Schlock Corridor: Day Eight

SCHLOCK CORRIDOR: The Initiation

The Initiation is a pretty unremarkable slasher flick from the 1980's, a decade oversaturated with films of that ilk. Shit got out of control back in the day, and everyone and their landscaper was out on the streets with a nubile young "actress" and a bottle of red-dyed corn syrup, trying to capture the magic of a Halloween or a Friday The 13th on film or (shudder) video. But how many of these movies do we hold in high esteem today? Not very many. To be fair, there will always be a small contingent of people who inexplicably cherish also-rans like The House On Sorority Row or April Fool's Day, but most folks don't even remember that these movies exist. In the end, every movie finds its audience, even if that audience consists of one contrarian asshole who maintains that New Year's Evil is some kind of misunderstood masterpiece, and there's nothing to be done about it.

1984's The Initiation, directed by the late Larry Stewart, introduces nothing new or particularly interesting to the slasher sub-genre, but it's too competently acted and directed to be considered a bad example of the form, resting firmly in the middle of that well-worn cinematic road. It's the film equivalent of a shrug. The main plot follows a young college student named Kelly (Daphne Zuniga) as she endures the "Hell Week" initiation process at the Delta Ro Kai sorority, while attempting to uncover the truth behind a childhood trauma that has rendered her unable to remember her formative years. She is haunted by a recurring dream, watching a strange man make love to her mother before attempting to stab him in a fit of rage and screaming bloody murder as he rolls into a fireplace and burns before her eyes. Pretty much standard boilerplate, then.

She falls in like with a campus T.A. named Peter (James Read), who wants to crawl inside of her head and rewire her brain to make her a well-adjusted girl. He's training to become a therapist, and keeps name-dropping Sigmund Freud and Carl Jung in an effort to trick people into thinking he knows what he's talking about. Kelly and her friends are tasked with sneaking into the monolithic shopping mall owned by her wealthy father to charm the uniform off the overnight security guard as a culmination of their initiation, but it's really just an excuse for the established members of the sorority to follow them around and scare the bejesus out of them. A psychotic killer ruins all the fun by murdering just about everybody who dares to show their face onscreen, seriously screwing up Kelly's social life in the process.

The big twist in the film involves that pesky recurring dream, wouldn't you know? You see, it wasn't really a dream at all! I know you're shocked, but I need you to stick with me, here. The strange man who burned in her mommy's bedroom was actually her biological father, and the man she's been calling "daddy" all these years is actually some slimy usurper played by Clu Gulager! Her real father's been in a mental institution all these years, and he escaped to wreak bloody vengeance on... Kelly's friends? Holy shit, DOUBLE TWIST!!!! Kelly's real daddy wasn't the killer at all! It was actually Kelly's forgotten twin sister Terry, who was also in the mental institution and also broke out, and she's been killing everybody Kelly knows because she wants to Single White Female her not-crazy sister, claiming the poor girl's life as her own. But it's okay, because Kelly's mom (Vera Miles) pops up like an adolescent boner in Algebra class to shoot crazy Terry in the back, saving her very confused favorite daughter Kelly just in the nick of time. That's it, really. No big deal.

I don't know what I'm supposed to say about The Initiation. It was a movie, it was around 90 minutes in length, it had actors reciting lines in front of a 35mm camera, and it culminated in a mind-numbing sequence of Daphne Zuniga running through an empty mall like a stray dog, bumping into a bunch of dead bodies and screaming quite a bit. It is what it is, and it did its job well enough not to be insulting, but it never managed to get a rise out of me, preferring to just occur in sequence until it  ended and I sat in the dark, trying to recall what I had just seen. I actually spent most of the movie recognizing cast members from other films and TV shows and remembering how much more I liked them in those other things.

Former Miss Kansas Vera Miles is probably best known for her roles in Psycho, The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, and The Searchers, a true Hollywood legend. I was shocked to see her appear in this film, top-billed in her relatively minor role as Daphne Zuniga's mother. Watching this movie just reminded me that I need to see Wichita again.

Return Of The Living Dead's Clu fucking Gulager is second-billed for his role as the fake father, but he dies thirty minutes into the damned movie, and never has a chance to actually do anything, aside from speak to his never-seen mistress over the phone in one brief sequence. I'm not even sure why this scene is included, because it never leads anywhere. I think maybe it was provided to give Kelly a motive to kill the old man, because she's seen overhearing the conversation, and the movie very briefly toys with the idea that maybe Kelly is suffering from dissociative disorder and is in fact responsible for all of the murders, which would have made absolutely no fucking sense if proven to be true. Either way, Clu Gulager deserved better than this.

James Read, who plays Kelly's headshrinker boytoy, will always be Victor Bennett to me. Who, you may ask? Why, none other than the father of the Charmed Ones in that classic WB television series Charmed! I have nothing else to add here, I'm just glad to have the opportunity to mention my beloved Charmed, because the heart wants what the heart wants.

And that leaves me with Marilyn Kagan, who portrayed Kelly's best pal Marcia. She's easily the best of all the young actresses in the film, demonstrating a natural presence and charisma that is lacking in her peers. Her character is a happy-go-lucky sort at first glance, but her benign exterior is masking the wounds left behind by a terrible trauma that rivals Kelly's own deep dark secret. Her burgeoning romance with a fellow student named Ralph is the most believable and endearing relationship in the film, easily crushing the coupling of Kelly and Peter, two characters with no chemistry played by two actors with no chemistry. So of course as soon as everything's coming up roses in Marcia's love life, she gets brutally murdered by Kelly's evil twin sister in a freight elevator.

A better movie would have followed Marcia as the primary protagonist, because she's a more interesting character, portrayed by an actress with something resembling range. Daphne Zuniga just doesn't have much to work with, if I'm being honest. This was an early role, sure, and she was only just starting out in the film business, but I've never been terribly impressed by her performances. She's a serviceable actress, and that's about it. Now for a slasher movie, that's a pretty common trait among the so-called "final girls", so it's hard to complain about it here, but I can't help but imagine a better version of The Initiation with Marilyn Kagan in the lead role.

She was great in Foxes, by the way, holding her own opposite a very young Jodie Foster. And she also plays a relatively small but certainly memorable role in a little-remembered 1986 film called The Ladies Club, concerning victims of rape who band together to dish out their own brand of justice on sexual predators who escape the clutches of Johnny Law. Here's a hint: it rhymes with "castration". Now there's a memorable fucking movie! I'd rather talk about that than The Initiation, and that's the problem. This film is perfectly fine for what it is, nothing more and nothing less. It's the worst kind of movie to talk about, really, because there's really nothing to talk about.

The Initiation is okay. And sometimes that's the worst sin of all.

TOMORROW: Legion Of The Dead