The Burning (1981) - How I was figuratively assaulted by Harvey Weinstein

To explain the title, this is the first film Harvey Weinstein produced and he wrote/created this. I did not know this going in. --- To start things off imagine you are going to your local ice cream shop. You want french vanilla (the more vanilla-y vanilla) with gummi bears. You proceed to make your order and are given a giant tub with 100 lbs of ice cream. The tub contains actual ice cream but it tastes like they used 1/32 of a vanilla bean for the entire batch. It tastes more like ice and milk. And there are only 10 gummi bears that are mixed in at uneven intervals. And you have to eat all 100 lbs to get to the last one. That's this movie. Long, boring, and a failure as entertainment. A film that, even two days later, has left me angry at how awful it was. ---- So let's do a deeper dive! This film is a near carbon copy of the original Friday the 13th. It's a generic slasher about a disfigured "bad guy" that kills camp counselors. It had to have been the product of Harvey and his crew seeing the film and saying, "Hey, we can make this movie but better!" Supposedly production for the film dates back to 1979 where Weinstein wrote a 5 page treatment, but I honestly call bullshit. This film hits every single story beat from Friday the 13th that I firmly believe Weinstein had some insider knowledge. My tin foil hat aside, the film starts out with some campers "pranking" an apparently abusive drunk camp caretaker (Cropsy) by putting a worm ridden skull in his room with candles in the eye sockets. This leads to the Cropsy freaking out, getting set on fire, there being gasoline in the bedroom that then gets on him and the man being horribly burned and disfigured. He spends the next 5 years in rehab and then is discharged. Upon discharge Cropsy gets a hooker who is shocked at his disfigurement and he kills her. This first kill takes place about 13 minutes into the movie. The next kill doesn't happen for 37 minutes. Oh that bit about 10 gummi bears from earlier, yeah, that's the number of kills in the film. There are 10 total in this. It goes 1, 1, 5, 2, 1 for kills. The only good thing about this film is the makeup and effects by the legendary Tom Savini, but there's like 2-3 minutes of that stuff in the entire 91 minute film. Apparently the film was censored to maintain the R rating, but an uncensored cut was released years ago. [This uncensored cut adds about a minute and 18 seconds of stuff. With 16 seconds of that being the MGM logo.](https://www.movie-censorship.com/report.php?ID=4924854) I watched this uncensored version and am actually angry that I spent even a minute more watching this trash. --- Now, let's get into the bad. **The "gratuitous" nudity/sex** I enjoy some TnA in a shlocky horror film. People getting killed for having sex, or a woman merely having b****, are staples of horror. But there is nothing fun about the nudity in this. It isn't e*****. It isn't playful. It's just there. It doesn't progress the story. It doesn't help you understand the characters, save for one scene. It's just pointless. For example there is a near 90 second shower scene with a woman. It's shot at a low angle and then focuses on her chest for 20ish seconds. The woman hears some wood creaking like there is someone out there. Then nothing happens. She isn't killed. The film doesn't show the killer peaking at her from a distance. It's just a shower scene to show her chest, played in a completely straight manner of her having a normal, non e***** or playful, shower. And then it goes to a new scene. The shower was completely pointless. It added nothing to the story other than to pad time. Theres another scene in a lake where a man and a woman are skinny dipping and you see her butt and full frontal with a merkin. The couple make out, she then decides she doesn't want to go further. He gets blue balled and angry. She leaves the lake and then for the next two minutes you have cuts of her wandering the woods to get her clothes and him beat the water in anger. Then she is finally killed. This is the one scene where the nudity actually leads up to a death. This is the second kill in the entire movie at the 49 minute mark. Kills 8 and 9 occur after a couple have sex, with no nudity, and the guy is a quickshot. You'd hope it's played for laughs, but it isn't. It's played completely straight. "That's all? Is it?" These are the words spoken by the woman and the entire scene is unintentionally funny. You laugh at how pathetic it is and how the scene could have been so much better. Oh and kill 9 is the best kill in the film because of how unintentionally hilarious it is. So the girl is left in her sleeping bag after she's murdered. The guy had left their campsite to go get matches, comes back and just assumes she's sleeping. Mind you this is in a decently sized clearing in the woods. Not in a building. Just a sleeping bag on the ground. The guy goes to check on the girl and pulls the sleeping bag back a bit. You see the gardening sheers next to her head and then suddenly you see them go from flat to flying into the guy to kill him. There was nowhere for the killer to be. He would have had to have been invisible right next to the guy to accomplish this, and even then he'd need magic to make the angles work. It's the funniest scene in the film because you're left wondering how the f*** it happened. It makes no sense without magic garden sheers that can levitate. Almost like they are the actual killer and not Copsy. But that's it. There's maybe all of a minute and a half of nudity and sex. All played completely straight and boring. **Wasted characters** This film is the debuts of Jason Alexander, Holly Hunter, and Fisher Stevens. Hunter and Stevens are fine. They serve purposes to die in the big kill scene of the movie. A scene that is just mediocre. There's some decent Savini effects of Stevens losing fingers and a guy being stabbed in the throat. The rest are weird, like a guy dying from just a slash to the shoulder, a woman being slashed on the side and then falling in the river, and then another woman being pushed down and a light cut to her forehead. This is a 35ish second scene with kills 3 to 7. Jason Alexander is seemingly the comic relief "bro" character who is around for the middle of the film and then he just disappears. He is not killed. He just disappears. He's a prominent side character, and then in one scene transition he's gone for the last 18ish minutes of the film. Unintentionally hilarious is his last line is "Grab this pole and pull it." while he's talking about a stick he was using to steer a raft and then get it to shore. The "villain" is a complete waste too. Copsy was apparently an abusive, alcoholic caretaker for a camp but we never see any of it. All we see is these campers that prank him, resulting in his body being completely engulfed in flames. He gets released from the hospital, gets rejected by a hooker, and then goes on a killing spree, at a completely different and unrelated camp. He's not a force of nature. There's nothing that says makes you realistically think supernatural. He's not shown to be abusive at all. He's not shown to be a b******. It's just a dude that got his life ruined and then rejected by a woman due to massive disfigurement. That's a sympathetic villain. Yes, he's crazy, and it's wrong, but understandable. He is also the 10th and final death in the film, going full circle and burning to death. Tragic demise to a man that was disfigured by some a****** kids. The "hero" is the actual villain. The male camp counselor who is the protagonist is shown in a flashback, 1 and hour and 22 minutes into a 90 minute movie, to have been one of the campers that caused Copsy to burn 5 years prior to the story. Oh and did I mention that Copsy was burned at one camp and these deaths happen at a completely different camp? Yup, these events seem to be completely unrelated to anything from the start for an hour and 22 minutes. So the guy that was a massive piece of shit at the start of the film kills the villain he helped create and is then lauded as a hero. **Padding time** The shower scene above was just one bit of padding in this film. I genuinely believe you could have cut half an hour out of this film and it would have been a better product. Or at the very least, less infuriating. Anyway, another example of padding is toward the end one camper is running through the woods for 3 and a half minutes. And he's running around what looks to be the remains of a cement building that is maybe a 15x15 foot thing because you see him go past this same wall multiple times from different directions. And you know it's the same wall because it has what looks to be a trail of rust going down it. There is so much padding. Scenes just linger. Shots take so long for no good reason. **Tension** There is maybe a minute of tension in this film. I say that because there are plenty of scenes where you feel it because you think there will be pay off, but then there isn't. The above scene of the camper running in the woods has one solid bit of tension. The camper is running along this stone out cropping and the camera then pans above them like 3 feet, and you see the feet and weapon of the killer. There are multiple fake out scenes where you'd think the camera would pan to the villain watching from afar, or it would be from their perspective only to just move on entirely or fake you out and show it was this one shitty camper who was watching the scene. **The ending** Blah blah blah the villain dies, but that's not the ending. The ending is a bunch of kids around a camp fire telling the story of Copsy. That's it. They end the film talking about how a man gets horribly disfigured by some a****** kids, then he gets rejected by the world and goes on a killing spree. Copsy ain't the bad guy here. It's all these shit head kids. --- This film is a 1 to 1.2 out of 5 on a good day. The actors play it straight and no one gives a bad performance. They just give a performance. It's tap water. It's bland but gets the job done. Only Alexander seems to have been improving some attempts at comedy, that fall completely flat, but he gives a performance that I can't say is bad. The kills are shot in a way that leaves a lot of be desired with angles for the villain to appear that make zero sense, but the rest of the film isn't awful like with weird angles or extreme closeup that make no sense. It's the pacing and dialogue that kill it. Most of the stuff that happens doesn't make sense, even for a horror film. The pacing is awful where scenes linger for 3 to 4 times longer than they should. Or the scenes just serve zero purpose. As I said before, you could cut half an hour of this and it would make for a better product. This film left me genuinely angry at how I spent my time. And yes, I've spent even more time writing this, but that is because somehow this thing has positive ratings on IMDB, RT, and Letterboxd. There was no charm or soul. The mask for the villain was OK, but not enough to make up for the rest. The kills were OK, but again, not enough to make up for the rest. The nudity was boring and wouldn't have titillated teenage me. No one gives a hammy performance showing they are having fun with it. It's all done flat and straight. This is the most offensively bland movie I have ever seen. It has no redeeming value. It's not a film that was obviously made to turn a buck, even though it had to be. It's not trying to be original because it's completely derivative. It's not an art film. It's just absolute shlock with zero soul or charm. And fully admit to being a nerd raging about a bad film. Don't be me. Don't watch this film. Do not waste your time. **TLDR** First film Harvey Weinstein ever did and it is so bad I genuinely wonder how stupid Hollywood is to think he deserved any other chances after this.