Welcome to a new B-Movie Enema review, and welcome to the official start of summer.

Yeah, you read the right, bitches. I say when summer starts. And it starts right now as we say goodbye to May this weekend and hello to June. With the warmer months, traditionally speaking, people start taking vacations in various ways. Families might plan trips to lakes to go boating and maybe fish or something. They may plan on going to Disney World. The days get longer and the movies get more fun and entertaining (for better or worse). Parents are ready, after a long, grueling school year dealing with piss poor report cards and parent-teacher conferences, to send their kids to a camp to get them out of their goddamn hair for a few weeks.

That desire to make your kids someone else’s problem gave birth to two very distinctly 80s subgenres in movies. The first were comedies like 1979’s Meatballs. The second, much more popular subgenre, was the slasher horror like 1980’s Friday the 13th. The latter is where this week’s featured movie, 1981’s The Burning, lies.

While released a year after the incredibly influential and popular Friday the 13th, The Burning is not actually a ripoff or something trying to cash in on the new hotness that was the camp slasher subgenre. The project began in 1979, making this maybe more tied to Meatballs than Friday the 13th…? Eh, sure. Anyway, to really get into the discussion of The Burning, we really need to rip a band-aid off a topic that has unfortunately soiled this movie’s very positive qualities for many people.

Yeah… Let’s do it. This movie is the brainchild of Harvey Weinstein.

Sorry, but it’s true. The man whose legacy was ruined when the women he ickily propositioned for roles in the movies he produced finally had enough of keeping quiet over how much of a creep he is. The man who SOME-FUCKING-HOW is getting rehabilitated by one of the biggest pieces of shit ever, Candace Owens. The man whose own brother, Bob (who isn’t exactly an angel himself), doesn’t seem to like him. Yeah, that’s the guy who is credited as creating this incredible piece of 80s horror quality.

Weinstein was desperate to get into the movie business. I hate to think why he was so hot on the idea of getting into movies. Anyway, he recognized that horror was a good way of getting into the biz. Typically, they are not very expensive. Typically, they turn profits. After The Texas Chainsaw Massacre and Halloween proved to show how small budgets, the right marketing, and the right story could turn into box office gold, he started working more toward horror with his then producing partner, Michael Cohl.

Harvey heard tales of the Cropsey legend in New York when he was younger. Basically, Cropsey was an urban legend that an escaped mental patient lived in an abandoned mental institution on Staten Island. He’d go out at night and snatch kids. Typically, he would brandish an axe or a hook for a hand. Cropsey was a legend built around a real killer named Andre Rand. He allegedly killed five people. He was only ever convicted of the kidnapping and murder of one woman, years after committing the crime. He would only be sentenced to 25 years in prison. The legend of Cropsey would go on to inspire several horror movies and such from The Burning to even providing some elements to Candyman and I Know What You Did Last Summer.

When Harvey Weinstein wrote up a quick treatment for a Cropsey-inspired movie titled “The Cropsy Maniac” and delivered it to Cohl, his producer buddy loved the idea, and away they went. A script was written and shopped at Cannes in 1980. They got a few promising offers, but wanted to shoot the movie themselves and raise some more money once it was completed. This was similar to how Sean Cunningham secured distribution from Paramount for Friday the 13th. With what they were able to raise, they hired Tony Maylam to direct. Maylam was a Brit who had been best known at the time for being a rock documentarian. Maylam actually knew Harvey Weinstein and Cohl from when they were rock music promoters. This would go on to become Maylam’s most famous work by a pretty wide margin.

Next came adding some really interesting names to the production. First up, Weinstein and Cohl hired Tom Savini to do effects work. Savini preferred this to working on the second Friday because, while there were issues with trying to figure out what the producers were doing with this adult Jason character, among other things, he just liked the script to The Burning more. With the cast, we’d find a lot of soon-to-be quite famous people making very early appearances in films. Jason Alexander, Fisher Stevens, Leah Ayres, and Holly Hunter were all cast as people at the camp where the horrors would eventually go down. One year later, one of the leads, Brian Backer, would end up having an even bigger movie with Fast Times at Ridgemont High before going on to be the face of some of the early Doritos commercials. All this makes the movie famous for two things other than being created by Hollywood’s greatest monster – a very young and talented cast who would all go on to have pretty memorable careers and an overall pretty damn effective plot and monster.

So, let’s not waste any more time and set off for Camp Blackfoot!

The movie opens with the lore for the entire movie. At Camp Blackfoot, a group of boys in one of the cabins make plans to get back at Cropsy. Cropsy is the camp’s drunken caretaker. He’s also pretty shitty to the campers and absues them. They plan to do nothing more than simply scare him with a fake skull they’ve done up with candles in its eye sockets. They just want the caretaker to realize they are onto him and they ain’t taking his shit anymore. One of the kids puts the skull next to Cropsy’s bed while the others bang on the windows to wake him up so he can see the skull.

Everything starts off as intended. The guy who sneaks in to leave the skull and light the candles gets in, but gets a brief start when Cropsy sits up while still asleep. He’s able to leave behind the head and get outside to join the others as they play their part of rapping on the window to wake the caretaker. The skull even does its job of scaring the shit out of Cropsy.

The problem is it works too well because out of sheer fright, Cropsy knocks the skull onto his bed, which causes the candles to light his blankets, and him, on fire.

The boys, seeing that this has gone too far, even intend on going to get Cropsy out of his cabin to help him. However, when Cropsy thrashes about on fire, he knocks over a can of gasoline that ignites a bigger fire, and he runs out of his cabin completely engulfed in flames. He eventually falls into a nearby pond. It’s already determined that Cropsy survived. He’s been in the burn unit at the hospital for a week. He’s even used as an attraction for a new doctor at the hospital, but the nurse who wanted to freak the doctor out gets a scare of his own when Cropsy’s charred hand grabs his arm.

Five years later, Cropsy is finally released from the hospital. They attempted skin grafts, but the procedure didn’t work. They need to wait another six months before they try anything else. We hear his doctors talk about how it will be difficult for him to adjust to the outside again, especially with his physical appearance. Most importantly, though, we hear his doctors all advise him to look past his hatred of the kids who played the prank on him.

The first thing he does upon release from the hospital, Cropsy does what any guy who’s been stuck in the hospital for five years with third degree burns all over his body would do – he buys some pussy. Unfortunately for the hooker, she didn’t get a good look at him until she already invited him into her apartment. While she begs for him to simply leave, he grabs a pair of scissors and stabs her. He even throws her body halfway through one of her windows just to add… well, I’d say insult to injury, but it’s more like back scrapes and cuts to her stab wound.

Cut to Camp Stonewater, where campers and counselors are already settled into the usual business of camping. The girls are playing softball while the boys watch. Counselor Eddy and Jason Alexander’s Dave, a camper, have buns on their minds. Specifically, the counselor who is playing third base named Karen. They leer at the girl’s juicy butt in her bikini bottoms.

Did I mention this is a Harvey Weinstein production?

Basically, the entire cast of the rest of the film is here at this game. While one girl goes into the treeline to get the ball, we see that Cropsy has already arrived at Camp Stonewater. He lurks with a pair of pruning shears. He raises the shears above his head to strike, but just then, the girl, named Tiger, finds the ball and heads back out to rejoin the game.

In the mess hall, Karen later tells her friend, another counselor named Michelle, that she likes Eddy but sometimes he kind of scares her. Michelle more or less tells her that she has to shit or get off the pot. If she doesn’t have great feelings about him, she needs to steer clear of him. But when she says that she does like him, then she needs to actually get with the getting with him.

The next morning, we follow Sally, another of the older girls at the camp, to the shower. As she showers, she hears creaking as if she isn’t alone. Sure enough, she is not. One of the campers, a teen named Alfred, is snooping around. She screams, which gets Michelle and Karen to come running along with Eddy and lead counselor Todd. Todd promises to talk to Alfred about what he was doing sneaking around the showers, even if all he wanted to do was spook the girl. Michelle says he’s a sexual pervert and should probably be kicked out. She thinks Todd is too much of a pushover to actually set Alfred right.

Now, Alfred… well… He’s a sweaty, nervous kid. I mean, it’s Brian Backer who is best known for being the neurotic, sweaty, nervous, dorky Mark Ratner in Fast Times at Ridgemont High. So that’s probably not helping his case here when Todd talks to him. Alfred says that he doesn’t have any friends. He’s constantly getting picked on. He never wanted to come hear. It’s like the military. He feels like everyone is always telling him what to do. Todd reveals to Alfred (and us) that he was sent home five years ago for doing something wrong, giving us a clue as to how this part of the story has a connection to the cold open with the prank that burned Cropsy. Todd says that if Alfred ever feels like he needs to talk to someone, he needs to come to him and not act out.

Alfred has one particular bully who gives him problems. There’s a tough named Glazer who picks on Alfred. Glazer and Sally are sweet on each other. Alfred peeking on Sally pisses Glazer off. Glazer warns Alfred that if he so much as look at Sally that he’ll fuck him up so bad his own mother wouldn’t recognize him. Todd comes to Alfred’s defense and issues a warning to Glazer. If Glazer so much as creates any kind of problem for any of the campers, Todd will fuck him up.

Now everyone at camp is preparing for the three-day canoe trip that will lead to real camping throughout the woods. Now, Dave, Fisher Stevens’ Woodstock, and another of the teenage campers named Fish start to talk to Alfred. They are going to help Alfred learn how to swim so he won’t be that much of a liability on the canoe trip. Well, when they aren’t watching, Glazer pushes Alfred in. Alfred tells the others, after they pull him out of the lake, that Glazer will get his. Dave decides that Woodstock can help get a little revenge with his pea shooter.

God, you gotta love this era of history when a kid can just bring something that straight up looks like a gun that can fire little pebbles out like a gun to a camp.

Woodstock hits Glazer right in the ass as he’s trying to talk up the girls. They then moon the bully as he yells about getting back at them. As he is freaking out at the guys, one of the girls push Glazer off the platform in the lake. Later that night, the guys are in their cabin. Cropsy lurks around outside and eventually comes up to one of the windows and looks inside. Alfred sees Cropsy’s face but the other guys don’t believe he saw what he saw. When Todd comes to take them to the mess hall for dinner, Alfred declines to tell him what he saw.

That’s called “don’t tell another character a thing to keep the plot moving and fill out the entire 90-minute runtime.”

But, if I’m really being honest and fair, I can let that go because this is an extremely well-written film. I’d say it’s better written than most of the 80s horror films as a whole. Yeah, not just slashers, but all of the genre of the entire decade. It’s a large cast of characters. They are quickly fleshed out to let you know exactly who they are, what they’re personality types are, and what you can expect from them.

Sure, later on, the cast is whittled down, and not the way you might think, so we can focus on the most important characters dealing with Cropsy, but in this early stage of the movie, these characters are pretty rich. We’re not so sure about Alfred. He’s kind of a creep. We know we don’t like Glazer because he just reeks of being a bully. Sally just kind of enjoys the attention she gets. The girls around her, particularly the younger girls, tease her and act like young, boy-crazy girls would act. The trio of Dave, Woodstock, and Fish is the group of guys you’d like to think you’d hang out with.

While there are other characters like the counselors Michelle, Todd, Eddy, and Karen filling out the cast, we get that they are the “responsible” ones in the gaggle of characters we’ve met. Well, I don’t know about Eddy. He both appeals to and frightens Karen. Not sure how to feel about that, but still, you’d think Eddy would throw down with Glazer if that psycho got out of hand.

The structure of the movie also feels very Italian giallo in these early acts too. We don’t see too much of Cropsy, but we definitely see his point of view. We see his black-gloved hands. We see the pop of red as he splashes blood across a wall. All the different things that could potentially inspire this movie are well used in this script, and it makes for a very engaging movie.

As we get pretty near the halfway point of the movie, it’s finally time for the big, exciting canoe trip that will take the campers away from their cabins for the next three days down the river of the campgrounds. The first night of the trip, Todd tells the story of Cropsy at Camp Blackfoot, which was near their camp on the same lake. Now, his story of Cropsy he tells is part horror, part comedy. He talks about how Cropsy drank so much that he could peel paint from the walls simply by breathing. He talks about how one of the kids got the brunt of Cropsy’s cruelty, so some other kids decided to pull their prank we saw at the start of the movie. He tells the story somewhat accurately. The prank went wrong, Cropsy burned up, and he survived. However, Todd tells the story to set up Eddy wearing a mask and carrying a fake knife to scare the others sitting around the campfire.

One thing I’m not sure Todd realized he got right, or if it really was something that Cropsy always had with him, are those pruning shears that we’ve seen Cropsy carrying around.

We finally get a little more insight into the deal between Karen and Eddy. Karen does like Eddy. She finds him charming, but she doesn’t quite know what to think about him when he starts talking about how many girls he’s been with. He charms her enough to convince her to go skinny dipping with him. However, when he becomes a little too aggressive again, she backs off, and he basically reacts poorly to her reconsideration of sex. He then tells her to get the fuck out of his face. So yeah. Eddy isn’t necessarily a terrible guy, but he’s aggressive, and that doesn’t fit with what Karen’s looking for. I get it. Again, it’s a good, complex character in this movie.

When she gets out of the lake, she finds that Cropsy’s scattered her clothes all over the place. As she tries to find them and get dressed, Cropsy jumps out. He uses his shears to slice her throat.

It’s at this point The Burning really picks up steam. That, more or less, started Day 2 of the canoe trip, and that’s when things really turn into a nightmare. Todd and Michelle interrogate Eddy about Karen being missing. He explains that he did go off with her the night before, but he must have come on a little too strong, and she took off. He figured she swam back to the rest of the camp. It’s then the kids tell the counselors that the canoes are all missing.

When Todd and Michelle ask the kids what happened to the canoes, Glazer immediately points his finger at Alfred, but no one buys the idea. Todd says they can’t hike back to the main camp, so they need to split up and find those canoes. Todd has an uneasy feeling. He can’t see any way that the canoes were accidentally unmoored. He also can’t see a situation in which Karen would have left everyone in the middle of the night.

With the canoes definitely gone, Todd begins building a raft so they can get back to the main camp. While ordered to find wood to help build the raft, Glazer gets real fresh with Sally, but she continuously tells him no. She eventually relents but Alfred is watching from behind a tree.

Back with the rest of the campers and counselors, Eddy, along with a handful of campers, including Woodstock and Fish, row off with the explicit instructions to return to the main camp so they can get more boats to come back for the rest of the stranded campers. As they row along, they end up discovering one of the missing canoes. When they approach the canoe, there is a surprise waiting for them…

Frankly, this is one of the greatest jump scare surprises in any horror movie of the 80s. It may be the greatest jump scare in slasher history. Not only does it totally surprise you that Cropsy is hiding there, but it also kills characters you wouldn’t expect to die. I mean, sure, Eddy… He’s got it coming. However, we also lose a younger girl who didn’t exactly have a ton of scenes or lines, but she was heavily featured whenever the girls were. We lose a girl who was sweet on Alexander’s Dave. The biggest surprise, though? Woodstock and Fish getting killed too. They were major characters. That’s pretty ballsy even for 1981 in the early days of slasher horror.

But after the horror and slaughter of five featured characters from the cast, it’s time to offset that with some sexy times. Todd and Michelle decide to play around a bit while they wait to be saved. Sally and Glazer are in a sleeping bag fucking. Glazer cums too early, disappointing Sally. After all the big talk from this Glazer character, to hear her frustratedly ask, “Is that all?” is satisfying as hell.

Less than satisfying is that when Glazer decides to go back to where the others are sleeping to grab some matches to warm them up, Cropsy finds Sally naked, alone, and vulnerable. What’s a crazed burn victim killer to do? She’s barely over the utter disappointment before he penetrates her with his shears. Cropsy cleverly hides with Sally’s body so he can send those shears right through Glazer’s throat when he returns.

Unknown to Glazer or Cropsy, Alfred followed Glazer and witnessed Cropsy killing him. Alfred wakes Todd up and tries to tell him that Glazer is dead, and he saw the burnt-face guy he saw looking into his cabin the other night. Todd agrees to follow Alfred. Todd finds Glazer’s body, but Cropsy is there too. Alfred is able to at least warn Todd quick enough for Cropsy to only cause a slight wound on Todd’s head.

Later, while Todd is unconscious and Alfred is running away and hiding from Cropsy, the rest of the camp see the raft slowly floating back. Dave thinks the guys they sent off are playing a prank on them, but Michelle swims out to investigate nonetheless. Todd comes back looking for Alfred just as Michelle reaches the raft to find the dismembered bodies of Eddy and the others.

Things are not good. The kids realize their friends are dead. Todd needs help to stop this killer dude who is still at large. He’s not even sure if Alfred is still alive or if he was able to escape the maniac. He sends Michelle and the rest of the kids back to camp to get help for him.

Todd heads out into the woods with an axe. Cropsy stalks Alfred while Michelle was able to get back to the main camp, call the police, and head back to Todd’s location with a boat and the lead counselor, Jeff. Thankfully, when Cropsy grabs Alfred, his screams tip Todd off to where he is. Cropsy takes Alfred to a shack where he gags the kid and uses the shears to pin his arm to the wall.

It kind of leads Todd into a trap in the enclosed shack. He goes inside where it’s not exactly well-lit. Not to mention, I think just watching this scene can give you tetanus with all the dirt and rusted sheet metal around. Cropsy tries to pin Todd between two rail cars in what appears to be either the opening to a mine or a storage shed for… rail cars… used for… mining? Eh, whatever.

Cropsy lights a flamethrower and approaches Todd while he remembers that night he and the other kids were part of the whole prank that burned Cropsy up but good and set all this in motion. As Todd quietly tries to search the shack for Alfred, we get a second really good jump scare and a really good look at Cropsy’s face. This is why you go get Tom Savini for your movie, kids.

Cropsy wants to burn Todd with the flamethrower. Todd wants to axe Cropsy a question. Cropsy gets a bit of an upper hand because he falls. Cropsy closes in with the flamethrower, but Alfred grows some balls and pulls the shears out of the wall, which would really hurt because those are also slicing at his arm flesh too, but he jams that shit into Cropsy’s back, killing the monster.

Michelle, Jeff, and the cops arrive as Cropsy makes one more lunge for Alfred and Todd. Todd buries the axe with Cropsy and Alfred lights that son of a bitch up with the flamethrower. Cropsy burns to nothing while everyone gets a round of therapy to get over this hellish camping trip.

This is a fantastic slasher. This eschews the typical slasher trappings because it’s still early in the subgenre for it to do all the same things that Halloween or Friday the 13th did to become so popular. There is no sequel to this movie. But… in a way there is – in the final minutes of this movie. As Cropsy burns, we hear a different camp counselor telling the story of Cropsy to a new set of campers. He tells the story not that his body wasn’t found, and therefore Cropsy is still alive, no. In this version, it’s the spirit of Cropsy that did not die. So, in a way, the final 90 seconds of the movie served as its own sequel, saying that the horror of Cropsy will forever haunt these woods.

Also, there is no real “Final Girl” in this. Instead, it’s a story about a kid, Alfred, who is a survivor, but also a bit of an outsider, needing to find his own inner strength to win the day, and there’s the counselor, Todd, who has a checkered past that karmically led to what happened over the last few days. Todd needs to literally bury the hatchet with that prank and be freed from it.

The Burning is one of the all-time great horror films of the modern age. I recommend it to anyone and everyone who loves 80s slashers. It’s simultaneously part of the subgenre while standing apart as something better than the copycats like Sleepaway Camp. Honestly, it might be more accurate that Sleepaway Camp is more of a copycat of The Burning than it is of Friday the 13th. Huh… I never really pieced that together before. Regardless, I know there is a very tainted and cursed name attached to this movie, but this movie should be separated from that monster because it’s a great movie that is seriously one of the finest examples of its genre.

Alright, so summer may officially begin now. B-Movie Enema has declared it so. We enter the summer months next week with a bit of a stinker that I saw last October on AMC Fear Fest and it pissed me off something royally. It’s a movie I was aware of only because it had a trailer on every DVD of the old Friday the 13th set I had before I upgraded to Scream Factory’s far superior set. It’s a movie that is based on a far superior Korean film. It’s time for me to look at 2009’s The Uninvited.

Until next week, just remember that it isn’t always the best play to burn the old drunk who’s a dick to you at summer camp because he might decide to come back as a Cropsy.

Oh… wait. I forgot to mention Holly Hunter again. It’s not like me to not bring up the multiple Oscar and Emmy Award-nominated actress after name-checking her earlier in the article. The main reason for that is that she’s not a major part of this movie at all. In fact, I’m not sure she has any lines that feature her directly. However, she did survive the film and was part of the group of kids who got returned after Cropsy killed the others on the raft. She was seen on screen most recognizably in the campfire scene the first night of the canoe trip.

Yup… That sure is Holly Hunter. Anyway, I’m done now. See you next week.