1981 was something of a banner year for the slasher film that not only saw the first of many Friday The 13th and Halloween sequels, but also saw the likes of The Prowler, The Funhouse and My Bloody Valentine vie for superiority in the rapidly filling realms of stalk and slash. However, one entry stood a little apart from the rest that took it’s rather overfamilar setting (a camp? In the wake of F13? Are you mad?) and added a rather sleazy, grimy tone that got it lumped onto Mary Whitehouse’s shitlist during the British video nasty craze.
So apart from being temporarily banned in a misguided attempt to protect our children from naughty bits and fake blood, what makes Tony Maylam’s The Burning so special? Well, for a start it ticks quite a few boxes when it comes to 80s slasher bingo and not only does it boast gore effects by Tom Savini and a deformed, Jason-esque killer in the form of the roasted, shears wielding Cropsy, it also boasts a clutch of roles for some recognisable, before-they-were-famous, faces. Y’know, unburnt ones…
Meet Cropsy, a grizzled old meanie who not only is a card carrying piece of shit, but also makes his living as the caretaker of Camp Blackfoot which kind of seems like hiring Hannibal Lecter to work the grill at a cafe. In fact, Cropsy is so alcoholic and abusive, that one night a bunch of campers despite to play a joke on the booze sodden old fuck, but as this is an 80s slasher flick, you can safely get folding money that a hideous accident is about to occur. As a result of the prank, Cropsy goes up in flames and is admitted to a hospital looking like so much charred hamburger meat and after five years, he’s discharged looking not much better.
However, after this life changing experience, Cropsy is a new man and decides to dedicate his life to the betterment of mankind and… oh wait, no. I’ve got that wrong. He *checks notes* goes out and murders a prostitute who wont have sex with him and then returns to the scene of the crime where he plots the violent death of anyone who comes near with a pair of unfeasibly sharp garden shears. Makes sense.
However, while Camp Blackfoot is a smoldering ruin, the adjacent Camp Stonewater is open for business and is positively heaving with horny teens, class clowns, excitable kids and the shy, malajusted Arthur who attempts to get over the bullying he suffers at the hands of the thuggish Glazer by creeping and spying on his girlfriend, Sally. But while this and many other sub-plots – usually all dealing with the burgeoning sexual need of so many hormones in one place – run their course, Cropsy is out there hoping to run them through with his shears in order to get revenge for looking like a charbroiled testicle.
In many ways, The Burning is sort of like an alt universe Friday The 13th that is both overwhelmingly similar (especially to Part 2) yet noticeably different. While both deal with deformed madmen lurking in the woods, a secondary camp located near one where a disaster occurred and teens so desperately down to fuck that it should be mandatory to spray them with a hose every hour, the tone of these opposing slashers are actually fairly different. For a start, despite the terrible parenting of Pamela Voorhees, the F13 series feels oddly wholesome compared to its sleazier, uglier pretender mainly due to the motives of their antagonists and the Kindred nature of those teens in peril.
Where the kids of Camp Crystal Lake are all usually clean cut and noticeably uncomplicated, the visitors of Camp Stonewater are noticeably a bit more “real” as they’re not all happy flappy goodnicks who seem to get laid without any problems whatsoever. No, in The Burning, some of these these kids come on way too strong, suffer premature ejaculation and tackle feelings of alienation and shyness by creeping on girls in the shower. Oh sure, there’s a fair share of virtuous counsellors too, not to mention a wisecracking resident joker (played a shockingly young Jason Alexander with a full head of hair that George Costanza would kill for) and plenty of innocently wide-eyed campers (two of which are played by none other than embryonic versions of Holly Hunter and Fisher Stevens), but The Burning’s choice to broach slightly more realistic sexual concerns gives it something of more skeevy feel. Adding to that greatly is Cropsy himself. Eschewing the maternal revenge of Pamela Voorhees and the mummy’s boy brutality of her bludgeoning baby boy, Cropsy swans about the place in a long black coat and gloves being as spiteful a prick as can be as he slices, snips and stabs his victims with a pair of shears so sharp they look like they could carve through titanium. Plus, with Tom Savini’s grue splashing skills finely honed after a string of high profile gorefests, Cropsy ups his game from taking out unsuspecting teens one at a time and in a celebrated set piece than no doubt horrified the moral majority, the killer lunges out of a canoe while framed in silhouette and wipes out a gaggle of raft bound kids in an impressive orgy of bloodletting.
However, just because The Burning is noticeably more saltier than the continuing misadventures of the Voorhees clan, it doesn’t mean that there isn’t a sense of style going on behind the violence. The first section of the film, that sees the kids frolic and gamble about feels more like a teen comedy like Ivan Reitman’s Meatballs as this horde of youths go about their business. This leads to you actually caring about the victims-to-be a little more than the average slash-a-thon.
However, there are issues. The main one is that while The Burning may have the edge when it comes to grittiness, there’s something about the slightly more polished feel of the Friday The 13th movies that’s a little more appealing. Also, while the characters in The Burning feels a tad more real, there’s so many ambient characters floating around, the main characters tend to get lost in the shuffle. Having a shy, nervy male kid be the lead helps the film stand out, but Alfred isn’t a patch on Adrienne King’s Alice, or Jamie Lee Curtis in any of her slashy outings.
Of course, these days, The Burning has picked up something of an even creepier legacy when you consider that this tale of an ugly, perverted predator stalking nubile women was thought up by none other than Harvey Weinstein and even the peeping tom antics of Arthur take on a more sinister hue.
Still, putting these notions aside for a moment, The Burning is a better than average Friday The 13th clone that stands out thanks to Savini’s gore and Cropsy’s savage modus operandi, but personally speaking, I’ll stick with my Jasons and Michaels thank you very much.
🌟🌟🌟
We Have Issues 