The Burning (1981)

“Every year he kills. Right now, he's out there. Watching. Waiting. So don't look; he'll see you. Don't breathe; he'll hear you. Don't move; you're dead!” – Camp Counsellor

There’s no way to avoid this, nor is there a way say this gently, but The Burning is pretty much a rip-off of Friday the 13th. Filmed in 1980, released in 1981 – so it came between F13 pts 1&2, it boasted some really great gore effects from F13’s Tom Savini, and an electronic score by the great Rick Wakeman. (Wakeman providing a score for a slasher movie struck me at the time as an odd choice, but it works. It shouldn’t, but it does.) Other historical points of interest, let’s see – it was disgraced producer Harvey Weinstein’s first shot at producing a film, and it features a very young Holly Hunter in her film debut. (Though, admittedly I’ve never managed to spot her. I thought I had this time, but nope, different character altogether. Maybe next time.)

Let’s touch upon the eighties for a second, because they were strange and trying times for horror movie fans, especially if, like me, you were based in the United Kingdom. I was lucky enough to have seen this one at the cinema, just before I bought my first VHS recorder (those were the days) and started building up a library of movies. Because, despite the liberation of being able to record films to add them to my collection, in the UK, the eighties were also the era of repressive censorship and the dreaded Video Nasties where the police could happily raid video rental stores, confiscate their tapes and prosecute their owners for carrying titles like The Burning. (Newsagents weren’t quite exempt from the government’s bat crap crazy puritanism either, I was a loyal reader of Fangoria, an American horror movie magazine and – totally true story, the newsagent I bought it from had to order me a copy and keep it under the counter because this movie magazine was on the government’s official obscene publications list. Unbelievable!)

All of this has led the film to be regarded these days, over 40 years later, as something of a cult classic. It has achieved something of a legendary status among horror fans. Myself, I have a fondness for it (especially now that in its DVD release, it is uncut) but my liking it doesn’t detract from its undeniable and utter derivativeness. There really is nothing original here in the script. Take any slasher movie, gather up the tropes, lump them all together in some kind of order and essentially, you have The Burning. No real surprises, not really anything we haven’t seen before, plot holes and improbabilities you can drive a truck through, uniformly bad acting – but despite that, it’s a quick and easy fun way to spend a brisk 88 minutes. The elevating factors are Savini’s effects and Wakeman’s score.

The film opens at a summer camp, Camp Blackfoot. It’s night, and some of the kids are planning a practical revenge joke on camp caretaker Cropsy (Lou David). Cropsy, we are told in anecdotes, is a cruel drunken sadist, who beats kids up. (So, how does he keep his job, exactly?) The kids rig up a dummy (I hope) skull lit with candles and draped with worms by his bed as he sleeps then they wake him up while they look through the window. Cropsy wakes up, panics, the skull and candle fall on the bed, which combusts immediately with Cropsy in it. He kicks over an open gasoline can, which splashes on him and makes everything worse. (Because EVERYONE sleeps with an open can of petrol next to the bed – right?) Now a stumbling inferno, he runs screaming and tumbling to the nearby lake, while the kids watch, horrified.

Flash forward six months, and we find Cropsy has survived, and is in an intensive burns unit at the hospital, giving us a brief look at his burnt, moist arm.

Jump forward another five years, and Cropsy is released from hospital – but the skin grafts didn’t take. He is, reputedly a walking mass of scar tissue. Understandably, I guess, after five years in hospital Cropsy wants some…relief, and engages the services of a prostitute who asks him to leave as soon as she gets a good look at him (because it’s night – get your minds out of the gutter) which enrages him to stab her with a pair of scissors – and it’s the graphic nature of Savini’s effects, as the weapon is twisted in the victim’s stomach that partly contributed to the film’s infamy, back in the day.

That’s the lengthy set-up. Let’s move now to Camp Stonewater (I don’t understand the naming conventions either) where the kids (who range from early teens to early adulthood – oldest looking teens I ever saw, making Steve McQueen in The Blob look practically pre-pubescent) where a softball game is in progress. The ball gets lost, one of the younger kids – a girl named “Tiger” (just don’t ask!) fetches it from the edge of the forest, watched by (presumably) Cropsy. But she avoids an encounter with him.

There’s no explanation how he got there, or why – it just seems that he chose a Camp to take his revenge on at random.

From this point, the film just flies, the camp crowd are practically cardboard cut-outs. We have the wise guy, the bully, the nerd, the would-be pervert Peeping Tom, the pretty girl, the sporty girl, the untouchable virginal girl, the feisty girl …they’re all here. The cause and effect of sex and death is in full effect, gratuitous nudity – yep, plenty of that. But here’s the thing, there’s no character development. The kids are literally just there to be killed at the hands of Cropsy and his garden scissors. As such, we really don’t care if they get killed or not. The buy-in just isn’t there. An example is Alfred (Brian Backer) who we first see watching one of the girls shower. He’s not actually punished for this, actually his actions are glossed over and excused (let’s pause for a moment and remember who the producer was, and consider he also had a hand in the story). Later, when confronted by the girl’s would-be boyfriend, Alfred is made out to be the victim (??????)

The bulk of the action, or mayhem, takes place when several of the campers and a couple of counsellors take a canoe trip down river and somehow, Cropsy follows them – and keeps up with them. He slaughters several before the big money scene. Graphic neck stabbing, impaling on to a tree with the garden scissors, that kind of thing.

Now, the money shot is the high point of the film – the kids have lost their canoes, and are far from the camp – too far to walk, apparently (despite being only one day’s paddling away and Cropsy, who’s much older and probably has mobility issues due to his burns having no trouble managing it the day before)

So, the kids build a raft – which evidently is far easier than hiking – and a number of them head off to get help from the camp, leaving the others behind, awaiting rescue. On the river, they see one of their canoes – and as they get close enough to retrieve it, Cropsy (somehow, despite there being no hiding place on the canoe for a guy his size) jumps up, scissors held high and kills them all, graphically stabbing and severing fingers in the scene that the film is best known for, and was cut from the original home video release, as ruthlessly as by Cropsy himself.

The raft makes its way back to the kids awaiting rescue, and they find the corpses, but the remainder of the kids can all fit – so (somehow) within a matter of an hour or so, they’re back at the camp calling for a rescue helicopter, which arrives just in time to pick up Alfred (how did HE get to be rewarded by being a final survivor?) and a Counsellor (who turns out to have been one of the original kids who burnt Cropsy years earlier in a pretty unnecessary last second plot twist that adds nothing.)

But not before Cropsy becomes Crispy. Burnt again. To death this time.

There would be no sequel to this – Cropsy wisely stayed dead. Kudos to Tom Savini for some truly ghastly looking make-up effects, and also to director Tony Maylam, who wisely kept the reveal of Cropsy’s face to a few quick inserts at the film’s end as he’s menacing Alfred and the Counsellor. The quick impressions of his face bring back to memory the awesome make-up on Actor Lionel Atwill in the 1932 Mystery of the Wax Museum, when his mask is broken away.

If you’re only going to watch one slasher movie that gives you all the tropes and conventions – a sampler of the genre, if you will, then watch this and you’ll know what it’s all about. If you’re going to watch a whole slew of them (see what I did there?) you’ll see where ALL the ideas in The Burning came from.