Rating:

Ahhhh….summer. Tis the season of popsicles, slip and slides, camping, fishing, hiking, and B-grade campfire slasher flicks. I love my summer slashers. Nothing like a good heat wave to get me to retreat inside and snuggle up to some degraded filth. Big tits, dumb broads, blue balls, and deformed mongoloids eeking out revenge with edged weapon in hand. It’s an artform, and one that I cherish with nostalgistic glee. Derivative of the Friday the 13th series, like so many other masked maniacs slalking the woodlands in the 80’s, comes a by the numbers horror flick that gets my blood flowing every time….all over the cabin…..The Burning!

When talking about The Burning you can’t help but compare it to the Friday the 13th series, it’s practically a direct rip off; right down to the screen flares after a shocking kill. Right down to the catchy keyboard soundtrack. Right down to the camp setting, the hornball teens, and ridiculous revenge plot. Right down to the deformed mute killer, insane with rage, always stalking the woods nearby the campers, plotting when to strike. The story begins with a crazy prank that can only go horribly wrong, burning the mean spirited groundskeeper Cropsy to a “big mac”. We get an awesome voiceover of docs telling the poor nutjob about how the “skin grafts just wouldn’t take” and about how he should let the kids off the hook, “It was an accident, only a terrible accident”. Cropsy’s got something else in mind. To warm himself up to offing little bouncing Betty’s he corners a stripper in a fleabag hotel room; a two dollar whore who can’t even bring herself to pleasure this hideous burn victim. After going to town on her with his signature weapon, a pair of garden shears, we’re brisked away to the campground where Cropsy’s legend has grown three fold; the mysterious backwoods slasher from Camp Blackfoot.

It’s full of the usual cast of teen campers, aka meat for the grinder. There’s jocks, nerds, dopey teens, and voluptuous babes. There are a few famous faces to be seen, including the future George Canstanza (Jason Alexander) from Seinfeld, which is pretty weird, considering he’s all young and with a full head of hair. There’s this one bully, Glazer, that I just can’t help but laugh at. Every one of his lines are terribly overacted. He’s tries to come off as such a tough guy with a city accent that you can’t help but sense that he’s a closet homosexual and that any moment he’s going to hold some poor camper down and rape him. He also makes it a point to tell his bunk mates that he only uses “lubricated rubbas“. There’s a peeking Tom outcast and a kid obsessed with vitamin E, don’t ask why. It only seems like ploy to set up one of the fake scares the first half of this flick is full of. There are so many “leaping cats” and misleading frights that it almost gets to the point that you begin wondering if the real shit will hit the fan, or if Cropsy has given up his revenge plot, or just plain totally forget this is a slasher movie. What’s truly amazing though, at least for a slasher flick in the 80’s, is that these kids relationships never come off as being totally unbelievable. They seem to act like what you’d expect normal kids to act like and it serves as a fine filler until the “shear terror” begins (get it, Cropsy uses garden shears, “shear terror”, so…uhh…nevermind).

When the blood flows, it gushes all over the screen. It starts out with an awesome river rafting massacre scene that supposedly landed this flick on the list of video nasties when it came out, which is the reason why it got hacked away in some versions.* Then Cropsy never lays off, he goes into full tilt hunt mode and teens are dispatched in rapid fashion; fingers get cut off, throats get torn open, skulls get punctured. As more people get shredded it’s revealed that one of the counselors working at the camp was part of the original fold of kids that disfigured the poor alcoholic Cropsy, which sets up the final confrontation (not to mention some little plot hiccups, seeing as how the guy spreading stories about Cropsy knew it to be true, which begs to question why he’d make light of it by telling it as a campfire tale when he later appears to regret the accident). Cropsy’s face and outfit are finally totally revealed, which look great (Tom Savini did the makeup for this flick), and the killer is finally dispatched in gruesome fashion.

The direction and atmosphere was fine. You truly get the sense that they are in the woods in some remote locale. The killer is pretty cool and sufficiently grounded in reality, considering the splurge of slasher flicks surrounding it’s release. This is one of the first films (maybe even the first, not sure) from the Weinstein’s, and is really effective at stirring up that magical summer slasher feeling that landed the big three slasher horror franchises from the same time period on the map. Criminally overlooked, so be sure to check it out, and remember:

“Don’t look….he’ll see you.”

“Don’t scream….he’ll hear you.”

“Don’t breath…..YOU’RE DEAD!”

*Only watch the uncut version, the rest are pale imitations of the original!*