In 1984, a young woman who suffers from terrible nightmares is stalked by a killer with a badly burned face and a desire for revenge. She goes to a dream lab where, after talking about the science of dreams and REM sleep, she is hooked up to machines while dreaming. The killer stalks and kills her friends, including dragging one of them off-camera by the ankles and there's a chase in a boiler room.
Ah. So
The Initiation is just a ripoff of
A Nightmare On Elm Street. Guess I should have known. End of review.
Not so fast!
The Initiation was released, including runs in California where Wes Craven lived at the time, two months
before shooting on
A Nightmare On Elm Street began. What were you stealing, Wes?
Of course, all of this could, I guess, be coincidence, but man...
It's pretty much even the same makeup just not as much, give the man some "fingerknives" and... I mean, the young woman with nightmares that tie into the murderer, the dream lab and all the dream talk (some of which is almost the exact same language as the same scene in ANoES), the burned killer from the nightmare specifically targeting the dreamer and working his way through her friends to her, the boiler room, we see the killer pick up a supine female victim's ankles and drag her off camera... I mean, that is a shot I have only ever seen in one other movie in my life and that movie started filming like 50-60 days after this opened.
Might just be an odd coincidence but man it's sure hard to believe it.
Why am I focusing on this instead of the movie?
Easy, because the movie is bad. Really bad.
Really bad dialogue, pretty bad characters, and you really can tell when they switched directors as the scenes at the asylum had me thinking, “Well, this does have a certain low-budget flair,” and then it just became really bland and pedestrian. The first guy seemed to have some imagination and the second guy just seemed to be directing a TV episode.
The idea was "an inexpensive slasher that takes place in a shopping mall" per wikipedia, and the writer whipped this out. And it shows. It's really just an excuse for the killer to have a
lot of different random weapons because that was the original
Friday the 13th formula. But, like, really, if you’re a killer and you already have a big knife, why would you then go find and use a hatchet? And then if you have a knife and a hatchet why would you use a f*cking bow and arrow? From like ten feet away? And then if you have a knife
and a hatchet
and a bow and arrow... now you’re gonna use a
speargun? A SPEARGUN?! Because that's what they did in
F13? Though I have to say, what a mall!
It doesn't help that the acting is pretty atrocious here and even Daphne Zuniga, whose job it is to carry this movie, falls dreadfully flat when it counts.
Yes, you, you're not good.
Ultimately, I will give the movie that it's final reveal, while somewhat expected, is not a bad idea but then Zuniga just isn't a good enough actress to carry it, honestly. It requires her to be better and she's just not.
I gotta be honest, I would call this almost a complete waste of time. Now that neither
The Prowler nor
Prom Night are my
Worst Slasher Ever I’ve been lost.
Thank god
The Initiation found me.
PS - I just had to share this bit that's a good example of how bad the script actually is. I guess it was an attempt to develop one of the peripheral characters but first of all why and second of all why this?
WARNING: "Maybe not spoiler-tag worthy but sheesh." spoilers below
Late in the film one girl decides to tell everyone the reason everyone thinks she’s a virgin. It's because she hasn’t had sex since she was raped when she was 12 years old.
Ok, that's heavy, this movie took a turn. But it turns back when one of the guys she told, who's been trying to sleep with her throughout the movie, immediately hits on her, you know, to cheer her up. And she says it does cheer her up and so naturally they have sex immediately… which apparently saves her from her trauma and now she's gonna be happy, yay! Except that he is then immediately murdered in her arms (with the aforementioned speargun) so the only two times she has sex in her life she wass raped and her positive partner was murdered. And then her friend tells her not to think about it. Thank god for her she is promptly murdered.
And just because we were so good at this stuff in the 80s, here is the rape-victim going to a costume party with the guy who eventually saves her with sex dressed as...
... a giant penis. Yay, 80s!
Late in the film one girl decides to tell everyone the reason everyone thinks she’s a virgin. It's because she hasn’t had sex since she was raped when she was 12 years old.
Ok, that's heavy, this movie took a turn. But it turns back when one of the guys she told, who's been trying to sleep with her throughout the movie, immediately hits on her, you know, to cheer her up. And she says it does cheer her up and so naturally they have sex immediately… which apparently saves her from her trauma and now she's gonna be happy, yay! Except that he is then immediately murdered in her arms (with the aforementioned speargun) so the only two times she has sex in her life she wass raped and her positive partner was murdered. And then her friend tells her not to think about it. Thank god for her she is promptly murdered.
And just because we were so good at this stuff in the 80s, here is the rape-victim going to a costume party with the guy who eventually saves her with sex dressed as...
... a giant penis. Yay, 80s!
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