good back-story, and good acting

Crappy film

A Major Disappointment

Let me be very fair here, this is not the best movie in my opinion. But, this movie is fun, it has purpose and is very enjoyable to watch.

While not as bad as Part 2, this was still awful. It's mostly because of how utterly ridiculous it is. This movie features a woman on fire jumping off a building and another woman investigating her death. It turns out the woman was a member of a cult that worshipped giant larvae (!) and she failed to go through initiation. Now only does this movie have virtually nothing to do with the previous movies, but it has virtually nothing to do with Christmas at all! Couldn't these guys have at least kept that consistent? There's a few Christmas trees and presents here and there and a Christmas party, but that's it! The woman is plagued by insects all around her house. I do know what that's like unfortunately. There are several giant insects that appear throughout the movie and it looks absolutely stupid. I think this woman is actually supposed to give birth to a giant bug at one point. This film is really disgusting and has nothing to do with anything. There's just so many random things going on it's hard to put any plot together. It looks like they just took random elements and objects and made a movie out of them. This is just pointless. *

Yours truly has a dumb but very punctual tradition to watch at least one holiday-themed horror movie during the Christmas period. After all these years, however, I'm running out of options and pretty much the only Christmas horror movies that I haven't seen yet are the more obscure sequels in the "Silent Night, Deadly Night" franchise. I couldn't get my filthy claws on part III, so I went straight to Brian Yuzna's fourth installment which has absolutely nothing to do with the original 1984 classic and actually hardly even qualifies as a Christmas movie. Apart from a couple of decorated trees left and right and one lousy strangulation with a cord of colorful lights, this "Initiation" has as much to see with Christmas as "Die Hard" has to see with the 4th of July… So, instead of a slasher with a psychopathic Santa Clause, we have a gooey splatter flick with a coven of female witches aiming to resurrect a demon by the name of Lilith. The over-ambitious Los Angeles journalist Kim is individually – and against the will of her superiors – investigating the bizarre suicide of a girl who jumped from a rooftop whilst on fire. She receives a lot of help from the kind and motherly occult book store owner Fima, but before she properly realizes what's happening, Kim is hallucinating about satanic symbols in her spaghetti and vomiting out cockroaches in her cockroach-infested little apartment. "SN,DN: Initiation" actually feels somewhat as if co- creator and director Brian Yuzna couldn't stuff all his crazy figments in his previous film "Society" and thus especially thought up another senseless plot. This way, he could also prolong his collaboration with the awesome special effects wizard Screaming Mad George and stuff the script – like a Christmas turkey – with perversities, filth and bugs. The film is definitely watchable, but a bit too random and imbecilic. Classy woman and two-time James Bond starlet ("The Man with the Golden Gun", "Octopussy") depicts one of the lead witches and surprisingly enough seems to enjoy herself as well. Cult actor Clint Howard appears as the men-hating witches' marginal errand boy. Now, if you'll excuse me, I'm going to look for an actual Christmas horror movie!

"Silent Night, Deadly Night Part 4: Intiation" is one strange movie. In fact, I don't think I've seen anything quite like it before. And I've seen a lot of films. It is about a Los Angeles journalist who is investigating a woman's death around Christmastime. The woman spontaneously combusted and leaped from the top of a building downtown. While asking the owner of a bookstore (Maude Adams) within the building about the strange death, she is lead into a sacrificial cult of modern day witches that plan on using her for one of their sacrificial ceremonies on Christmas Eve.Take elements from "Rosemary's Baby" and throw in some nasty monster creatures and feminist witches in a Christmas setting, and you've got this movie. I swear, this movie is one of the weirdest movies I think I've seen. There are a lot of strange bugs and creatures throughout the film that are really disgusting. Bizarre events and sequences take place throughout the movie. This film has pretty decent acting, Maude Adams is the best of the cast as the head of the cult, and the special effects are pretty cheap but sufficient. Since it's Los Angeles and there's no snow, the Christmastime mood isn't really set here, but the film didn't really have anything to do the Christmas anyway. And the sequence where Ricky attacks Kim and her boyfriend in the apartment was pretty well-done. This is the only "Silent Night, Deadly Night" film that I've seen so far, but still I'd probably only recommend this to hardcore fans of the "Silent Night, Deadly Night" series, and from what I know this sequel is unrelated to the other films. It's entertaining and has some good moments, but it's a little far out there. I liked it though, oddly enough. 6/10.

A female reporter investigates the death of a woman who, on fire, leapt off of a building to her death. Her investigation leads her to discover the existence of a strange cult dedicated Egyptian god Isis--and the cult wants her as its new queen. While the plot is virtually unrelated to the first 3 films, SNDN4 is a surprisingly effective gross-out thriller. There are a few scares and gruesome moments here and there and the visual effects are terrific and, as we've come to expect from Screaming mad George, different. Both The script and acting are unimaginative but it's good horror fun from the Yuzna team that we've all come to love and it makes a great holiday family......err, horror film. My rating for "Silent Night, Deadly Night 4: Initiation"-8/10.