Movie Review: The Initiation (1984, New World/Arrow Video)

 ...alright, folks!! Let's see a raise of hands out there, whose partial joy of one's bygone high school years, was spent hanging out with friends, at the local shopping mall. With a hand elatedly raised high, yes, this viewer most assuredly engaged in this adolescent ritual...a demandant after-school prerequisite...a cartel of your best buds, or on some nights, just your best gal...a mass invasion of the food court...checking out the record stores and game shops...emptying a pocketful of quarters, obliterating asteroids, saving monkey-enslaved princesses and chomping on ghost-guarded power pills, at the arcade...and seeing the latest blood-spattered horror flickage at the multiplex. In a time when one's first taste of splattery cinema was the one-two-three punch of the original "Halloween", "Dawn of the Dead" & "Friday the 13th", and the onslaught of horror films to come, was just short of emphasizing a preponderance of holiday-based horrors (...jeez, didn't any holiday miss the ravages of horror filmmakers?? Oh wait...hey, how about that?? Arbor Day wasn't touched...horror filmmakers, take note), the idealist possibility of horrible horrors at a shopping mall weren't fully and wholly considered (...even after the siege of Romero zombies), especially after the more reflectively exuberant fun of hanging out at the mall was joyously upheld, with a certain little comedy ditty, in and the about the area of fictional Ridgemont High. That all changed, in the excellent '80's, when even a wayward and nocturnally covert jaunt at a shopping mall or department store proved to be quite horrific...even deadly, in notables like 1984's "Night of the Comet", 1986's "Chopping Mall", 1988's "Hide and Go Shriek", 1987's "The Outing" (...oh, OK...that was a museum, not a mall), as well as a quaint and underappreciated little whodunit slasher entry from 1984, entitled "The Initiation"...

Movie Review: Uninvited (1988, Greydon Clark)

Greydon Clark's exploitation resume to many (including this fan) is quite exceptional. A few favorites of mine from the genre director include Black Shampoo, Without Warning and a movie where my pre-pubescent eyes saw his first pair of titties, Joysticks. Clark also helmed one of the only good killer cat flicks with the 1988 schlock-fest Uninvited that's available now from Cheezy Flicks Entertainment.

Not to be confused with the classic The Uninvited starring Ray Milland, this Z-grade piece of genius involves a mutant kitty who after killing a group of scientists at a lab flees for the comfort of a mobster's yacht. The mobster and his goons (including the great George Kennedy) battle the feline monster so it doesn't make Fancy Feast out of the lot.