The Revenging Manta, the ninja vigilante of downtown Orlando, and I parted ways. With the Goose Lord and his gang finished once and for all, he had other obligations that needed to be fulfilled. Among them was finding the guy that stole the truck of his good friend, Big Tom, and lost his cargo. The Revenging Manta vowed revenge on that man. I gulped and wished him luck.

— To be continued. 

Tonight’s super scary made-for-tv movie is 1978’s The Initiation of Sarah from Robert Day. You can catch an old promo for this movie on YouTube where it was paired with an episode of The Six Million Dollar Man. Now that’s a night of TV! What do we now have on network TV? Reality shows and the odd medical drama. It’s as if the kids stopped watching television. No doubt it’s to go outside and play in the sun.

As the title would suggest, The Initiation of Sarah is about sorority initiation.  You have two sisters, Patty (Morgan Brittany) and Sarah (Kay Lenz). Patty is the pretty, outgoing sister. Sarah is the shy sister who also happens to be adopted. Their mother has a clear favorite, Patty, and has high hopes that she’ll get into the sorority she attended, Alpha Nu Sigma. Unbeknownst to her adoptive family is the fact that Sarah has powerful psionic powers.

Yes, Sarah is like the characters we saw in the Scanners movies. Are we going to see anyone’s head explode? Probably not, but this was network TV in the 1970s. Anything goes.

Alpha Nu Sigma is run by a bunch of catty bullies, the president of which is Jennifer Lawrence (Morgan Fairchild). Patty, naturally, gets accepted into Alpha Nu Sigma while Sarah has to settle for Phi Epsilon Delta. Sarah’s new sorority is the main rival of Alpha Nu Sigma and run by the mysterious house mother Erica Hunter (Shelley Winters). Erica has been working on her thesis for ages and is rumored to have performed witchcraft. I also have a sneaking suspicion that she’s the birth mother of Patty as she and Sarah’s father seemed to have a fling back in her college days.

Jennifer keeps taunting Phi Epsilon Delta members and, in a fit of psionic rage, she knocks Jennifer into a water fountain. I think she then tells her how much of a mean person she is and blah, blah, blah. When you look like Morgan Fairchild, you can do whatever you want. The world is yours to torment. Later on, Sarah gets invited to a surprise party for her favorite professor, but it’s  trap. Jennifer and the other Sigmas throw vegetables and mud (?) at Sarah, humiliating her. Erica uses this humiliation as a chance to deepen Sarah’s hatred for Alpha Nu Sigma.

It seems that Phi Epsilon Delta and Alpha Nu Sigma have had a nasty rivalry for the better part of two decades and with Sarah about to turn all Carrie on them, this rivalry will come to an end. I suspect this will all end in tears and blood. 

Jeff Shuster (episode 47, episode 102, episode 124, episode 131, episode 284, episode 441, episode 442, episode 443, episode 444, episode 450, episode 477, episode 491, episode 492, episode 493, episode 495, episode 496, episode 545, episode 546, episode 547, episode 548, episode 549, episode 575, episode 596, episode 597, episode 598, episode 599, episode 642, episode 643, episode 644, episode 645, episode 670, episode 686, episode 687,  688, and 689) is an MFA graduate from the University of Central Florida.