Huh. I. Hmmm. Well. I. The first thoughts that came to mind when I was watching this the other day were “what is this load of bung” but now it’s been a couple of days and the day I’m writing this I’m sitting in a hotel room in a place called Missouri and while this place is actually really nice, the movie was a lot better than some of the places we drove through or passed on the way here. One was a place called Alpena which really kind of scared me to drive through and this bar we saw last night called The Cheeky Monkey which totally looked like a murder bar but it looked really super packed so it must do great business maybe if you’re not afraid to engage in a knife fight or something but I’m really a big wuss now that I’m old and don’t really do risky things anymore. But The Hazing was kind of sheesh there most of the time and aside from a couple of laughs I didn’t really like this too much but let’s be fair and subjective and nice in this hot lake sun and see what happened.

For starters I think it took about 20 minutes for this thing to high-res itself which wasn’t fun and I about quit it early but I read Brad Dourif’s name in the credits and I always like him so 🤞 and then there was this terrible terrible voice over going on about this evil book and blah blah shit and it was some Englishman blathering on and then the camera changed focus and it was Dourif doing an English accent and I wasn’t too impressed and then this lady from back in the day named Brooke Burke showed up making eyes and wearing skimpy clothes and she changed into some genie outfit because it’s Halloween but then she was out of the picture pretty quick and everything changed focus again to some coeds pledging something and their hazing was to go scavenger hunting and the next 20 minutes or so was them stealing things set to sounds of old ska music like the mighty mighty bosstones or the Friends opening credits jingle and some sketchy scooby doo sound effects and I was really wondering what my life was like back in 2004 and did people really talk like that and what the fuck was going on here. It really reminded me of going to bars back when they would set up 8 tvs in a big square before big hd screens were around and they’d play low res music videos of – say – Red Hot Chili Peppers and Anthony Keidis running around without his shirt on. Or Smashmouth. Maybe that doesn’t make any sense but I thought it was kind of sucky with all of the small dong and orgasm jokes and bad hairdos.

Then they get to the evil scary haunted house where they had to stay the night and it was almost a copy of Hell Night without Linda Blair’s décolletage but including lots of POV of things moving down hallways and possessing someone ala Evil Dead – I mean completely and blatantly. At one point they even throw darts at a Bruce Campbell picture.

Oh yeah – the plot – these youths have to stay the night in this old haunted house and if they make it they win! In the meantime a frat boy and his friend will make things scary for them. Also in the meantime, during one of their scavenges, a couple of them stab Dourif’s crazy professor character and steal his evil book so now his evil soul is possessing people in the scary old house trying to get them to open a scary portal to hell. BTW – somehow, when his evil soul inhabits their bodies, they miraculously grow long, evil eyebrows and get bad teeth, which go back to normal if they get lucky and he leaves.

Is it any good? I guess. I suppose it’s not tooooooooooooooooo bad when you keep things in context. There are some fun parts with some roll-y heads and some decent enough kills and if nothing else AT LEAST the writers had enough decency to throw in reasons why there were all of these props sitting around the old abandoned house. There’s nothing more irritating to me than when someone just carries around a zippo even though they don’t smoke just because it fits that they have to light something on fire later. That’s just never made any goddammed sense to me. That or screeching tires on dirt roads or why people’s eyebrows and teeth go immediately wonky when they get possessed even though that would literally take a year or so. Well, I could be wrong because my eyebrows don’t grow out like that, mine are rather kempt. That reminds me of my old barber who we think is dead now or just disappeared – when i would go in there and he’d give me my high and tight even though I wanted something else entirely he’d ask “want me to trim them eyebrows?’ and take a few steps back and assess them and come back with “nope, you’re not there yet”. I’m not sure what happened, Wayne, but good for you wherever you’re at or ended up with, we spent a lot of time together.

And then – after all of the hijinks and one liners about tiny dick size and men incapable of giving orgasms and innuendo about who and what people can do with their mouths whether possessed or not, they round everything up into a kind of unexpectedly surprising ending. Not that it’s GOOD or anything but it wasn’t just the cookie cutter ‘aw shit everything’s ok’ ending we could expect from a 2004 episode of Friends – you remember – The One With The Two Foot Tongue.

FILED UNDER: VERY POOR BUT OK IF YOU LIKE JOKES ABOUT HOSEBEASTS AND TINY DONGS AND BROOK BURKE’S NAVAL AND BRAD DOURIF IN A SKIMPY HOSPITAL GOWN AND A LADY RUNNING AROUND IN A SKIN TIGHT SILVER NYLON OR MAYBE THAT WAS RAYON I NEVER KNOW AND I GUESS IT’S KIND OF A GOOD MEMORY OUT THERE IN MY BRAIN I GUESS

P.S. Since we’re all about posterity and memories out here – I found this when I got back to HQ and went looking around for things: