Daphne (Spaceballs) Zuniga is a sorority pledge who must spend the night in her parents’ department store with her sisters as part of her initiation. Too bad there’s an escaped lunatic lurking about who’s stabbing everybody in the throat with a three-pronged garden trowel. Gee, do you think this ominous figure could be somehow connected to all those bad dreams Zuniga’s been having lately?
Produced by the creators of the Buck Rogers TV show, The Initiation starts off with a scene of Clu Gulager banging Vera Miles, and let me tell you, it’s far and away the scariest part of this movie. Sadly, this is one of those deals that is made of scrap parts of other horror films and then patchworked together in a half-assed fashion. Among the cliched plot elements are an escaped killer, nightmare sequences, dream analysis, and long-buried family secrets. Oh, yeah, and there’s a sorority initiation too. There’s so much going on in the flick that it almost forgets what it’s about.
Which is a shame because once the action switches over to the shopping mall, The Initiation turns into a decent little slasher. Heck, I even dug the last-minute twist ending. It’s just that the first fifty minutes or so is rough going at times.
Zuniga does a fine job, all things considered. Her character actually is allowed to have a little personality, which is a nice change of pace. Future soap star Hunter Tyler also helps to brighten things up as Zuniga’s plucky pal. Gulager is always a welcome presence in something like this, even if he doesn’t stick around very long. Miles looks slightly embarrassed to be there (this came out the year after Psycho 2), but the pay must’ve been pretty good because she doesn’t phone it in.
The gore is OK too. The garden trowel kills are moderately bloody, but it’s nothing that would get gorehounds’ pulses racing. To make up for that fact, we get a little T & A, although not enough to bump this up to *** territory.
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