Initiation, The (1984)

Directed by:
Larry Stewart

It started with fifteen and now it's down to just four. Who said being a sorority pledge was easy? It's definitely not when you're a sorority pledge in a horror flick. First you have to get naked and then you have to die. Sorry ladies, but those are the rules. At the mercy of mean pledge leader Megan (Frances Peterson), the latest crop of new inductees at the Delta Rho Chi house has been narrowed down to just a few. There's virtuous nice girl Marcia (Marilyn Kagan), slutty Alison ("Deborah Morehart" aka future soap opera star Hunter Tylo), reluctant Beth (Paula Knowles) and the troubled Kelly (Daphne Zuniga). Kelly has been having a recurring nightmare featuring a little girl walking in on her parents having sex and then stabbing her dad before another man barges and is accidentally caught on fire. 300 miles away, we pay a visit to the Fireside Sanitarium; a place full of cliché horror movie nutcase behavior. Moving down our checklist, we can mark off "Woman staring at a turned-off TV screen," "Woman pretending to knit" "Man who drools and licks the walls" "Woman sucking thumb and staring at a pencil," "Woman whose face we never see because she figures into the plot" and of course that old stand-by "Guy in football helmet hitting himself on the head with a ping pong paddle over and over again." A man (Robert Dowdell) with serious fire damage to his face and body lurks around outside clutching a three-pronged garden claw. He sneaks in later that night to let all of the patients out. Someone murders the bitchy Nurse Ratched wanna-be and steals her car.

Because of her nightmares, graduate student / psychology professor Peter Adams (James Read), who's working on his "doctorate in parapsychology," begins hooking Kelly up to machinery and trying to analyze her "classic Freudian dream." He and his research assistant (Joy Jones) soon come to the conclusion that this isn't a nightmare, but a flashback. It seems Kelly's wealthy parents; Frances (Vera Miles) and Dwight (Clu Gulager) Fairchild, have been hiding a few things from their daughter. Dad doesn't get to relay much info because he's stabbed and decapitated with a machete when he tries to sneak off to see his mistress. Mom, however, doesn't want her daughter being examined or for her to see Peter any more for fear that the secret will be revealed. Either way, whoever escaped from the nuthouse is lurking around and ready to spill some blood... and just in time for the big sorority initiation. Their final challenge is to break into Kelly's father's department store (which is actually more like a multi-level office building) and somehow get their hands on the night watchman's uniform. But that's OK. As Alison points out, he's rumored to be "a real stud hung like a mule or something." Too bad he's pronged to death before they get to find out for sure.

Kelly, Marcia and Alison are all locked in the store, Megan and three frat guys sneak inside in an attempt to scare them and the killer shows up to do them all in. There's death by axe to the head, arrow, slit throat and a garden variety stabbing. One girl confesses being raped by her violin teacher when she was 12 years old and then trades one traumatic sexual experience for another when the first guy she willingly gives herself to is shot dead with a harpoon gun immediately afterward. The melted-faced groundskeeper shows up, as does another surprise guest. After his assistant hits the library to do some research, Peter rushes to the Fairchild home to alert Frances and then to the mall in an effort to save Kelly.

The Initiation is yet another interchangeable, forgettable slasher flick from the early 80s. Production values, score and photography are all OK, and there's enough blood, death and nudity for one of these things, but the storyline is far too predictable and whatever twists it has to offer up are poorly telegraphed in advance. Even the attempt for a last-minute shock is pretty easy to figure out. The acting is all over-the-place; ranging from OK (Miles, Gulager, Read) to flat out terrible (most of the younger cast). Though clearly still in need of some experience before the cameras, star Zuniga is pretty and appealing enough. She seemed poised for stardom after snagging lead roles in the popular teen comedy The Sure Thing (1986) and the successful Star Wars spoof Spaceballs (1987) right after this, but the string of poor / mediocre films - Last Rites (1988), The Fly II (1989), Gross Anatomy (1989) - that followed doomed her to TV work thereafter. She's probably now best known for her role on the nighttime soap Melrose Place.

★★

Beast from 20,000 Fathoms, The (1953)

... aka: Dinosaur in New York

... aka: Monster from Beneath the Sea

... aka: Panic in New York

Directed by:

Eugène Lourié

A hydrogen bomb blast in the arctic has unleashed a giant, aquatic "prehistoric beast" (aka Rhedosaurus) and it's about to do some major damage! Swiss Scientist Tom Nesbitt (Paul Christian) is the only living human to actually encounter the monster while working on "Operation Experiment" in the arctic and ends up with a broken leg after it knocks him into a ravine. He's rushed back to a New York City hospital where doctors there label his recollections of the beast as "traumatic hallucinations." After reading about a sea monster sinking a ship in St. Pierre, Nova Scotia, Tom sneaks out of the hospital and seeks help from paleontologist Thurgood Elson (Cecil Kellaway), who initially doubts Tom's theory about the monster being able to survive for 100 millions in a block of ice before becoming unfrozen. Elson's assistant - scientist Lee Hunter (Paula Raymond) - decides to kick things into motion when she has Tom and one of the survivors of a boat attack both pick out pictures of the beast they saw. That, along with various other sightings and attacks, all leading down the East Coast headed toward the United States, is enough proof to get Elson to enlist other scientists and military men, the latter lead by army colonel Jack Evans (Kenneth Tobey) on a sea expedition to locate the dino. Their attempts prove futile and they're unable to stop the beast before it emerges in New York harbor and then goes on a rampage.

The dino tears apart a lighthouse, breaks up a shark vs. octopus fight (by eating both of them) and consumes a diving bell with one of the principal characters on board. But the really great stuff comes when he crashes into the Big Apple, starts stomping on everything, eats a policeman, picks up a car in its mouth and then drops it, buries people under a pile of rubble after crashing through a brick building and destroys a roller coaster, not to mention causing screaming people to stampede over a blind man! It's also revealed that the monster has toxic blood that can kill humans on contact. After the monster's first sweep, a newspaper headline says "180 known dead; 1500 injured. Damage estimated at 300,000,000." And then the stupid military, like they always do, have to come in and spoil all our fun by shooting a bazooka at it, trying to electrocute it and finally having marksman Lee Van Cleef shoot a radioactive isotope missile into its wound.

This is clearly one of the very best '50s monster flicks and obviously a big inspiration for the obscenely popular Japanese Godzilla series that started just one year later, as well as numerous other films made across the globe during the later part of the decade. The movie's chief drawing card, of course, are the spectacular Ray Harryhausen special effects, which are outstanding for their time and still hold up surprisingly well today. Hell, give me Ray's charming stop-motion monsters any day of the week over the cartoonish CGI of today. At least his fx have some personality to them.

On a meager budget of just 200,000 dollars, this went on to gross over 5 million, making it one of the biggest box office successes of its year. Director Lourié (who also co-scripted from a Ray Bradbury story) was a "jack of all trades" in the entertainment industry, serving as a production designer / art director on numerous features, and also dabbling in other production areas. He'd direct several other films; The Colossus of New York (1958), The Giant Behemoth (1959) and Gorgo (1961), all of which were about giant monsters or beings. Lead actor Christian (real name Paul Hubschmid) apparently became "the first Swiss film star" back in the late 1930s and had a very successful career in Germany, though he's virtually unknown here in America except for this film.

The cast also includes many familiar faces from 50s sci-fi/horror, including Donald Woods (13 Ghosts), Steve Brodie (Donovan's Brain), Ross Elliott (Tarantula), King Donovan (Invasion of the Body Snatchers) as a psychiatrist and an uncredited James Best, who'd go on to star in THE KILLER SHREWS (1959) and play "Rosco P. Coltrane" on The Dukes of Hazard. Merv Griffin provides the voice of a radio announcer and Vera Miles appears in the trailer but not in the actual film itself.

★★★1/2