The above shot of Cropsy, the disfigured killer in The Burning (1981), holding his garden shears aloft before the film’s signature raft massacre, deserves to be one of the iconic images of horror cinema. The Burning, which boasts strong, painful Tom Savini gore effects, went out in UK theaters with some trimming (as it did in US theaters), then turned up uncut on video. For its troubles, it got itself on the Video Nasties list, only to be released in 1992 with about 20 seconds of cuts, then uncut in 2001. (We in America had to wait till 2007 for an official uncut edition, which restored all the lunch-repelling murders and mutilations in that raft scene.)
The other death-among-the-trees slasher this time, also from 1981, is the ungrammatically titled (unless it means “Don’t Go Number 1 or 2 in the Woods”) Don’t Go in the Woods. (Not to be confused with Vincent D’Onofrio1‘s slasher musical of the same name from 2010.) This one offered effects that were pretty cheapjack but still gory enough to put it off-limits on UK video until 2007, when it got an uncut release and a 15 rating.
Don’t Go in the Woods is notable for its bottomless supply of the worst acting ever. When there’s a scene featuring the worst actors you’ve seen in your life, wait for the next scene, which will showcase fresh new worst actors you’ve seen in your life, and on and on until by the end, all the characters are played by robots in clown suits. Well, not really, but it’s how you expect it to go. The closest thing to a professional on the set plays Craig, leader of a hiking group of friends, and he’s playing it like Bill Hader doing Dan Aykroyd. This in a movie that’s supposed to be frightening.
These are busy woods. A bunch of birdwatchers, leaf-peepers, and all-around nature-botherers are eliminated bloodily but incoherently, with editing trying to seem artsy but really obviously designed to cover the crap special effects. One couple, massacred in their sleeping bags, aren’t even introduced before they’re perforated. “Oh okay,” we say, “I guess we’re doing this now.” Meanwhile, we keep following Bill Hader-oyd and his three friends as though they were of any interest. The killer turns out to be a woodsman who looks like an escapee from Wes Craven’s The Hills Have Eyes. The blood splatters are like the red splotches that show up on the sides of the celluloid every so often (signifying a loose roll of film). The end-credits ditty (“Don’t go out in the woods tonight/You probably will get killed”) is almost worth staying the course.
And yet this could be a fun beer-and-pizza flick due to its sheer quantity of idiocies, like the bit when one of our “heroes” accidentally skewers an innocent hiker and says “Sorry! Sorry!” as though he’d just bumped into the guy on a crowded sidewalk. If you get into the goofus groove of it and laugh over the dull parts, it could keep you entertained for 82 minutes. There’s a slight spirit of play, conveying the “let’s put on a show” fervor of a bunch of no-talents who bumbled out into the woods to make … whatever this is. It certainly has more crude personality than many horror remakes/reboots. Jane Schoenbrun is probably a fan — and Schoenbrun’s “Long December” sequence in Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma could as well be a reworking of the notorious splatterthon in the next movie under discussion here.
The Burning is a legitimately ugly movie with a surprising number of future talents in it, including Jason Alexander (with hair) and Holly Hunter. Alas, Harvey Weinstein is involved — this was his first credit. He produced it and helped come up with the story (his brother Bob cowrote the script). I don’t know if Weinstein gets any money from royalties,2 but you might be able to find a copy of the uncut DVD or Blu-ray through your local library. If not, there’s always the seven seas.
It’s tempting to reverse-engineer a dark reading of The Burning using Weinstein’s later crimes. Here, after all, is a killer whose motive is that he was burn-scarred from head to toe in a prank played by some campers — Cropsy was the camp caretaker. After he’s released from the hospital after five years of unsuccessful skin grafts, he goes to a sex worker, who can’t stand the sight of him, so he impales her with his giant set of gardening shears. I can imagine a younger, pre-mogul, not-much-to-look-at, acne-scarred Weinstein identifying a little too much with the hulking, ghastly Cropsy.
Beyond that, the movie is creepily directed by Tony Maylam, with a weirdly bifurcated score by Yes’s Rick Wakeman, of all people, that alternates between bluegrass and the expected slasher-flick synthesizers. I dunno, maybe he was bored? Needed to repair his pool? The kills, in the uncut version, are vicious and fast and wince-worthy. During the celebrated raft massacre you get to see Fisher Stevens say goodbye to three of his fingers.
The raft massacre is notorious not only for its full Savini splatter splendor (Savini turned down Friday the 13th Part 2 to do The Burning), but for the fact that we don’t see it coming. There’s a bunch of folks rowing up to what looks like an abandoned rowboat, so we figure they’ll just find a dead body —
— nope.
There’s supposed to be safety in numbers in these movies —
— not here.
And they’re in the middle of a lake in broad daylight —
— doesn’t matter. Cropsy just ends them all anyway, in a rapid-fire mass murder. About all we’re spared is Cropsy rowing back to shore, his hideous work finished for the afternoon.
It’s really no wonder The Burning ended up as a Nasty — it is nasty, with more rage and retributive cruelty than we expect from slasher flicks. As expected, Jason Alexander is the comic relief, and I think Holly Hunter has maybe one line. The killer’s black hat and trenchcoat might remind some viewers of The Shadow or Darkman. He’s certainly a more stylish psycho than most. Towards the end, Maylam and Savini finally reveal Cropsy’s face, which looks like a melted candle with a barely-covered screaming skull underneath (Savini studied real burn patients’ photos at a Pittsburgh hospital). To put it mildly, the movie isn’t meant to make any real-life burn victims feel any easier about their disfigurement. Like a lot of Nasties, it isn’t nice.
Don’t Go in the Woods and The Burning are both free on Tubi.
- We love Vincent D’Onofrio here. Check out our take on his music. ↩︎
- He claims he gets a $60,000 yearly pension from Disney, half of which goes to his ex-wife. ↩︎
