Watch your fingers! Cropsy’s back in a new DVD edition of THE BURNING.
Holly Hunter (virtually an extra— perhaps because her Texas twang would be out of place amid all the New York kids). As Maylam says of THE BURN-
ING, perhaps unintentionally quot- ing Ricky Jay in BOOGIE NIGHTS, “It is what it is.” In a prologue, some kids play a prank on ill-tempered camp handyman Cropsy (THE LAST DRAGON’s Lou David) which goes sour as he sets fire to him- self. Months later, the totally burned Cropsy gets out of hos- pital and hones his killing skills (in a scene which borrows some set-ups from the opening of PEEPING TOM) on a middle- aged hooker (ALL THAT JAZZ’s K.C. Townsend). Then, we head upstate to a busy camp—unlike FRIDAY THE 13TH, this was shot in summer, with throngs of kid extras—where Todd (Matthews), one of the Cropsy-burners, is now a responsible counselor. Winnow- ing down the victim pool, a core group of older kids take a canoe trip upriver, with the expected time- outs for scary stories, practical jokes, skinny-dipping and unsatis- fying teen sex. Cropsy strands them by unmooring the canoe,
forcing Todd to supervise a raft- building exercise, and takes his sharpened gardening shears to an assortment of kids in an attempt to get at his nemesis. The slasher formula hadn’t quite set in stone when THE BURNING was made, so some characters who seem obvious victims (including Alexander’s camp clown) get off scot-free (though lanky Stevens suffers a severe finger-snipping which was the BBFC’s least favor- ite moment). Rather than focus on a “final girl,” the climax depends on the hero with a troubled past rescuing a younger, slightly misfit boy (Backer) from the psycho— though we get an obligatory return from the dead after Cropsy seems to have been killed, and an “un- masking” of Savini’s previously- hidden-in-shadow burn-face makeup.
When films like THE BURN-
ING were coming out every week, completist horror fans (like me) dutifully turned up, grumbling slightly because we’d rather see a Hammer Dracula or an Italian zombie picture. In a CINEFANTASTIQUE review of PROM NIGHT, critic John McCarty
perceptively noted that for a gen- eral (teenage) audience, films like this were “junk alright... but also fun, in much the same way that stupid movies like I WAS A TEEN- AGE WEREWOLF were fun for moviegoers of my generation.” Nearly thirty years on (!), even the original grumblers have softened and admitted the fun. In his STARBURST review of THE BURN- ING, Alan Jones compared Maylam to the character of the raddled hooker wearily getting the job done, but now joins the director on a chatty commentary track which offers solid back- ground material on the produc- tion. Maylam remains too polite to go into a falling-out he had with the Weinsteins late in the day, which Savini talks about in his own 19m video interview (which includes camcorder foot- age of the effects man at work on-set).
This disc, like a previous do- mestic VHS release from MGM, represents the film in its entirety, which was trimmed stateside to score an R rating. The transfer is a good-looking 1.85:1 and clear enough to show off some of the
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