Movie: Horror: The Burning
Title: The Burning
Year: 1981
Rating: 2/10. (*b-boing?*)
Welcome to theme month, in which it turns out that yet another summer camp smack dab in the middle of Jersey is being haunted by a reclusive, possibly dead caretaker. Why? Because just one year before this movie was released, Friday the 13th made metric assloads of money, that's why.
Meet Cropsy. Cropsy was just your average run-of-the-mill summer camp caretaker until a group of...counselors? campers? (yo plot!) play a cruel practical joke on him with fire, rendering him more crispy than Cropsy, and so of course he returns to an entirely different summer camp to exact his revenge.
Now meet Cropsy The Killing Machine.
The Good:
Genuinely suspenseful. (Madman take notes.)
The Bad:
At this time, I can't prove that Cropsy and Dippy were played by the same actor, but then again, I can't prove that they weren't.
There's this awesome moment when Cropsy's in the prostitute's apartment, and he snaps off the lights, and the music switches off as well. Helloooooooo, unintentional comedy.
I know what I've said before, BUT this movie was just a little too graphic for my taste. And I'm not talking about the Dolphin shorts*. There's also a moment where a group of dude campers (including George Alexander and a basically fetal Fisher Stevens) play a practical joke on the camp bully (hello theme), then drop trou and moon him. I am here to tell you that the cameraman was way, way too into that scene. I should not be able to tell you who waxed and who didn't.
Actually, it's a very drrrrty camp in general, as evidenced by all the gratuitous showering, complete with jigglin' titties**.
"Michelle?" *boing?* Is that you????" *boingboing?*
And The Meta:
I'm not sure how this fits into the standard slasher framework: there's a Final Weird Boy, who saves Final Former Boy (who was involved in the original burninating), by stabbing and then lighting Cropsy back on fire. There's an attempt at a tender moment between the two arsonist-Boymen that's almost like father and son, if the family tradition was lighting people the fuck on fire.
And the last shot of Cropsy, all aflame for a second time, takes the form of a burning cross. So um, I have no idea what that means.
Other than that, this movie's all over the place: the sleazy guy who pressures the Good Girl into sex dies, but so does the Good Girl, even though she said no. The Slut and the Stud both die (of course), but so do a bunch of innocent campers whose only crime was building a raft and carving matching paddles to go with it. A bunch of campers who sit around and cry until they're rescued, survive.
This doesn't feel like "rejection of genre conventions" as much as "dartboard screenwriting." Especially as the standard conventions for slashers weren't all that established in '81. Good thing the filmmakers had those titties to fall back on.
*Am I the only woman in North America who never felt the urge to play softball in her underwear while between the ages of 16 and 23? What the fuck?
**Again, am I the only woman in North America who, when showering in the wilderness, hears a strange noise and reaches for a robe? Or better yet, a weapon? Dude. In that situation, I'd certainly make every effort to beat my attacker to death with a bottle of Prell.