The Burning



Several boys at Camp Blackfoot gather together one night to pull an epic prank on the camp’s on-site caretaker, Cropsy. Cropsy is pretty much universally hated at camp for being an abusive dick to the campers, and the boy’s whom he’s picked on the most see this prank as an act of epic revenge. So they sneak into his cabin one night and place a rotting, worm infested skull with candles in its eyes next to his bed, and wait for the anticipated freak-out. To their delight, they get what they want, but in Cropsy’s ensuing panic he knocks the flaming skull on his bed, causing it, him and the whole cabin to catch fire (though that last part was partially due to the open can of gasoline he kept in his room for some reason. WTF, my dude?) Miraculously, Cropsy survives nearly being turned into a crispy critter and winds up in the hospital with severe burns, with the whole incident being chalked up to an unfortunate accident.


Yeah…sure…accident…

Five years later, Cropsy is finally deemed well enough to be released from the hospital. Unfortunately for him though, all the skin grafts have failed, leaving him not only permanently scarred, but also royally pissed at the boys who caused him years of suffering. Ignoring the advice of his doctors, Cropsy sets off on his own quest of epic revenge. The only problem is, Camp Blackfoot is now closed and the boys who disfigured him have long since moved on. No matter though. Cropsy’s rage is so great that technicalities like that are unimportant. So he arms himself with his trusty pair of pruning shears and heads to the next best thing: Stonewater, the other summer camp right across the lake from Blackfoot. Surely it’s filled with its own fair share of annoying kids to stab, so that should work just as well.



Up next on my list of “things I should have watched before now” is The Burning, an 1981 slasher that is loosely based on the New York urban legend of the Cropsey maniac, with a screenplay by Bob Weinstein and Peter Lawrence, from a story conceived by producer Harvey Weinstein (fuck that guy). The Burning is usually talked about pretty favorably in slasher circles. It not only sports some decent deaths, but it also has the earliest film appearances of Jason Alexander, Holly Hunter (blink and you’ll miss her) and Fisher Stevens, and (as of current) it even has a very decent 70+% score from Rotten Tomatoes. But it wasn’t always viewed so well. Contemporary reviews often called it “dull”, or unfavorably compared it to Friday the 13th. I personally think they might have been a smidge harsh. But I can also see why they might not have been all that impressed.



The movie’s biggest issue, to me at least, is that the film is honestly kinda slow in parts, so that part of some of the critic’s critique isn’t completely off. The beginning of the movie has a perfectly fine introduction for a slasher, what with the screaming, flaming groundskeeper, and the dead hooker and all. But then there’s a very big 35 minute gap between Cropsy’s first and second kills. So before the movie really gets back to all the Stabby-Stabby bits the audience is expecting, the film instead hits the pause button on the action and decides to establish the film’s swift setting change and handle all the new character introductions (of which there are many). Which isn’t necessarily bad, per say, as I rather liked a lot of the characters. Most of them are rather predictably trope-y, sure, but for a summer camp themed slasher they’d probably rank towards the top of my list of “Least Annoying Camper Victims”. So that’s nice. And while I do appreciate that the film does try to add in a couple of suspenseful moments during that half-hour gap, seasoned horror watchers will undoubtedly recognize them for the “fake-outs” that they are. Because, I mean, they’re just reeeealy obvious. Thankfully though the film picks up quite a bit after that and the last 40 minutes move along at a much more enjoyable clip. But that still means you end up watching a bunch of 20-something-year-old “Teens” (and their equally old counselors) do lame summer camp related activities like eating and swimming for a good third of the film. Which, for a movie that’s only 91 minutes long….kinda sucks.


Row, row, row your….*yawn*…Look the faster you guys go, the faster you die, so hurry up, would’ya?

Another thing that kinda irked me – only less so – is that Cropsy’s motivations are kinda all over the place. Not that slasher killers actually need all that much motivation. Cause, you know, they’re usually just crazy slashers – which, fair enough. But the issue I had here is that the filmmakers actually did establish that Cropsy had a motivation to kill. And it was a really good one, too! Before he even leaves the hospital the film goes out of its way to have the doctors tell him that they’re sorry he’s still angry, it was only an accident, and that he shouldn’t take his anger out on those boys, yada, yada, yada. With “those boys” clearly being a reference to the tiny little ass-hats who almost killed him. So this is clearly a revenge story, cause those little SOBs up and royally ruined his life. Or at least that’s what the movie could have been. But I guess at some point the filmmakers had the revelation that by having Cropsy only go after the boys who nearly deep fried him to death would make their ruthless mass killer a little too relatable or sympathetic. So instead of having him seek revenge, a motive which they themselves started to establish, they have him immediately kill a random hooker and then try to off as many campers as he can find. Which, honestly, I don’t have a problem with. Slashers can kill off whomever they want to as long as it’s entertaining enough. I’m just saying that it does annoy me a bit that they spent 10 minutes totally establishing a solid motive, only to then seemingly give up on it two minutes later. I mean, come on, just pick either “motive or crazy dick” and be done with it, you goobers.


The least you could have done was kill all the assholes first! What’d blondie ever do to you?

On the plus side though, the movie has some lovely effects. And why shouldn’t it? The filmmakers hired none other than make-up maestro Tom Savini to do all of their icky bits. So all the blood and gore fans should be pleased with what they see. There is a ton of splatter in this one, bloated corpses, plenty of dismemberment, and of course roasty-toasty Cropsy looks appropriately ooey-gooey. Unfortunately there’s a lot more splatter bandied about than there are gore effects. But everything is appropriately excessive, so slasher fans should still walk away from this rather satisfied.





So, yes, I did end up liking The Burning, but it’s kinda hard to ignore some of those drawbacks. The effects are top-notch, and all the slasher parts it has are great. But a full third of the film is really plodding. I mean, did they really need to spend that much time establishing all of these characters? Especially when only a couple of them were going to be important and the rest would be completely forgotten? I’m skeptical. And it also doesn’t help that at least one of the characters you’re meant to sympathize with is the creepy camp pervert, and that the main male counselor keeps trying to excuse his behavior. In light of Harvey Weinstein’s actions (again, fuck that guy) that just makes those scenes feel extra squiggy. That said though, I think the good outweighs the bad here, so if you’re a slasher fan you’ll probably walk away from this one rather satisfied. You’ll just have to utilize some patience to get to “the good stuff.”

The Burning is available on a variety of streaming services.

The Burning is also available on DVD and Bluray.

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