The Burning (1981) [Collector’s Edition] – Blu-ray + DVD Combo Pack

**½/****
Image B
Sound B
Extras A
starring
Brian Matthews, Leah Ayres, Brian Backer, Lou David
screenplay
by Peter Lawrence and Bob Weinstein
directed
by Tony Maylam

by
Walter Chaw The pleasures of Tony Maylam's The
Burning, such as they are, arise when one engages it in an
extra-textual
conversation about why at the end of the American '70s there
suddenly bloomed an exploitation slasher subgenre to provide a
nihilistic
gateway into the Reagan '80s. Really, when you look at the
wonderland of '80s blockbuster cinema, there is throughout an
undercurrent of Friday the 13^ths
and Elm Street flicks, of
course, but also stuff like Slumber Party Massacre,
Prom Night, My
Bloody Valentine, Maniac, Camps
Cheerleader and Sleepaway,
Mother's Day (which Roger Ebert referred to as a
"geek" show–the kind that bit heads off chickens, not the kind that
founded
Apple)…all the lurid VHS covers that made browsing the neighbourhood
rental
joint such delicious taboo delight. It's that thrill that The
Burning captures and evokes still–that feeling adolescent
boys of a
certain age got, pre-Internet, by renting something they
shouldn't rent
with the suspicion, nay, promise, it would provoke the same erotic
tingle
as hardcore porn would in a couple years' time. It's a movie very
much like
Tolkien's writing: if you don't discover it in junior high,
you'll
never appreciate it the way it was meant to be appreciated again.

Utilizing the regional Cropsy folktale for
some reason, The Burning depicts Cropsy
as a Podunk camp caretaker whom a
quartet of merry tricksters decides to scare with a rotting skull. This leads to them somehow setting Cropsy (Lou
David) ablaze,
and then to a weird sideshow at a hospital years later that
apparently
results in Cropsy going back to the woods of his torment (and former
employ) in
order to, um, kill vacuous teenagers for having sex, I guess. It's
worth asking
where our jokesters got the wormy skull with which to startle, then
inadvertently immolate, Cropsy…but no one ever does. The origin story
is the same as the one
for Freddy Krueger, basically, but credit to Wes Craven for making it
infinitely more interesting. Here, though, there's more pathos than
horror–it's essentially the tale of a gimp bullied by the "normals,"
thus instantly casting all the people about to be butchered as deserving it. The legend behind the making of the film is that
the
Weinsteins (yes, those Weinsteins), wanting to
capitalize on the success
of Friday the 13^th, rushed
The Burning into production. If true,
they must have hurried, as the picture was shot in the summer of 1980 and
the first Friday the 13^th was released in May of that
year. More likely, the similarities to Sean S. Cunningham's
underwhelming flick are entirely attributable to the sort of parallel
genesis that happens in film
art when zeitgeist dictates, say, five
body-switching movies in a row, True
Believer and Flashback within months
of each other, or, in this
case, a few years of near-identical slasher flicks. For a brief period,
The
Burning was what every teenaged moviegoer wanted: something
to do with
prurience; a little to do with gore, sure; and lots to do with sex.

In that, at least, The Burning delivers
with regular, loving, gratuitous shots of young women topless,
bottomless–I
can proudly say that the first time I saw a woman's pubis was watching
this and
Revenge of the Nerds the same summer on home
video. Who needs sex-ed
when there's VHS? It's a peepshow, no question, but a peepshow
padded
(like Revenge of the Nerds and others of that
ilk: The Last
American Virgin, Porky's, even Weird
Science) with
compelling-for-the-target-demographic bully/popularity adolescent
political
melodramas. It's different in that way from straight-up rape-revenge
scenarios
like The Last House on the Left or I
Spit on Your Grave, in that the
bulk of slasher flicks engaged on some level in this need for teenagers
to make
their way through pubescent thickets into adulthood. It's possible to
read Halloween–the
best of them, without question–as a fairytale not unlike The
Wizard of Oz
(no less frightening for its target age group) where the
protagonist/"final girl," surrounded by aspects of her unconscious, navigates her way to the safety and relative mendacity of "home." The
main difference is that slasher movies were less oblique about their
sexual
subtexts.

The Burning
is basically the story of two ugly, outcast males (Cropsy and his analogue,
dork
Alfred (Fast Times at Ridgemont High's Brian
Backer), exiled from
"polite" teen society for doing what all of us do: peeping)
who are incapable of closing the deal with the objects of their
torment/desire. The whole film, really, is about sexual frustration,
giving the
title a poignant double-meaning in addition to providing a pretty
fair blueprint
for the entire subgenre. In her landmark book-length analysis of the
slasher flick Men,
Women, and
Chainsaws, Carol Clover brings up an interesting
phenomenon with regards to the "final
girl" trope in that although the viewers of these pictures are traditionally
adolescent males, they are asked by the end to identify with a virginal
girl.
Clover's more eloquent on the subject than I am (so is Alex Jackson in his
tour
de force examination
of the Friday the 13^th franchise),
but what's interesting about The Burning is that
its "final
girl" is, in fact, mouth-breather Alfred, who, in the course of his
increasingly-agitated blue-balling, gets the chance at the end to be
the
hero of the piece alongside handsome Todd (Brian Matthews). The heavy
use of
POV suggests the movie's debt to Halloween's
legendary prologue, of course, but it also indicts the audience (as that film did, and brilliantly) as
aligned in
their frustrated sexual yearning. The Burning is
that scene in Animal
House where John Belushi peeps into a sorority and falls
over
backwards; there's no gender ambiguity here, another exhibit in the
case that
the Weinsteins were then literalists, as they are now.

The gore effects by a young Tom Savini are
fun in the way all of Savini's effects work is fun. It's do-it-yourself
amusing–the invention inherent in their creation is easy to
backwards-engineer to
a degree (is that a squeeze-bulb? Hollow knife? Where does the latex
chest
start?), and a celebrated scene on a canoe, featuring an
impossibly-young Fisher
Stevens getting liberated from his fingers, offers a nice, daylit opportunity
to do so at
length. What's missing is any real lore beyond the "Cropsy" name: why
the hedge-clippers, for instance? What's the anniversary being
"celebrated" here? It's not even particularly clear that there's any
significance to the events of the film beyond a general conversation
about how dangerous (young) men can be when they're sexually
frustrated. The
Burning is about being frightened, inexperienced, and
on the verge
of–or at the very beginning of–becoming sexually active. It's about
horniness, the fantasy of punishing the jocks and the Heathers in
equal, extravagant
measure, of dressing up like, say, Darth Vader and
having
fantastic sex with the head cheerleader on a replica of the moon.

THE
BLU-RAY DISC
Scream Factory brings the uncut (zing!) version of The
Burning home on a two-disc set that includes both DVD and
Blu-ray pressings in one convenient, slip-covered package. The
Blu-ray contains a 1.85:1, 1080p transfer that wisely chooses to
clarify how low-budget it all
was instead of trying to impose too much slickness on the film. Preserved is
that particular, skeezy '80s video quality that makes The
Burning and
its contemporaries what they are; grain fluctuates from dense to mottled while fleshtones have that peculiar, era-specific pink patina. The
source materials are in great shape, however, and there are no digital
artifacts impeding the image. An attendant 2.0 DTS-HD MA track is
nothing
spectacular–definitely not scary. The first of two commentaries has
British film critic Alan
Jones interviewing director Tony Maylam in a sometimes-scene-specific
yakker
that goes long on the self-deprecation and occasionally, passively
takes the
Weinsteins to the shed. It's filled with recollections of the shoot and
the
casting, spotting folks like Jason Alexander and Holly Hunter among a
game cast
of duelling youngsters. Overall, a fun listen, full of energy and
verve. The second
yakker, again with Jones moderating, features cast members Shelley
Bruce and Bonnie Deroski, who give it the ol' college try in terms of
offering
some kind of analysis of the piece but lapse into uncomfortable
silences, to
be prodded gently by Jones as the picture winds down.

Featurettes begin with "Blood 'n' Fire" (18 mins., HD), a new
interview with Savini talking in high-Savini style about how
he did The Burning instead of the Friday
the 13^th sequel,
but came on to the production at the last minute and therefore wasn't
able to do a proper
"geek" job on the climactic Cropsy unveiling. He's right–it looks a lot
like
Rick Baker's work on the same year's also-awesome The
Funhouse: not good, necessarily, but cozily nostalgic. Fun
B-roll inserts show Savini demonstrating how he set
his own leg on fire. Meanwhile, Jack Sholder, director of the great The
Hidden and editor of this one, reveals himself in "Slash
& Cut" (12 mins.,
HD) to be pretentious and crucially-lacking in introspection and
self-awareness. He says he wanted to be a poet, liked Russian novels,
and
drops Fassbinder in conversation as what he's really
interested in. If
not for The Hidden, I swear…

In "Summer Camp Nightmare" (7 mins., HD), the still-lovely
scream
queen Leah Ayres (7 mins.) touches on how she doesn't
watch horror films ("Those images, I can't go there") and her own
background as a starving modern dancer, while "Cropsy Speaks" (11
mins., HD) finds actor David recalling the whole thing with great
fondness (he calls Savini's work on the film "magic"). "Behind
the Scenes Footage" (8 mins., HD) isolates but recycles the vintage bits of
footage from the Savini docu; the HiDef trailer plus semi-extensive make-up
and promo
stills galleries round out the generous presentation.

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