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: The Vineyard (1989, New World/Arrow)

...as might be the same to some of you fine genre-loving film freaks out there, this viewer has a good number of movies in his varied andf accumulated collection of films (...mine numbers in the 13,000's, as far as titles; how about yours, eh??), which on a whole, are not particularly great, and yet strangely still keepable in the sense that, in happenstance stumbling upon the odd, misfit of a film, when parousing for something else, one cannot help but irresistibly pull out and blow the dust off the oddball...dimly recalling how unremarkable it was, upon last viewing...and giving it another chance (...I mean, really...it couldn't have been THAT bad, right??)...perhaps even, in watching it in a different light, or a different mood, to find something sorely missed, on previous viewings. In the end, upon final credits roll, self-exclaiming, "...ah, now THAT'S why I found it so unremarkable..", putting it back in it's original, carefully preserved slot on the shelf...and yet, performing this whole ritual again, some months...even years later. Come on, you KNOW you do this, right?? Well, this viewer finds himself many a-time, doing this very thing...and in fact, in being afforded an opportunity to re-examine the rather odd, uneven and waywardly all-over-the-place 1986 horror flick, "The Vineyard", I was prepared and determined to find something in the film, this time around, to relish and embrace...to find that elusive sheen in the turd, so to speak. Uh, what was it, that someone once said about 'famous last words"??...