Review: Initiation

During pledge week at a college campus, a top campus swimming star (Froy Gutierrez) is found brutally murdered. His sister (Lindsay LaVanchy) starts to wonder if his death is in some way connected to a possible sexual assault of a friend of hers at a frat party they all attended. And then more bodies start to turn up. Yancy Butler plays a detective, Lochlyn Munro is the college chancellor.

 

Boozy, sorority hazing crap and wannabe “Scream” meets “Happy Death Day” goings on in a film from 2021? Aren’t we beyond all of that at this point? Apparently not. This horror flick from director John Berardo (who mostly comes from a background in shorts) doesn’t bring anything fresh or interesting to the mix unless you count possible sexual assault on a college campus. After 26 minutes not one damn thing has happened aside from a lot of boozing and toking, and that potential sexual assault. To that latter point, if the filmmakers think they’re doing something new and profound in the genre with it, they’re sadly mistaken. I get the feeling they thought they were being clever and trendy here but the filmmakers never take things to an interesting or worthy place. In the current cultural climate I think it’s a bit of a risk to engage in themes of sexual assault in what is a very gimmicky horror surrounding, and I don’t think it was worth the risk here. Anyway, someone finally does get murdered (followed by a slasher movie killing spree) and while I didn’t expect it to be that character, I can’t say I cared either because these characters are awful and vacuous and the film had already taken too damn long to get off the ground. Meanwhile, Mr. Director thinks he’s clever giving us cute messaging bubble graphics, which get old and annoying within 5 minutes.

 

Lead actress (and co-writer) Lindsay LaVanchy is pretty decent, but the other performances are fairly awful including familiar faces Lochlyn Munro and Yancy Butler who have seen much better days. The worst offender is an actress named Shireen Lai, who is so lethargic and monotone you’d swear she had just been woken up before every take (It’s her debut film and it shows). The whole film is woefully lethargic, lacking any pulse or tension whatsoever. There’s quite a bit of blood, but much of it is post-mortem, so gorehounds won’t get much out of this either. As to the mystery, there are so many red herrings and potential suspects for the sake of it that you won’t even care who it really is, because no matter who it won’t really be a surprise. I also don’t think the film ultimately plays fair there anyway (for reasons I cannot disclose).

 

What a lousy, clichéd, lethargic, and unnecessary film. The screenplay is by LaVanchy, Brian Frager (who co-produced), and the director. It seems I’m a lone dissenting voice on this one, I just think it has more ambition than the people involved have talent to create something worthy with those ambitions.

 

Rating: D+

 

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