director
Tony
Maylam
screenwriters
Peter
Lawrence
Bob
Weinstein
story by
Harvey
Weinstein
Tony
Maylam
Brad
Grey
producer
Harvey
Weinstein
cinematographer
Harvey
Harrison
music
Alan
Brewer
Rick
Wakeman
editor
Jack
Sholder
special
effects
Tom
Savini
cast
Brian Matthews (Todd)
Leah
Ayres (Michelle)
Brian
Backer (Alfred)
Larry
Joshua (Glazer)
Jason Alexander
(Dave)
Ned
Eisenberg (Eddy)
Carrick
Glenn (Sally)
Fisher
Stevens (Woodstock)
Lou
David (Cropsy)
Holly
Hunter (Sophie)
mpaa rating: R or unrated
running
time: 91m
u.s.
release: May 8, 1981
video
availability: VHS -
DVD
|
Quite the grim and nasty movie,
The Burning is. Oh, it has its share of goofing around
-- it's set (like Friday the 13th) at a summer camp, so
there are many scenes of camper hijinks that feel like padding
-- but it has a memorably ugly undercurrent. The premise is based
loosely on an actual urban legend/campfire tale (of which there
are many variants): Five years ago, a despised camp caretaker
named Cropsy fell victim to a prank that went awry; horribly
burned from head to toe, he gets out of the hospital, warms up
by butchering a hooker, and heads to another summer camp in search
of nubile, foolish teenagers to slice up with his absurdly large
pair of shears. Much emphasis is placed at the beginning on how
hideously disfigured Cropsy is, how the skin grafts didn't take,
how even a seasoned prostitute cowers at the mere sight of him.
You can bet Sam Raimi took a long look at The Burning
before getting started on his Darkman:
Cropsy is like Peyton Westlake without the artificial-skin formula
and with a heaping plate of bitter, homicidal rage.
The Burning is of interest for other reasons, notably
its unusually strong pedigree of future successes (rather than
enumerating them in the review proper, I've made most of the
cast and crew names in the left sidebar into clickable links;
hit a few and have fun). As a slasher movie, it belongs firmly
in the company of such rip-offs as My Bloody Valentine
and The Prowler; excoriated at the time, those early-'80s
Dead Teenager Films (Roger Ebert's term) have become sources
of affectionate nostalgia for horror fans of a certain age. People
get excited when these movies finally show up on DVD (and
they get downright orgasmic if the DVD offers an uncut
version). I'm no different. I first saw The Burning at
age 12 or so, on cable, very early in the morning; I actually
got up to watch the damn thing, rather than staying
up late (which I also did regularly, in those dim days before
VCRs).
The movie has stayed with me
for some twenty years. I think it's because The Burning
feels, at times, as if it were made by Cropsy. It is powered
by a strong sense of anger and disgust. We feel bad for
Cropsy when he sets himself on fire and goes screaming into the
night, just as we felt bad for the dork-turned-murderer in Terror
Train who was led into a room containing, instead of the
sexy girl he was expecting, a sexy cadaver, which drove
him insane. The idea of a "harmless prank" that ends
up fucking someone's life forever disturbs us. It goes back to
Carrie and the bucket of pig blood that led to a massacre.
Carrie destroyed the innocent as well as the guilty, and therein
lay the horror, but we couldn't help rooting for her to
release that rage. And so, in movies like Terror Train
and The Burning, a dark part of us wants the blood
to spill, wants the characters to die. Hell, the movie
is even named after the motivating trauma -- it's not called
Camp of Blood, or whatever. The title itself reminds us
continually why people are being killed.
There's precious little plot,
and only a mild twist. One of the counselors, it so happens,
was in on the prank, back when he was a camper; but since we
don't find that out till near the end, we don't feel the character's
guilt the way we felt Hart Bochner's "Oh shit, I'm going
to die and I probably deserve it" dread in Terror
Train. As a slight change of scenery, some of the counselors
and campers take off via canoe to the other side of the lake;
this accomplishes little except isolating a smaller group. (Oddly,
the campers are never threatened, even though it was a group
of campers who burned Cropsy; he goes after the counselors exclusively,
as if he somehow knew that among them is one of his destroyers.)
When the canoes mysteriously
disappear, the kids and counselors build a raft, and some of
them float off in search of the canoes; this leads to the movie's
centerpiece, staged by director Tony Maylam and special-effects
guru Tom Savini as a lightning-fast mass murder on the water.
Can a man really dispatch so many people in so little time? I
don't know, but the moment brings you up short; horror movies
condition you to believe that going off alone is certain doom,
whereas there's always safety in numbers. Here, there's not only
no safety in numbers -- it happens in broad daylight in
the middle of a lake! This camp must be a damned and forgotten
clime, where killers can butcher so easily and with such impunity
under the cover of nothing.
There's really no rhyme or
reason to who lives or dies; some of the counselors who stay
at the camp will live, some who left on the canoe trip will die.
Two of the comely young counselors who disrobe for the camera
are earmarked for destruction, as if Cropsy were punishing them
for their very sexuality -- and here, more than in most other
slasher films, the have-sex-and-die motif has a nasty realism.
Cropsy was burned all over, and we must assume that includes
his genitalia; how filled with rage he must be at the sight of
girls who once might've been masturbation fodder for him, but
whose very presence now mocks the insensate meat of what's left
between his legs -- not that any woman would come near him even
if he were sexually intact, as we saw in his encounter
with the prostitute.
This is a slasher movie with
a difference, though it plays by almost all the rules and is
generally too predictable to be "scary" (with the major
exception of the raft massacre, where all you're expecting is
for them to find a body part in the canoe, you pretty much see
all the killings coming a mile away). It tries to drum up audience
rapport with the doomed counselors (though Jason Alexander shows
his comedic gifts even here), but our sympathies are unavoidably
with Cropsy, based on the filmmakers' empathy with the horrors
he went through (five years of unsuccessful skin grafts,
man -- can you even imagine the torture?). His revenge, even
on those who had nothing to do with his disfigurement, feels
inevitable, preordained. All of this is an attempt to dig out
why The Burning has stayed with me since 1982 or so. It's
a legitimately ugly movie; it gets under your skin. |
