The Burning
Some might think that The Burning -- a 1981 slasher movie about a summer camp in which a former counselor returns for revenge after being burned alive -- is nothing more than a needless variant of Friday the 13th. If so, the timing was bad: in 1981, there was little in Friday the 13th and Friday the 13th Part 2 between them to offer for much variety; even the sequels themselves, spanned over decades and ranging from Vancouver to Hell to Space, find much for variety. And perhaps, if you consider other summer-camp themed slasher movies -- Madman, Final Terror, fucking Cheerleader Camp -- it's inevitable to realize that Friday the 13th left little undone that would allow for variety. Except letting the nerd get laid. And this movie doesn't do that either. But should originality be our only criterion for artistic merit? Or even entertainment? Recently, Cracked came down on Stranger Things -- I no longer read Cracked -- for being unoriginal, its chief -- only -- virtue being its nostalgia. Cracked -- that bastion of nostalgia and nit-picking fandoms, that writes a hatchet job on Trump every day (that never gets old, and good thing they started it); Cracked, who jumped on Ghostbuster's vulva and never quite hopped off -- is one to say originality is all that matters. I only mention that to give an indication of how sometimes hollow the criticism that "such and such" isn't original can be. And it's an unoriginal, stupid complaint. I have other criteria for judging art and entertainment, and The Burning is as good judging from that criteria as any unofficial sequel to Friday the 13th could hope to be. The first difference is the killer himself. Jason drowned, or pretended to; Cropsy is burned alive because he beat a camper "really bad". Just how bad, and how far this beating goes to justify his burning, are questions The Burning isn't as interested in as the burning itself. A group of campers put a skull with candles for eyes on Cropsy's nightstand, unaware that Cropsy douses his blankets in gasoline every night before he goes to bed. Once Cropsy wakes up and sees the skull, he screams so loudly that his voice comes not from his throat but a sound studio, where it is sustained for a lengthy period because the hole in Cropsy's mouth is too small to let the scream go back inside him and die. He has a spasm and knocks the skull off his bed, then gets up and rushes outside, where he attempts a mad-dervish method of putting himself out by whirling his arms around and running in circles. This is more entertaining than any pyrotechnic spectacle I've seen Rammstein do onstage. He falls down a hill -- stops -- drops and then rolls down a hill, which puts him out a little before he lands by a creek. Cropsy stays in a coma at a hospital for many years, then is let out and he kills a prostitute. He finds her on the street, then she goes inside her apartment and says "Are you coming up? 'Cause I'm going in." Cropsy will be going in, but he won't ever be coming up -- and not going in, probably. The murder that follows is brutal even by slasher standards. He strangles her and then stabs her with some scissors, then pushes her halfway out a window and I suppose lets her bleed out on the street. Besides this unprovoked and unexplained murder, there's little difference as to why Jason Voorhees and Cropsy kill campers. There is, however, some difference between the pranksters, potheads, and Final Girls of Friday the 13th and the stalkers, masturbators, and George Costanzas of The Burning. That's right: Jason Alexander is in this movie, and he's adorable. There are many soon-to-be famous celebrities in The Burning, but I won't spoil the fun. Alexander has a friend named Eddy, who is in an aggressive-boyfriend class all his own that, except for Madman, I haven't seen any other slasher movie try to portray. Eddy is fond of saying "Natch, baby", which is I think a stupid-ass portmanteau word compounded of nasty and snatch. I don't have an 80s slang dictionary. I have my limits. Of the prominent females, we have Eddy's girlfriend, Karen, the head-counselor Michelle, and Tiger. I don't know why her name is Tiger; she ain't a wonderful thing. When she's introduced, she hits a ball off into the woods as she plays softball with some other girls. She goes to look for it and is almost killed by Cropsy. Her teammates would have shortly noticed her disappearance anyway; or maybe they would have decided that playing softball without Tiger is much more fun even or especially without a bat and a ball. I meet the remaining cast in a mess hall that features a stuffed-and-mounted buffalo head that I have no choice but to consider authentic in this context. Karen and Michelle are eating together; Michelle is trying to convince Karen not to sleep with Eddy, and sadly, this rhetorical adventure will go on until one of the three is dead. Karen really likes Eddy, "But every time I think he's serious and I really start to get to him, he blows it.", which is a compact masterpiece of sexual misfires and mixed-messages that it's beneath my dignity as a critic to point them out. All the same though, I would rather have heard Jason Alexander either say that line or be the subject -- hell, object -- of it. There's a big "Overnight" coming up that frightens Karen because she might sleep with scary Eddy while she's out on it. The only other female of interest is Sally. She wakes up and takes a shower in a shower stall outside her cabin, where she hears someone approaching and screams. In Friday the 13th this person would be a prankster; in The Burning it's a stalker called Alfred, who is also conveniently and unfortunately and necessarily the only other male worth mentioning. Alfred is put under citizen's arrest by some older, or at least pretending-to-be-much-younger boys and Michelle demands that he explain himself. Alfred claims he only wanted to scare Sally, not to see her naked, which is a self-sacrificing prank indeed because those two goals are mutually exclusive. Then Todd -- the male head-counselor -- appears and takes Alfred away to explain himself in private. It's pretty obvious that Alfred either went to the shower stalls to pull a prank he did not premeditate very well, or that he went there to peep without the premeditation of a prank to cover it up. Todd tells Alfred he's here to talk, and then this stalking-peeping business is supposed to be left resolved, as I'm sure in 1981 it would have been, whereas now The Burning would be a totally different movie. In the next scene, Alfred is bullied by Glazer, Sally's boyfriend. Then Alfred, Alexander, and another boy named Woodstock -- who will provide all the slapstick in this movie that his name suggests -- go swimming, although Alfred can't swim. He's pushed in to the lake by Glazer, who stands over him, arms akimbo, laughing as if he is a Nietzschean fiend in an Ayn Rand novel. Alfred is saved; what a pity. Glazer swims up to a platform where all the girls are sunbathing. He asks Sally is she wants to go swimming, and when she says "No way.", he looks hurt and offended in an ad-libbed way that makes his question an honest one. Meanwhile Woodstock pulls out his "pee-shooter", a pellet gun that adds even more hilarious connotations to his name. He aims at Glazer, then double-checks with Alexander, who says "This is about to be the greatest moment of your life." This is probably true. Woodstock's gun goes off like a musket, the pellet striking Glazer in the ass and almost knocking him off his feet. The boys, however, don't run when Glazer looks at them, but moon him instead. I should have a joke about this but now I've seen Jason Alexander's ass and the world has changed so much thereafter that I no longer care. I might not even finish this review. Part 2 Next, Woodstock and the boys are inside a cabin at night. Woodstock is smoking a cigar; smoking is in itself a bad habit (I know) but retarded when coupled with a habit of shooting much older and larger boys in the ass with a pellet gun that has more wind in it than he has. Speaking of Glazer, he is in the cabin with them, running a dart along his arm as if plotting out the outline for a tattoo design to be filled in later when he goes to prison for murdering Woodhouse -- or Alfred; he's in the cabin too. Then Alexander shows up with a Playboy and a Hustler; the Hustler is for Woodstock: he doesn't have the stamina after smoking to jerk off to a Playboy. The other boy -- he doesn't matter; none of this matters -- says that "Woody" is too small for a Hustler, which is a remark he should have revised considering that he has a pet name for a boy whose name is already a double-entendre for dick and whose masturbation habits he is intimately familiar with. Alexander says "That's the world bantam-weight jerk-off champion over there, huh?". This line implies a number of things, the least ridiculous of which is that there is a jerk off competition, the most unbelievable that there are assigned weight classes, and the most unsettling is that Woodstock is a world champ -- of know. Alexander brought Glazer a bag of condoms, which Glazer perhaps regrets buying now that he has a hole in his ass that Alexander practically drilled there himself. Glazer is pissed that the condoms aren't lubricated, and if you're wondering why Glazer is being a tight-ass about lubrication issues, well: Alfred. Next, Alexander, Todd, and Woodstock enter the mess hall and go to a table where Sally, Karen, and Michelle are perched as if they are the Aryan Sisterhood of some women's prison. I've been to Band Camp and Christian Camp, but there were no correctional-facility-based hierarchies there. Alexander sweet talks some of the girls, asking them if they need any life-preservers or spermicide, having both a pro-life and pro-death niche on the Summer Camp market. The Supervisor finally explains what the "Overnight" is: a "three-day canoe trip to Devil's Creek". Three days explain why Glazer wanted a bag of condoms instead of individual, "fun-size" packets. The canoe trip begins, and once at a location appropriate for camping, Todd tells the story of Camp Blackfoot, which is where Cropsy was burned. Apparently, Cropsy took the entire camp, and anything that was worth seeing there right along with him, so they opened up this new camp somewhere else, which Cropsy has come back to, nonetheless. Eddy then tries to seduce Karen with his Ethical Appeal. "Come on, what do you say?" is about as rhetorical as Eddy gets. He goes into the lake naked, hoping to lure Karen in, which works, then backfires when he tries to seduce her again although he promised not too. Karen swims away, angry and sad. She can't find her clothes when she gets back to the river bank; Cropsy has strewn them around as if they were breadcrumbs leading to her death more effectively than Eddy's leading questions led to sex. Panties on one branch, shirt on another, and her romper at the foot of a tree. Cropsy wants Karen dressed in the reverse order that she undressed, thus giving him time to decide when to kill her and what level of dress will most likely leave a corpse that will roll Eddy's rage erection back into his belly like a spent kazoo. She finds her panties after putting on her shoes, which she will have to take off to put the panties on -- an amazing feat considering her no-vagina nudity clause -- so the movie cuts to Eddy swimming off his blue balls, which are probably blue in fact no matter whether they are in breach of contract or not. Suddenly, Cropsy pops out from behind a tree and slits Karen's throat. Then Todd and Michelle accost Eddy as to Karen's whereabouts. Michelle figured Karen was with Eddy, but did not figure on Eddy trying to seduce Karen, then promising not to, then breaking his promise and being every bit as scary as Karen told her he was. Then a girl shouts that the canoes are gone, as if Cropsy let them loose thinking they would flee upriver like untamed cattle. Glazer blames Alfred, although these campers knocked over a canoe on the first day out and it's just as likely no one tied them down. The campers divide to find wood for a raft. Glazer tries to convince Sally to have sex with him because when Glazer sees an opportunity he takes it. Sally agrees to have sex later while Alfred peeps on this diplomacy exercise and perhaps learns how women can put him off with hollow promises instead of credible threats. Eddy, Glazer, and Alfred are like the Three Musketeers of sex appeal: Ethos, Pathos, and Bathos. The raft is made and a group of campers including Woodstock and Eddy are sent back, for more canoes to lose, a bigger raft, a rescue mission led by the overconfident Supervisor, a beer run. But if their mission is to find another canoe, then they succeed, because they find one on the way back and paddle towards it. Cropsy hops out, having unaccountably counted on this, and kills all the campers simultaneously in a group-kill that is remarkable for dispatching the most annoying characters (save Alfred) in one fell swoop. I suppose it would have been more annoying to kill them off individually, and more expensive after all the fancy cuts to avoid nudity payments. Glazer and Sally have sex and Glazer has an orgasm before you finish reading this sentence. Glazer leaves and Cropsy attacks Sally while Glazer gets some firewood, as Alfred trails behind him, making for an interesting scene when Glazer, on his way to try sex again with Sally, finds dead Sally, and then finds the person he hates most right there on-hand to punish for her death (as well as and his pathetic orgasm). Cropsy, however, not Sally, pops out from under the sheets and attacks Glazer. He stabs Glazer with the shears, but it takes Glazer a long time to die as Alfred runs back. He finds Todd and explains everything, leaving the peeping -- if I remember correctly -- assumed as obvious. Todd finds Glazer's body; Cropsy is getting sloppy, and now he has lost the element of surprise and also has given Alfred credibility and made him a secondary character that might survive the movie. Cropsy, however unbelievably, is still at the crime scene, having counted on Alfred peeping although he probably didn't spy him himself, and attacks Todd, knocking him out. Alfred gets away again, running deeper in the woods because he doesn't have any credibility with anyone else -- especially if he has to tell about Glazer's death, who wants to kill him, then Sally's, who he wants to have sex with, and finally Todd's -- who wants to stop Glazer and Sally from killing him. How convenient, Alfred. The raft, meanwhile, now filled with mutilated body parts, floats back to camp, where it is seen by the other campers who cheer it on although they don't see anyone on it and know the other campers left in canoes, not on a raft. Alexander thinks this is a prank. That would be the worst possible prank to pull at the worst possible time on the worst possible people, who are -- delight delight -- exactly the people I want to discover their dead friends in exactly this fashion -- complete with the prank delusion. Michelle swims to the raft and finds her mutilated friends. Todd runs around looking for Alfred in a long-ass chase that culminates with Todd, Alfred, and Cropsy in a metal shack for the movie's denouement. Cropsy has a blowtorch, then he wrestles with Todd, then strangles Alfred. Alfred escapes and then stabs Cropsy in the back as he approaches Todd. Cropsy drops his blowtorch on the ground, which after all was a weapon he should have had more finesse with considering the risk of being burned alive again. He catches fire again, once-burned flesh going up just as fast as fresh flesh, although he went up pretty good then too. And with Cropsy dead, the movie ends. The Burning has just enough variety -- faulty sex, group kills, fire -- to be different, but not quite dissimilar enough from Friday the 13th to be both derivative and a good example of where the Friday the 13th series could have gone instead of Space. But is it Original? No. But who really cares about originality anymore? Ulysses was original. Fuck originality. Only a fool would go into a slasher movie and expect something entirely new. It's all in the game: guessing who dies, when, how, and why. Who gets laid? Who doesn't? Asking a slasher movie -- or anything that isn't an art-house film or postmodern literature -- to be original is as silly as watching the same Redtube video over and over again because they all look the same. Long live The Burning. And long live After Shower Quickie. That's a good one. |