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THE BURNING

AN ANGRY CAMP JANITOR TRIES TO KILL GEORGE COSTANZA



★★☆☆☆ (Don’t Bother)

Director: Tony Maylam

1981


The Burning is an okay film if you’re looking for something to get you in the mood for summer or Meatballs, but it’s a stretch to call it a horror movie, especially a decent one. Fun scenes and dialogue among campers are rudely interrupted when the burned janitor of a defunct camp comes back for a lame kill or two. There is one slasher moment so awesome, it rivals Friday the 13th, but this quick culling of teens on a raft isn’t the climax, so we’re left with half a dull movie to get through, afterward. If you watch this for anything, it’s to spot stars in the sea of familiar baby faces. There’s Holly Hunter and Brian Backer and then there’s Jason Alexander, who plays a teenage version of George Costanza. In The Burning, he’s a charming smartass who, like Red in The Shawshank Redemption, can get his friends anything they need, from condoms to nudie mags. Again, the hijinks of everyday camp life is amusing, and some characters stand out, but the pigeon-holed burned-janitor-bent-on-vengeance plot weighs the film down like an anchor. It feels like an afterthought.



The Burning begins with a trite backstory. A couple of boys at camp play a prank on the sleeping janitor Cropsy, who is sent to a hospital to recover and build his bloodlust. After so many years go by, he’s released into the wild where he promptly murders a prostitute for some reason. Then the movie fast forwards us to a new camp filled with interesting characters and lots of nipples and butt shots. The sleaze is laid on thick in the beginning, but because it’s through the lens of horny, ogling teenagers, I’ll give it a pass. After spending time with these kids (and suffering through scare fake-outs) the oldest ones canoe down a river for a three-day excursion to their doom.


This is where Cropsy decides to wreak havoc, but these scenes are slow and predictable mush. Out of our large cast, a few characters emerge as our “last guys” and I’m stunned to find Alfred (Backer) among them. Alfred is the bullied newbie who skulks around and claims he peeps on showering girls because he wants to scare them—he acts like the kind of guy who will one day write “Free Candy” on the side of his windowless van. Usually a perfect geek (Fast Times at Ridgemont High), Backer’s dweeb counter is too high for us to have sympathy for Alfred’s troubles. Sometimes it felt like he was supposed to be Mr. Red Herring, but this is unnecessary considering the first thing Cropsy did after leaving that burn unit was stab someone.


The finale of The Burning is nothing compared to that raft massacre I mentioned earlier. Our final showdown between Cropsy and our last guys had potential because someone brought out the pyrotechnics, but there’s no investment in those chosen characters, and the “twist” only elicits a shrug. The writers probably should have stuck to the original premise: Meatballs Lite. If you like your horror movies half-cooked and full of campfires and boobs, you probably won’t mind The Burning, though you probably won’t remember it, either.





GENRES: Serial Killer, Teens in Peril


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