Initiation

 

A premonition of disaster hits Danny Molloy (Rodney Harvey) as his plane lands at Adelaide airport. The 16-year-old street kid from Brooklyn has come to South Australia to make contact with his
father (Bruno Lawrence) whom he has not seen for ten years.

The accents, scenery and people are a bewildering jumble to Danny as he finds his way to the remote homestead where his father Nat. an ex-Vietnam pilot who runs a crop dusting outfit, lives.

It is a shock to Nat Molloy, when his son suddenly turns up at his outback home. He is now living with a divorcee. Sal, (Arna-Maria Winchester) and her pretty teenage daughter, Stevie (Miranda Otto).
Not only has his lifestyle changed since he split up with Danny’s mother; he now faces financial ruin and has agreed to fly a consignment of marijuana down from the North.

It is a bad time for the boy to appear and from their first meeting it is obvious the father and son’s relationship is not going to be a smooth one. They argue and fight and through a series of misadventures,
Danny ends up in a local brawl, gets arrested for stealing a car and narrowly misses giving the game away when he destroys the barn containing the marijuana.

Through all the traumas, he has two allies. Stevie with whom he strikes up a romantic friendship and Kulu (David Gulpilil), an old Aboriginal medicine man who explains to him that a conspiracy of circumstances is at work.
He isn’t just having a run of bad luck but is being tested.

He warns Danny that his time for initiation is approaching, gives him a charm – a quartz stone and promises to help when ‘the time’ comes.

Nat and Danny are finally bound together by events surrounding the drug run but before they can enjoy this new relationship they are put in a perilous situation when Danny’s earlier premonition comes true.
Nat’s plane crashes in the mountains and he is badly hurt.

It is up to Danny, the street kid raised among pinball parlors and fast food joints to find a way out of the wilderness.

Father and son hack their way through scrub and forest, but Nat is almost done for. Danny leaves him in a sheltered cave to battle on alone. It is then that the evil spirits finally challenge him.