THE BURNING

Directed by Tony Maylam. United States, Canada. 1981.

I want you to picture this. You’re sitting in a field with your best friends from high school. You’re all happy to see each other. You’re enjoying each other’s company immensely, only talking about the things you remember that bring you joy. Below you, at the bottom of a steep hill, is a playpen full of kittens. No people in sight, just wonderful, adorable balls of fluff and whiskers, running in circles, playing with bits of yarn and fallen leaves. It’s heaven on Earth: your cherished friends beside you, and dozens of meowing kittens below.

But then you see it, high atop the hill across from you. A giant boulder sits perched on the hilltop. Its path leads directly towards the playpen below. Your friend whispers something in your ear, and you laugh sweetly. Looking down, you see a little calico playing with a snow-white Persian. You’re very happy right now. Life has rarely been this perfect, but you know, deep down and with frightening certainty, that the boulder is going to start rolling.

THE BURNING, the feature film debut of producer wunderkinds (among other things) Bob and Harvey Weinstein, begins with the classic prank gone wrong. Cropsey, the caretaker at a Summer camp, is set ablaze when a harmless joke goes awry, leaving him horribly disfigured. Years later, he’s back in the world and walking the city streets. His first stop? A prostitute, naturally. A professional lady of the night, she is into all kinds of kinky stuff, but draws the line at crispy weirdos. When she rejects him, Cropsey rams a pair of scissors into her gut.

So far, this has been a routine slasher movie, but we’re about to take a long detour into another 80s staple: the teen coming-of-age movie.

For most of its running time, THE BURNING is less concerned with chopping and slicing than with pranks and skirt-chasing. We still have some time before the boulder starts rolling. We meet Alfred, the nerdy kid struggling to fit in, and Glazer, a bully with eyes for camp hottie, Sally. There’s Dave, the smart-ass guy who can smuggle condoms and girly mags into camp, and Woodstock, the tagalong with a vitamin E deficiency. And what camp would be complete without a host of counselors, chief among them Todd and Michelle, the couple in charge? And these are no ordinary counselors. They all appear to be only a few years older than their younger wards and aren’t above gossiping about sex and smoking cigarettes with high school students.

Sure, there are rules, curfews, and mandatory activities, but there’s plenty of time for flirting, lounging around, and making out. The tone remains playful and light-hearted. Even after Alfred is caught peeping at Sally as she takes a gratuitously long shower, a violation that infuriates Glazer, the movie never lingers on any potential violence. It’s all solved with a BB gun shot to the ass and a push into the lake. No one throws a punch or bloodies a nose. It stays firmly in the teen sex comedy.

Yeah, we get a few spooks from Cropsey here or there, but nothing ever comes from them. The ground underneath the boulder shakes but holds. Those scenes only serve to set Alfred up as the boy who cried scorched psychopath, the outcast loser who keeps seeing the boogeyman around every corner.

Atypical for these kinds of films, none of these characters are obnoxious or ill-defined. Everyone has a personality quirk, interacts with their fellow castmates like real friends, and feels like an actual kid you’d meet at a summer camp. Their performances feel almost improvised (which you would expect from a cast that includes Jason Alexander, Brian Backer, Fisher Stevens, and Holly Hunter). I’m having fun just hanging out with them. I’m enjoying their company. But now we’re at the halfway point, and we need to leave the comfortable confines of Camp Stonewater for a rafting trip down the lake. This is when the ground beneath that boulder finally gives way.

The transition into full-on slasher movie is where THE BURNING goes from a solid 10 to a chewy 7. With every passing cliched moment, the film gets worse. Thankfully, we’ve spent half the movie getting to know the unfortunate souls now camping far from safe shores. Caring about characters is key to effective horror moments, because if you don’t care they live, what is there to worry about?

The film’s notoriety comes entirely from the escalating body count of the back half. Tom Savini’s effects work was just realistic enough to earn THE BURNING a spot on the infamous Video Nasties list in the early 80s. While it’s undeniably gruesome stuff, I can’t help but think the back half of THE BURNING is infinitely worse than the front half. Nothing here is presented with any real sense of care. The camera is lumbering, the day-for-night photography is laughable, and there is virtually no attempt at real tension or suspense. The horror stuff is often blunt and lazy. Worse, it’s often visually confusing. That boulder, tumbling downhill at frightening speed, is coming to ruin everything... and it’s carrying garden shears.

Garden shears that will be plunged into necks and snap off a handful of fingers in the blink of an eye. They’ll be slammed into foreheads and rammed through throats, all in convincingly nasty fashion. But the way these murder set pieces are filmed often turns guilty pleasures into head-scratching moments of bloody confusion. Take, for example, the infamous raft murder wherein our charred maniac mutilates a half dozen characters in under 90 seconds. The group comes across a lone canoe in the middle of the lake. They paddle their raft closer, only for Cropsey to stand straight up and bear down on them with his murder scissors.

But how? Was he crouched down? How deep is that canoe that they couldn’t see him inside it? They’re on the surface of a lake, not uneven ground, so how did no one see a tall, hideously deformed middle-aged man lying in the canoe as they approached? Moreover, how long was Cropsey lying in there? How did he know the campers would gather wood for a raft instead of just hiking back? Doesn’t that make more sense to do? What would he have done then, grumpily paddled back to shore and rushed to catch up?

Glazer is dispatched by having shears shoved through his neck, but I challenge anyone to explain to me how the killing actually happens. Glazer approaches Sally as she lies under a heavy blanket in the woods. He doesn’t know that she’s dead. As he lifts the blanket, shears mysteriously appear at the right side of the frame, turned inward. Was Cropsey under the blanket? If so, was he holding the shears above his head? Was he standing offscreen? If so, how did he get the shears into the front of Glazer’s neck? He’s bent over, with his face three feet away from the ground? Wouldn’t Cropsey have stabbed him in the back if he were offscreen? I cannot figure out the physics of what happens in that scene. It’s like they couldn’t figure out how to shoot it and just gave up.

Simply put, the back half of the film lacks the care and energy found in the first half. Even the grand finale, which sees our final boy Alfred being pursued by Cropsey in a copper mine, fails to impress. Todd comes to Alfred’s rescue only to come face-to-face with our charbroiled lunatic, now carrying a flamethrower for some reason. The screenwriters choose this moment to reveal a secret: Todd was one of the campers who played the fateful prank on Cropsey five years ago. There’s just one problem with that.

By the time the screenwriter drops the bombshell, the movie is over. A main character with personal stakes in the ‘why’ of your narrative can add dramatic depth. The fact that our hero figure was the figurative cause of all these deaths could be an ironically delicious angle, one with genuine dramatic oomph. But it’s just a throwaway detail here. The boulder has completed its tumble. The playpen full of kittens has been squashed. I’m ready for the film to be over now. It’s no longer fun.

I know I just spent a few paragraphs comparing the back half of THE BURNING to a large rock turning kittens into mush, but it is still one of the best 80s slasher movies. That first half does a lot of heavy lifting. The cast is uniformly great. Everyone is likeable, and the mood is light and energetic. The descent into routine slasher bullshit is regrettable, but not unforgivable. The back half lacks suspense and tension, trading genuine scares for graphic bloodletting. Savini’s effects work is praiseworthy, but it can’t wallpaper over the underlying issues. It simply doesn’t work as a scary movie. It does, however, work as a half-great piece of 80s entertainment. Every time I finish THE BURNING, it leaves a slight bad taste in my mouth, but I’d still drink a tall glass of this pretty much anytime.