The Burning

It is amazing how this and Friday the 13th Part 2 came out literally a week apart, and are so identical in so many ways. Bunch of horny camp counsellors? Check. Location is a camp nearby a closed down camp known for a tragedy? Check. Creepy hillbilly killer living in the woods, stalking people who get near his hovel? Check. But The Burning’s sins aren’t in copying a movie that came out the week before. It’s in being so naked in its copy-and-paste approach to the genre. Do any reading on the movie and you’ll find that the script was repeatedly doctored and tweaked so that it fit what had already been defined as a formula. It’s one thing for the makers of the original F13 to admit how they copied Halloween, and just made minor adjustments. This is as close as you can possibly get to plagiarism possible. This is an Asylum “mockbuster” likes Transmorphers 25 years before that was a thing. There isn’t an original thought to be found here, so, take the standard criticisms you see of slasher movies. I promise you they apply here. Except there are problems beyond being derivative that should be mentioned. The direction is fucking atrocious. The infamous “raft massacre” has so many cuts, it looks like an MCU fight scene. The lighting is haphazard, rendering many scenes in complete darkness; two kills happen in utter blackness. And if you’re going to bury the SFX work of Tom Savini in darkness, you’re a shitty director. That’s like hiring a Michelin three star chef to make you Eggo waffles. There’s multiple sexual predators in this movie, but the movie makes the women’s refusal of their advances look like being frigid. How about a creepy voyeur who is also a hero? Or the “kids” that look as old as the counsellors? Or how, at the half an hour mark, there’s still SIXTEEN living characters? Or how they break away from tense scenes to show you something unimportant, like cutting from the final showdown to a pair of people coming down the river in a boat? Or how the hero has flashbacks of events he didn’t witness? Or how the bad guy is the victim of an awful, horrible prank, and we’re only told towards the end how he was a jerk, and even then, why should we believe the storyteller? Literally the only kind thing I have to say about this is Savini’s make-up. Beyond that? This is the dirt worst. This is no lost classic. This is no hidden gem. This is a turd, unredeemable in any notable way. Do your duty. Flush twice.