2011 October Horror Movie Challenge Movie 5: Silent Night, Deadly Night 4: Initiation

This movie is pretty terrible, but the thing about some horror movies is that the worse they get, the more fucked-up they are, the more they make you feel like you might be on acid, the better they are, and in a weird way, this movie works. The first movie in this series is actually a pretty decent slasher with disturbing imagery and a creepy feel, the second movie is horrible, consisting of about 60% "flashback" footage where they just play the previous film again. the third movie is absolutely horrible, with terrible acting, a weak plot, lots of continuity errors, and really scary 80s hairstyles that are the most frightening thing about the film. And then there's this movie, which really has nothing to do with the previous 3 films (except for one scene where a character watches part of the third film on TV).

The movie is about a reporter named Kim who wants to investigate the strange death of a local woman who burst into flames and jumped off the roof of a building. The characters keep insisting she spontaneously combusted, but I don't know why they kept saying that because it's really not clear WHY the woman was on fire. In the course of the investigation, Kim gets tangled up in a local cult of Lesbian witches (I hate it when that happens) and the rest of the movie is really a big mess of sex scenes, weird rituals involving nudity and giant insects (um...ew) and a lot of mumbo-jumbo rambling about how women need to kill men because men are parasites of fear...or something. It's icky and gross at times, especially the scenes with the insects, and I'm not going to pretend that it really made SENSE, but I can't deny that it was mesmerizing to watch. you can tell that this was really a low-budget horror movie called "Initiation" that had nothing to do with the "Silent Night, Deadly Night" series, but the company released this movie and slapped "Silent Night, deadly Night 4" on it in an effort to make more money. I'm not going to pretend this movie was good or anything, but it's kind of fun to watch for sheer weirdness value alone.