"Don't look he'll see you, Don't breathe he'll hear you, Don't move you're DEAD!"

80’s slashers get bad press these days, all because of pop culture ridden, trendy, post modern slashers that get made by Hollywood fat cats today. People look back on them after seeing “Scream” and “I know what you did the day before yesterday” or whatever, and say, “Oh how cliché’d, I knew that was going to happen” etc, etc… But I myself like the eighties slashers, because I’m not looking for anything new and “clever”, I’m just looking for a simple horror flick with lots of disposable, horny teens for which a deformed or deranged killer to dice up in any way he/she sees fit.

The Burning is your typical Friday the 13th clone, In which a horribly deformed caretaker of a summer camp returns to reek havoc on an unsuspecting group of teens at Camp Blackwater. You see, some years earlier a group of young boys, at Camp Blackfoot played a practical joke on Cropsy the caretaker, resulting in him being horribly burned and disfigured. Cropsy’s first order of business when he is discharged from hospital some years later is to catch up on all the sex he has been missing while he was crisping away in hospital, so he goes to a prostitute. But of course, she sees how scarred he is and tells him to leave, but Cropsy won’t have any of it, so introduces her chest to a pair of scissors.

Poster for The Burnings British cinema release.

The youths at the summer camp are your usual summer camp murder fodder. There is the geeky shy one who spies on the girls, there is the loser, waster, bully type who thinks he’s some kind of stud. And there is the “good ‘old” guys who are just having a good time. At times The Burning has some comic elements that actually work to its advantage, like seeing someone get shot in the arse with an air pistol. Hey, made me laugh anyway...

Video Sleeve for the original video release before its banning.

Gore is also high on the menu here, more than your average eighties slasher, which resulted in The Burning getting a ban in Britain for a short while. Gore maestro Tom Savini (Friday the 13th, Dawn of the Dead) Handles the gore as good as he always does, having turned down work on Friday the 13th Part 2 to work on The Burning.

A keen eye will also spot a young Holly Hunter in a background type of role as one of the gang and Jason Alexander from Seinfeld fame. The Best scene in The Burning comes when Cropsy butchers a bunch of the teens on a raft in under 30 seconds…or twenty seconds if you’re watching the cut UK re-release. So if you thought Scream was gory and on the edge then why don’t you pick up The Burning and see what you are missing.

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