In Part 2, I deliver my first full lecture to the 16 year old sailor/students. It turns out that he is a fan of my Blog, and so we agree that I will be his substitute teacher for a while. He has just lost his onboard teacher for a couple of weeks due to Covid quarantine. (For any yet to see the film, close scrutiny of the youthful cast will swiftly reveal some singularly notable visages.In Part 1, I meet the captain of a Tall Ship who runs a Semester-at-Sea program. ‘The Burning’ certainly isn’t the best of its kind, but the pervasive cult of ‘Campfire Cropsy’ remains undiminished largely due to its almost autistic adherence to delirious Drive-In terror tropes, which still provided considerably grisly grist for the current crop of next-generation celluloid perpetrating Cropsyites! ‘The Burning’ is the blood-soaked daddy of Campfire carnage! Don’t even breathe!!!.or you’re DEAD!!!’ Many years later, allowing more than enough time for his psychosis to acidly percolate to an apocalyptic level of maniacal hatred, a sinuous slew of sleek-limbed nubiles have noisily sojourned at a near-by camp, one fortuitously close to killer Cropsy’s hunting ground and not long after the requisite preliminary pop-topping hi jinks are dutifully completed, the sensationally sanguineous, Tom Savini wrought mayhem begins in evil earnest, being ably assisted by some expertly sinister synth vibes from prolific prog maestro Rick Wakeman, and outside of Evilspeak’s skeezey satanic Creep Coopersmith (Clint Howard), The Burning’s very own asinine dweeb Alfred (Brian Backer) is quite possibly one of 80s Slasherdom’s more eminently expendable characters! Set in the meticulously mounted murder milieu of bucolic, lakeside ‘Camp Blackfoot’, a fiendishly vengeful, fear-mongering plot by a conspiring clutch of unhappy campers hatched to scare the living Christ into sadistically cruel camp caretaker Cropsy (Lou David) takes an excruciatingly fateful turn for the nefarious, where their macabre shenanigans unexpectedly ushered in the terrible, lake-stalking, limb-lopping legend of ‘Cropsy’, that insidiously forest-foraging, raw meat purloining perpetrator of twin-bladed, body cavity calamity which also inadvertently brought out the unnecessarily censorious scissors of the British censors! While oft disparaged as being too derivative, director Tony ‘Split Second’ Maylam’s ‘The Burning’ (1981) is arguably one of the more visibly prototypical, definitely the most pyrotechnical of the 1st especially bloody wave of post-Voorhees slashers and even today remains the most blatantly ‘influential’ resource for a good few of the myriad retrograde slashers fashioned in its wickedly exploitative wrong-headed wake.
Blood ‘n’ Fire Memories – a look at the creation of the film's make-up effects with FX artist Tom Savini.
Brand new audio commentary with The Hysteria Continues.Audio commentary with stars Shelley Bruce and Bonnie Deroski.Audio commentary with director Tony Maylam and critic Alan Jones.Optional English subtitles for the deaf and hard of hearing.Original mono audio (uncompressed PCM on the Blu-ray).High Definition Blu-ray (1080p) and Standard Definition DVD presentations.Now, fully uncut and in High Definition, The Burning is ready to reclaim its place as the ultimate summer camp nightmare. With standout gore effects courtesy of FX legend Tom Savini, The Burning proved too shocking for UK censors upon its original video release. But no sooner is Cropsy back on the streets than he’s headed back to camp with a rusty pair of shears in hand, determined to exact his bloody revenge. Released after five years, hospital officials warn him not to blame the young campers who caused his disfigurement. When an ill-advised prank misfires, summer camp caretaker Cropsy is committed to hospital with hideous burns. Of all the many slice-and-dice films that emerged in the early ‘80s, few remain as gruesomely effective as The Burning – the notorious “video nasty” now finally unleashed on Blu-ray!
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