The Hazing aka Dead Scared (2004)I promised to do a series on the hazards of college and how parents should just save their money 'cause it doesn't matter what college your kids go to or how smart they are, all college students get into the same types of situations in which they eventually die. Within an hour and a half anyway.
This entry was a little promising - anything with Brad Dourif I'm game to watch and hey, kids I can't stand are gonna die so win-win right? Ugh. This movie was, simply put, Evil Dead With Dead Head College Kids. In fact the IMDB (which I did NOT read until after the movie) says it's Evil Dead with Scream. I wouldn't give it that good of a combination. It ripped off Evil Dead so incredibly badly that Sam Raimi should be suing by now. They even had the audacity of... well let's tell the story quickly.
Girls and guys are pledging to a sorority (Hmm, really?) that's to begin with an asinine scavenger hunt, and end with spending the night in a spooky house. Get out the Scooby snacks. First these people, who we really don't care about and have probably never seen in anything else before (I mean c'mon - one of the actress' name was Nectar Rose for cryin' out loud) search for the stupidest objects, one being a picture of Bruce Campbell (nudge, nudge, wink, wink, say no more). When all the objects are collected, including a stolen ancient book of spells called the Necronomicon... err I mean sorry, this book really didn't have a 'title' but it has spells plus a cane for, I dunno, making the spells work I guess from a professor they think they accidentally killed (nice kids these are), everybody goes to the haunted house. Duh is certainly on a massive scale here.
We then get into dead and undead, mutilations and murder, and the camera work definitely doesn't even try to hide that it's copying Raimi's style of fast travel along hallways and down stairs as in the Evil Dead movies. What it doesn't copy, because it can't, is the sense of doom, urgency and fear that Evil Dead was able to bring to the viewer. What I felt was lethargy, boredom and a sense of c'mon, die already will you PLEASE!But oh no, we get 86 minutes of 'whose body's got the spirit' and the surviving teens fighting against each other and themselves as the movie gets slower and slower and slower...
FINALLY the professor (underplayed by Brad Dourif) dies for real in the hospital which actually makes things worse, until the remaining college kids manage to throw his spirit (don't ask this will be twice as long) into the abyss he opened and close it. It then spits out the girl he was inhabiting. All's well, right? The three left alive try to open the front door - nope. It seems while they got rid of the nasty professor, they also let out all the other nasties that have been waiting their turn at the gate so to speak, and a whole new battle will now begin. Thankfully, we don't have to watch it because that's where the movie ends. Phew.
Sam, don't let them do that to your stuff again, okay?
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