reepy occult scholar Professor Kapps (Dourif) explains the detailed history of a book of forbidden knowledge called The Saviour of Souls (which, despite having "Saviour" in the title, is really about damnation) to a voluptuous student named Jill (Burke, from E! Television's Wild On series; it's hard to recognize Burke without her going "Whooooo!"). Jill seems scared, despite the fact that what Kapp rambles on about the long history of the book has no bearing on the rest of the movie. Kapp turns out to be a bad guy, which Tolkien fans have figured out before Jill, because Dourif does an exaggeration of the English accent he did as Wormtongue in The Two Towers; so exaggerated is his bad-guy accent that he pronounces "monastery" as "mounestray".
Meanwhile, a group of very good-looking and unpleasant college kids are being hazed for a coed fraternity on Halloween night. They must commit a string of felonies that have been termed a "scavenger hunt" and then spend the night in a haunted house to pledge for the frat. Two of the pledges, Doug (Andrew) and Marsha (Shepis), commit a great big fat felony by breaking into Kapp's house in order to steal his copy of The Saviour of Souls. Kapp winds up mortally wounded, and the plucky pair of junior manslaughterers rendezvous with their fellow pledges at the haunted house.
At the house, Kapp's disembodied and malevolent soul wreaks havoc on the poor pledges. Kapp has clearly seen a number of Freddy Krueger movies, because he plays with the students' reality as he cracks stupid puns. Can the pledges survive? Even as they violate the "number one scary movie rule" and separate to have premarital sex?
'80s-style comedy and horror
The Hazing, as a horror-comedy, tries really hard to be a lot more clever than it is. The cast deserves major kudos for trying valiantly to make the humor work, but The Hazing is just too clunky a concept to come together, despite the actors' Herculean efforts.
The old surreal horror movies of the '80s and early '90s (from Nightmare on Elm Street to Bad Dreams to Hello, Mary Lou: Prom Night II to Brainscan) kept their black humor and latex-effects-heavy weirdness in an odd balance. The Hazing incorporates not only the kind of humor one would expect from a gleefully disembodied killer like Dourif (who voices Chucky, the disembodied serial killer of the Child's Play movies), but also the kind of humor found in Reagan-era lame teen sex comedies. When a major scene in The Hazing looks as if it might as easily incorporate Booger from Revenge of the Nerds as it would Freddy Krueger, something is fundamentally wrong. Thus, The Hazing is not quite scary enough to be fun, and not quite funny enough to be amusing.
The nuggets of horror and humor do vividly remind the viewer of the genuine '80s-era articles of post-Elm Street horror and post-Animal House humor. Yet how many of those movies were truly good? The Hazing disappoints because it is reminiscent of movies that were themselves pretty disappointing. The Hazing comes across as a series of snapshots of a boring party that one would just as soon forget.
Despite these flaws, The Hazing still deserves a certain amount of praise for being fast-paced and energetic enough not to entirely wear out its welcome.
