The thing I miss the most about the heyday of the ’80s slasher movie is that there were so many of them that eventually filmmakers had to start finding ways to shake up the formula and continually introduce weirder and weirder stuff. That's not to say that all of these movies were necessarily "good," but that they managed to be distinctive within a sub-genre known for its sameness. For as good as horror is today—and we are in a really good place for horror—there is no one corner of the genre that is so prevalent as the slasher once was that inspires various permutations. We don't get a Sleepaway Camp or a Blood Rage much anymore. The reasons for this are ultimately positive and encouraging—the current crop of horror films are so vastly different from one another that we avoid this phenomenon—but it still makes me miss that Golden Age of Crazy that we got in the ’80s.
Firmly entrenched in said Golden Age is The Initiation, a 1984 slasher directed by Larry Stewart and featuring the big screen debut of Daphne Zuniga in a starring role (she had already appeared in a supporting role in another college-themed horror movie, The Dorm That Dripped Blood, two years prior). She plays Kelly, a college co-ed plagued by horrible nightmares in which she sees her mother (Vera Miles, slumming) in bed with another man (Clu Gulager, slumming far less), and then another man is set on fire. She's also in the process of rushing a sorority, which requires her and some other kids to spend the night in a department store as part of the initiation. I have literally never heard of any initiation like this for any sorority, but I wasn't cool in college (or before college, or now). Wouldn't you know that a slasher crashes the party and starts killing a bunch of them?
To get into all the ways that The Initiation ends up being crazy would require spoilers, which I won't provide here. Like the similarly nutty Blood Rage (okay, Blood Rage is nuttier... way nuttier), the movie has to reinvent certain slasher tropes to stand out. It is more successful in some ways than others. The whole "teens locked in a mall overnight" is reminiscent of movies like Night of the Comet and Chopping Mall (even though the latter came after The Initiation), and the kills themselves aren't necessarily more inventive or interesting than your everyday slash-and-stab, but the weird psychological detours the screenplay takes (by Charles Pratt Jr., who has spent most of his career writing and producing both daytime and primetime soap operas) are what give the movie color.
The presence of both Vera Miles and Clu Gulager also gives the project an air of authenticity—they are genre royalty, after all—but both actors contribute what are essentially extended cameos. The movie belongs to the young cast. They, too, are mostly generic, save maybe for future soap star Hunter Tylo and, of course, Daphne Zuniga, who doesn't quite pop off the screen the way she would a year later in The Sure Thing, but who still manages to stand apart from the rest of the actors by projecting a quiet intelligence. She feels like some sort of "other" compared to the horny co-eds surrounding her, which works out perfectly for the story being told.
Arrow's Blu-ray is another in their growing line of first-rate editions for movies of which I can't believe we're getting first-rate editions; it's been given a new 2K scan and a 1080 HD makeover so that it looks, while not brand new, better than it has ever appeared, to be sure. There's a commentary track included from the members of The Hysteria Continues podcast (the second I've heard from them, as they're also on the Night Train to Terror commentary) that was recorded over Skype and is somewhat spotty as a result. Also included is the original trailer, a single deleted scene, and some brand new interviews with writer Charles Pratt Jr. and actors Christopher Bradley and Joy Jones. Sadly, there is no Zuniga to be found.
As both a fan and a student of ’80s slashers, I'm all in on a movie like The Initiation. While not quite the rediscovered gem of, say, The Burning or the aforementioned Blood Rage, it's an entry in the genre that's better than some of its better-known brethren (cough, Prom Night, cough) and worthy of being a bigger part of the slasher conversation. I love the titles that Arrow is choosing to restore and I love the treatment they're giving these movies, recognizing that while not conventional classics, these are the kinds of films that mean a lot to some of us. Plus, if you're as much a Zuniga fan as I am, this movie's got more of her than it can handle.
Movie Score: 3/5, Disc Score: 3.5/5
Patrick lives in Chicago, where he has been writing about film since 2004. A member of the Chicago Film Critics Association and the Online Film Critics Society, Patrick's writing also appears on About.com, DVDVerdict.com and fthismovie.net, the site he runs and hosts a weekly podcast.
He has been an obsessive fan of horror and genre films his entire life, watching, re-watching and studying everything from the Universal Monsters of the '30s and '40s to the modern explosion of indie horror. Some of his favorites include Dr. Jekyll & Mr. Hyde (1931), Dawn of the Dead (1978), John Carpenter's The Thing and The Funhouse. He is a lover of Tobe Hooper and his favorite Halloween film is part 4. He knows how you feel about that. He has a great wife and two cool kids, who he hopes to raise as horror nerds.
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