie mum and dad, although the final reveal is something you’ll never see coming, mainly because it was never set up in the first place.
But that may be looking too deeply into things as this is an early ‘80’s slasher film after all. Although the presence of Miles and Gulager adds a little gravitas they really don’t have that much to do and the film is mostly carried on the shoulders of Daphne Zuniga, who is pretty impressive and has as much heroic charisma as Heather Langenkamp or Adrienne King. The kills are fairly standard without offering up anything we haven’t seen before and the gore effects are good but wouldn’t trouble the likes of Friday the 13th or My Bloody Valentine, and the only real annoyance are the stock side-characters who are set up to become victims. They’re in every slasher film from the era so it isn’t a fault of the actors or the filmmakers but given Zuniga’s down-to-earth performance it just makes some of them stand out as being obvious victims rather than actual characters.
The Initiation is a film that is rarely mentioned in discussions on slasher/horror films from the early ‘80’s and it is perhaps a tad unfair as the film isn’t the worst example of the genre. Production-wise the film looks pretty decent, the acting is mostly good from the leads, there is adequate gore and nudity and the premise of a college prank gone wrong is always a good one but there isn’t anything in it that hasn’t been done before in dozens of other second-tier slasher films and it never offers up anything that comes close to competing with the big boys like Friday the 13th or Halloween, making it something of a fun curiosity for slasher fans but unlikely to appeal to anybody not already invested in the genre.
Flickering Myth Rating – Film: ★ ★ / Movie: ★ ★ ★
Chris Ward
Originally published November 7, 2016. Updated April 15, 2018.
