..look theirs nothing queer about it..just a group of guys who all dress alike, spend all their time together, are constantly grabbing each other and clearly hate women!

I have been waiting to watch this film for a while spotting that it starred veteran Austrian actor Helmet Berger who I could never forget in Tinto Brass’s highly underrated film Salon Kitty. However like a lot of foreign films being released these days it usually takes some time for English subtitles to become available.

Initiation is something of a black comedy posing questions about fiercely masculine neo-nazi skinheads on one hand and gay people on the other. Certainly there is a lot of confrontation in this film and it pulls no punches in showing the excessive violence of the skinheads, but it also for example uses slow motion and effects to try and pose a nasty skinhead gig as very balletesque, at times it even becomes a musical! This quickly suggests there is something more to this film than just showing the ridiculous life of skinheads.

Indeed throughout it seems most of the skinheads have issues with their own sexuality hinting that maybe their hatred of the gay locals masks something within themselves. The funniest scene was perhaps a member of the local Nazi party who delivers a long, fiery speech against everything including homosexuals and the price of fish; then instantly in the next scene is seen being led up stairs by two young male prostitutes in the local brothel!

The lead character Axel becomes torn between the local skinhead gang who offer him lots of blokey masculine mateship including a gang bang with the gangs moll and Berger, a gay dry cleaner, and his companions who befriend the troubled youth with compassion. You have to ask yourself the question, why do they bother, but this becomes clear as we are invited into Berger’s troubled past as a youngster in the Hitler Youth as so many of his generation were forced.

This film certainly delivers with the type of surreal spectacular we tend to expect from Helmet Berger and it is certainly confronting but not in the ways we initially might think.