Worth Mentioning - The Quick Brown Fox Jumps Over the Lazy Dog

We watch several movies a week. Every Friday, we'll talk a little about some of the movies we watched that we felt were Worth Mentioning. 

Horror, comedy, swords, sorcery, and Arnold.

INITIATION (2020)

There have been a lot of movies about slashers knocking off students and faculty on college campuses, but John Berardo's feature directorial debut Initiation stands out as a rare slasher in that it puts a stronger focus on characters and drama than on the murder sequences. There is a masked slasher stalking the campus of Whiton University in this film, and it's great to see this character take out their victims, but I also didn't want them to kill some of these people because it threatened to get in the way of us getting all of the details about the dramatic story Berardo and co-writers Brian Frager and Lindsay LaVanchy were telling here.

LaVanchy also stars in the film as Kappa Kappa Tau sorority sister Ellery Scott, and she co-wrote a great role for herself. Ellery doesn't make a good first impression, coming off like a potentially annoying party girl, but she's quickly shown to have depth, while LaVanchy proves to have impressive acting skills. Trouble hits when the Kappa girls party with the boys of the Sigma Nu Pi fraternity, which Ellery's brother Wes (Froy Gutierrez) is part of. Although the older girls of the sorority are each paired with a younger girl to keep an eye on during the party, pairings that are said to be between "bigs" and "littles", Ellery loses track of her "little" Kylie (Isabella Gomez) long enough that when she catches up with her the girl is unconscious in a locked bedroom with both frat bro Beau (Gattlin Griffith) and Wes, who is acting very drunk and out of it.

The next day, Kylie says she feels like she was assaulted while she was unconscious in that bedroom, and this isn't an accusation that's taken lightly by the film or by Ellery. While Ellery takes it upon herself to figure out exactly what happened in that room, Wes starts acting strangely toward everyone around him, and Berardo leans heavily into the drama, so much so that this film really could have been satisfying if it had just continued playing out as a drama dealing with the serious issue of sexual assault on a college campus and the fact that Wes, an athlete and Olympic hopeful, has some protection against accusations like this because there are authority figures who don't want his reputation to be ruined. 

But Initiation doesn't just stay on that track. 32 minutes into the film's 97 minute running time, a masked slasher shows up on the scene - their reveal accompanied by a sound effect reminiscent of the "ki ki ki ma ma ma" sound from the Friday the 13th franchise - and starts knocking off characters who are connected to this potential sexual assault case. They don't rack up a huge body count, because Berardo continues to play up the drama and show off LaVanchy's range between the death scenes, but they do manage to remove multiple people from the story with their chosen murder method of a drill and screws, and it's a bloody good time.

Who's doing the killing? That's the question that carries us through the remaining hour of the film, and Berardo and his collaborators do a good job of keeping us wondering and guessing. Ellery's strange co-worker Tyler (Maxwell Hamilton) seems like a prime suspect, but then again, why would he care about killing these people? As the investigation goes on, prolific character actor Lochlyn Munro gets some screen time as the school chancellor - yep, Munro has aged up from being the "kick me in the junk" guy in Dead Man on Campus to being the head of a school; Yancy Butler plays a detective trying to solve the mystery; and Jon Huertas comes off well as a caring police officer. Slasher fans may also recognize the actress who plays the chancellor's assistant: that's Debra De Liso from The Slumber Party Massacre!

Initiation is a well made, interesting film, a good slasher that gets Berardo's career off to a promising start and leaves me looking forward to seeing what LaVanchy will do in the future. As mentioned, the only problem I had with any of it is that the killing of certain characters kind of got in the way of us learning exactly what happened in that alleged assualt situation... but there's enough information given that we can fill in the blanks, and I'd say it's a good thing when you're so involved with the story being told in a slasher movie that the deaths are inconvenient.

The review of Initiation originally appeared on ArrowintheHead.com

STRIPES (1981)

There's an established tradition of comedy teams making films where their characters join the Army. The Three Stooges, Abbott and Costello, Martin and Lewis, they all did Army movies. So it makes sense that Meatballs director Ivan Reitman thought "Cheech and Chong in the Army" was a fine idea for a movie. It nearly happened. The project was in the works, the script was written by Len Blum and Dan Goldberg... but then it fell apart over deal specifics. Reitman didn't give up on his Army comedy, though. He just had the script rewritten so the lead characters could be played by Meatballs star Bill Murray and Animal House and Meatballs co-writer Harold Ramis - who also did some work on the script for the film that would end up being called Stripes.

Murray's character is irreverent slacker John Winger, who decides to join the Army after a bad day where he walked away from his job as a cab driver in Louisville, Kentucky, his car was repossessed, and his girlfriend dumped him. His friend Russell Ziskey (Ramis) suggests he join a monastery again, but Winger responds, "Did you ever see a monk get wildly f---ed by teenage girls?" Which does not strike me as something the lead would say in a comedy made forty years later.

Winger is able to convince Ziskey to join him in the Army rather easily, and most of the film follows them through basic training at Fort Arnold, where their fellow recruits include characters played by John Candy, John Diehl, Conrad Dunn, and Judge Reinhold. They make up a strong comedy ensemble, and they're put through the paces by the great Warren Oates as drill sergeant Hulka. As you would expect, Winger instantly butts heads with this authority figure, and the conflict between them is a big part of the story.

Also present on the base is John Larroquette as Captain Stillman, who isn't a big fan of Winger and his goofy cohorts, either. But unlike Hulka, Stillman does some ridiculous and inappropriate things himself. Winger and Ziskey do a lot of things they shouldn't, like head out to a club to witness and perhaps partake in some mud wrestling, but luckily they're kept out of serious trouble because they strike up relationships with a pair of female MPs, Halloween's P.J. Soles as Stella Hansen and Sean Young as Louise Cooper.

You might think the movie is structured to end with the graduation ceremony, and that is perfectly set up to be the ending since Winger and Ziskey step up to lead their platoon through the routine. They must have learned something about responsibility by then, right? Well, not so much, and that's why we get an extended, action-heavy epilogue with the guys driving around Europe in a military vehicle that's loaded with weaponry and disguised as an RV.

Much like its lead characters, Stripes can sometimes feel like it's wandering along aimlessly, but in the end it all ties together as a really entertaining comedy. I also have a large dose of nostalgia for this one, as I have memories of watching it on cable with my maternal grandmother when I was a child back in the '80s.

The theatrical cut of Stripes is 106 minutes, but if you really like the movie and want more of it, there's also a 123 minute cut available, with a whole extra sequence involving a bunch of drugs (possibly left over from the Cheech and Chong draft) and an accidental trip to South America.

SALEM'S LOT (1979)

The first thing Tobe Hooper had the chance to direct after his breakthrough film The Texas Chainsaw Massacre was Eaten Alive, which definitely was not a project that allowed Hooper to prove much about himself. As cool and weird as it was, it was another low budget backwoods horror movie, and Hooper had already shown how good he was at making something like that. But a few years later, he got a chance to do something major, as he was able to take the helm of a three hour television mini-series adaptation of Salem's Lot, a novel by a popular, relatively new-on-the-scene author named Stephen King. While his previous films had been small stories with few locations, Salem's Lot documents the crumbling of an entire town after a vampire moves in.

There are so many characters in Salem's Lot, almost the entire first hour of the mini-series is dedicated to introducing these people and establishing their personal situations. The show does not get off to an exciting start. But if you can get through that first hour, Hooper will reward you with some fantastic horror visuals in the remaining two hours.

The story centers on author Ben Mears (David Soul) - a King story where the lead character is a writer, how rare! - who has come back to his hometown of Salem's Lot, Maine with the intention of writing about the Marsten House, a house that has been the site of deaths and the home of murderers, and is rumored to be haunted. Mears believes the house itself is evil, and that it draws evil people to it. Which would explain why the latest buyer of the property turns out to be a bloodsucker. That buyer is Kurt Barlow (Reggie Nalder), who was a regular looking person in King's novel, but looks like an even more terrifying version of Nosferatu in the mini-series, which was an excellent choice as far as I'm concerned. With the help of his human familiar Richard Straker (James Mason), Barlow starts sucking his way through Salem's Lot on the same night he arrives in town, and soon there are vampires all over the place.

Hooper did an incredible job making these vamps come off as creepy and intimidating as possible, whether the scene involves Barlow, or vampire children floating outside second story windows, or a woman rising from her slab in the morgue. When Geoffrey Lewis's character, gravedigger Mike Ryerson, becomes a vampire (after feeling the urge to jump down into a vampire's grave before he fills it in), some of his movements and facial expressions are more amusing than scary, but for the most part the vampire scenes are excellent.

Mears does his best to try to stop the vampirism from spreading, and gets help from some locals - his love interest Susan Norton (Bonnie Bedelia), horror-loving youth Mark Petrie (Lance Kerwin), schoolteacher Jason Burke (Lew Ayres), Susan's father Bill (Ed Flanders) - but this stuff spreads quickly.

Salem's Lot is a good mini-series (now presented as a long movie on home video), although the dramatic character scenes in this often feel a bit flat and dull to me. That can make it tough for me to sit through at times, but things really come alive whenever there's a vampire on the screen. Hooper did a fine job with this, and soon he was working with Universal on The Funhouse and Steven Spielberg on Poltergeist.

RED SONJA (1985)

Red Sonja is a fantasy adventure epic told in just 88 minutes. Want to hear some back story on the titular heroine, played by Brigitte Nielsen? Red Sonja will give you her back story - and it gets that stuff out of the way in the first three minutes, turning turns what I have to imagine was meant to be an actual scene into a quick exposition dump montage. Sonja was propositioned by the evil Queen Gedren (Sandahl Bergman) of Berkubane, the land of perpetual night. When Sonja turned her down, the Queen had Sonja's parents and brother killed. Sonja was raped and left for dead by Gedren's men, but as she lay in the forest she was visited by the goddess Scathach, who gave her the strength to guarantee her "sword arm has no equal" as she seeks to avenge herself and her family. Sonja has the strength, but she still has to spend some time training with a Swordmaster (Tad Horino).

Sonja has a sister named Varna (Janet Agren), a priestess who was apparently off with her order, serving under High Priestess Kendra (Donna Osterbuhr) when Gedren attacked the family home. Varna doesn't get away unscathed very long, though. The priestesses have in their possession a mystical talisman, which the God of Gods used to create the world. Now the talisman is becoming too powerful and threatens to destroy the world, so the priestesses must destroy it. This is something that must be done by women, because if a man tries to touch the talisman they get zapped out of existence. But before the priestesses can carry out their plan, the destruction ceremony is interrupted by Queen Gedren and her soldiers, who murder the priestesses - including Varna - and take the talisman so Gedren can use it for her own evil schemes.

The ceremony was supposed to be attended by Kalidor (Arnold Schwarzenegger), High Lord of Hyrkania, the kingdom that entrusted the priestesses with the talisman in the first place. He was running late, so he doesn't show up until after the talisman has been stolen and Varna is taking her last breaths. He finds Sonja and notifies her that her sister is dead, and that's when Sonja finally sets out to take down Queen Gedren.

During her journey to Berkubane, Sonja crosses paths with the spoiled young Prince Tarn (future Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles II star Ernie Reyes Jr.), whose kingdom Hablock was destroyed by the talisman-wielding Gedren, and Tarn's dedicated servant Falkon (Paul L. Smith). She and Kalidor also make a bit of a love connection along the way, but Sonja has vowed that she will never lie with a man unless he is able to defeat her in a fair swordfight. Which is tough to do when her sword arm has no equal.

Nielsen is the star, but Schwarzenegger has a substantial supporting role - which apparently came as a surprise to him. He thought he was going to be filming a small role for one week and ended up being on set for four weeks. A lot of actors would be happy to have a larger role than they thought they would have, but Schwarzenegger wasn't happy to be present for so much of Red Sonja. He has said it's the worst movie he's ever made, which I would disagree with, and at the premiere Maria Shriver told him, "If this doesn't kill your career, nothing will."

Red Sonja has a bad reputation, but I find it to be a fun and fast paced bit of sword and sorcery nonsense. Directed by Richard Fleischer from a script by Clive Exton and George MacDonald Fraser, it's short and quick and has plenty of action in it. Interestingly, the credits claim that the film is based on "the character created by" Conan creator Robert E. Howard, but that's not the case. Howard created a character with a similar name, but Red Sonja was actually created by Roy Thomas and Barry Windsor-Smith in the pages of the 1973 Marvel comic book Conan the Barbarian #23. Online trivia claims Schwarzenegger's role in the film was originally intended to be a Conan cameo, but the character was changed into Lord Kalidor due to rights issues.