Sometimes a thoroughly unoriginal horror film is referred to as a total rip-off or blatant imitation and sometimes it's called a genuine throwback or a homage. I guess all depends on how entertaining the film was and how obviously it mentions its sources of inspiration. "The Hazing", for instance, is a successful new horror flick because it's unpretentious and good old-fashioned straightforward splatter fun. The plot is a mixture between the 80's classics "The Evil Dead" and "Night of the Demons", and sprinkled with some flashes of gratuitous nudity, you're almost guaranteed to have a winner! During a fraternity scavenger hunt, a couple of students need to steal a rare book in the house of a deranged murderous professor with an obsession for demonology. They accidentally kill the professor, but he returns by possessing one of the students during the second part of their initiation ritual: spending the night in a reputedly haunted house. Trapped inside the house on Halloween's Eve, the students will have to distinguish the actual demon attacks from all the fake stuff that was put there to scare them. As you can tell, this is completely derivative and clichéd guff you've seen a hundred times before already, and yet you won't regret watching "The Hazing" for a single second. Rolfe Kanefsky delivers a screenplay that is fast-paced and doesn't take itself overly serious. The lead characters are you're your usual stereotypes - or perhaps just act like stereotypes to make their lives easier, like the blond bimbo – and there's a lot of variation in the gore & splatter. "The Hazing" contains chainsaw action (another homage to "The Evil Dead"), axe-decapitations, giant darts and near-suffocation by a humongous tongue! There are also some slightly more sophisticated moments of authentic suspense, like when one poor girl is slowly transforming into a human mannequin doll. That always struck me as genuinely horrific. Last but not least, "The Hazing" benefices from the lovely naked bodies of Nectar Rose and the exquisite Tiffany Shepis. Brad Dourif overacts wondrously as the maniacal professor.
Review of The Hazing
