Try watching some Christmas horrors. Really! I managed to make it through December of `05 watching the first three of the Silent Night, Deadly Night series! If you’ve never seen them, and you feel like you’re going to launch on a killing-spree before the ball drops on `07, give this technique a try. Nothing puts a twinkle in your eye while working amid the holiday retail madness than rewinding scene after bloody scene in your head from this sick trio. You’ll find yourself able to maneuver through the Holidays with a carefree detachment that others can only dream of achieving! This year, I’m continuing the merriment-marathon by viewing S.N.,D.N. 4 and 5.

Initiation is a Brian Yuzna-directed horror, and if anybody can shove Santa back up the chimney sideways, it’s Yuzna! You might even say he takes the Humbuggery to a whole new level (Initiation is known as Bugs in the UK, and for good reason)! Yuzna (and writers Arthur Gorson and Woody Keith) tap into the seriously underappreciated Christmas witch-market, too! Throw-in the always delightfully gory Screaming-Mad George FX and Clint Howard as “Ricky” (a role he was born for), and you’ve got a recipe for serious seasonal mirth.

"There in the streets, looks like a man..."

As much as I’d love to detail every wicked little nauseous nuance of Initiation, I will spare you. Long story short, beautiful Kim (Neith Hunter, who looks GREAT in just about every single frame of the movie-- including covered in vomit, metamorphosing into a giant grub, spontaneously combusting, the works!) plays a rookie reporter running up against the “glass ceiling” at work at the L.A. Eye (a TV station), and suddenly transfixed by a news story about an apparent suicide/burning death where the victim’s legs cooked like kindling while plunging off of a squat, three-story building. They even show the woman’s corpse on TV while Kim and her hotshot reporter-boyfriend, Hank (Tommy Hinkley) are having one of their lunch-hour trysts at a cheap motel.

Experiencing nothing but sexism from the boss (Reggie Bannister!) and his lackeys, Kim decides to pursue the story on her own. The (seemingly) only other woman at The Eye is the always wonderful Allyce Beasley (in all her glorious frumpiness!) as Janice the secretary, who slides Kim the address on a scrap of paper, and off she goes to play Brenda Starr at the crime-scene.

Once there, Kim has a weird encounter with Jo (Glen Chin), the big Asian butcher at Munn’s Fresh Meats, who helps her to some nuts from a damaged snack machine by handing her a bloody handful while grunting in broken English that the girl: “burned up real bad. Not from around here. Could be hooker.” So, with a handful of bloody nuts to snack on, Kim proceeds to where the woman met the sidewalk, around the corner of the building. The white police-tape marking where the body landed ends at torso-level, where it is replaced by black, charred leg-silhouettes on the pavement(!). Around another corner, and Kim wanders into the simply-named BOOKS store of Fima (played by the sensational Maud Adams, here at her leonine best), the immortal leader of a coven of witches who are in dire need of a new “daughter” for their bloody Winter Solstice ceremonies!!!

Whoops. Got a little ahead of things there. Sorry.

But really, that’s about all you need to keep in mind while you attempt to follow along with the rest of this thing, because from there on out, this movie careens from one freaky, hallucinatory scene to another, as Kim finds herself drawn into the spiral nightmare of Sisterhood that comes with joining these seemingly peaceful, “new-agey” priestesses (and their errand-boy, the almost show-stealing, repulsively dog-like Ricky).

"But something's wrong I just don't understand"

But, back to the FX! Did I mention hallucinatory? It’s a Yuzna film, with Screaming Mad George special effects, so I knew to be ready for anything, and what to expect as the real star of this show. Good thing, too, as the whole 60 minutes from where I left off above to the finish is just dripping with gore, covered in bugs, creepy with “faces” and “spirals” “appearing” seemingly everywhere, and so much bloody/trippy more. By the end, I didn’t even try to understand how the “faces”, giant maggots and roaches, orgies in meat-lockers, and squirming spaghetti-hands(!) were even tenuously connected. You won’t either.

Not when there’s Ricky, the grubby-looking ‘do-boy’ to contend with, too! Alternately pathetic and remorseless, Clint Howard shines in this thing! At one early point in the BOOKS shop, Fima and Kim are discussing Ricky, and how he needs to be institutionalized, and he is standing right there in front of them, like a goggle-eyed dog, panting, almost beatific in his need to play “Fetch!” with them. Ricky is also a B.& E. idiot-savant (seemingly), stealing into places throughout this thing like some sort of vile anti-Santa from the sewers. Together with his sociopathic “He hit me first”-notion of killing people after they find him in their homes, Ricky is a holiday boogeyman come to life. For all the other wonderfully weird happenings in Initiation, it would be a vastly inferior story without Clint Howard as Ricky.

As holiday-fare, Initiation gives Christmas the ultimate bitchslap by relegating the Season to the sidelines. When we do get a glimpse into warm, Christmassy homes complete with wreathes, lighted trees, and carols playing, it’s usually about to turn damned ugly for someone. Then, it’s back to the vexing quagmire of insects, Lilith-lore, puke-scenes, faces-in-things, and so on. It all manages to coalesce into a murky, messy murder of a movie by the end, sufficiently staving-off the holiday mirth for a short but satisfying 90-or-so minutes that’ll help you coast through the next several weeks with a relaxed nonchalance that’ll be the envy of all.

Then, to continue your weird movie holiday escape-plan, you can move on to Silent Night, Deadly Night 5: The Toymaker. A totally different story, with half the cast from Initiation back in completely different roles!

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Check out a quick but typically bizarre scene from Initiation here!

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