Census Bloodbath: Camp Blood

For the crossover review of The Burning over at Kinemalogue, click here.

Year: 1981

Director: Tony Maylan

Cast: Brian Matthews, Leah Ayres, Brian Backer

Run Time: 1 hour 31 minutes

MPAA Rating: R

1981 was the year of the slasher film. 

No, it didn't have the most slashers released. 1982 beats it out with 43 of the godforsaken things, and the post-video boom years of '87 and '88 also clock in above the legal limit. 

Nor did it have the most franchise involvement. That would be 1989, the grisly offerings of which included Friday the 13th VIII, Halloween 5, Silent Night, Deadly Night III, Sleepaway Camp III, and Nightmare 5. 

But what it did have was a generous slate of what are pretty widely considered to be the absolute pinnacle films of the genre, including Friday the 13th Part 2, Halloween II, Just Before Dawn, Hell Night, Happy Birthday to Me, My Bloody Valentine, and The Prowler, and that's not even including the ones that I like that stray from the general consensus.

Our subject today is one of these films: The Burning, which is subject to wide-eyed adulation by many a Johnny Slasherfan. It's got it all. Summer camp shenanigans? Check. Cameos from a pre-fame Jason Alexander, Fisher Stevens, and Holly Hunter? Check. Gruesome gore effects provided by Tom Savini, the patron saint of bloody murder? Effects so nasty that Britain successfully persecuted and banned the film as a "video nasty"? Check and check.

So why don't I like it quite as much as all the hype has led me to suspect?

Well, I guess I'll have to tell you now that I've painted myself into this rhetorical corner. 

Also, try not to be depressed that Jason Alexander starred on Seinfeld as the miserably bald George Costanza a mere nine years after this film was shot.

I'll explain my lukewarm affair with The Burning in due time, but let's take a whack at the plot first, shall we? The film opens in the mid-70's in Camp Blackfoot, where young Todd (Keith Mandell) and his friends are planning the prank of a lifetime. They sneak into the bunk of the evil groundskeeper Cropsy (Lou David) and place a worm-riddled skull candle next to his cot. Their innocent jest turns disastrous when Cropsy knocks the candle off the nightstand in fear, igniting a blaze that could toast an admirable number of marshmallows, but toasts the poor groundskeeper instead.

Five years later, a murderous Cropsy has been released upon the world, skin covered in third-degree burns. He hightails it to Camp Stonewater, which is located just down the lake from the now defunct Blackfoot site, which presumably burned down in the blaze that stole his face. The blaze also stole the plot of Friday the 13th Part 2, but that is neither here nor there. Regardless, producers Harvey and Bob Weinstein (I know, right?) claim that their script was written in 1979, before any of this Voorhees nonsense.

Insipid controversy aside (All slasher films are rip-offs of Halloween, which was itself a rip-off of the rip-offs of Psycho. It's a very incestuous gene pool, and it's not worth getting our knickers in a bunch), The Burning has a classic slasher set-up with a new twist. In addition to the nubile counselors and older campers, there's also a heapload of children on hand, making a mess of the mess hall and inciting the ire of the dangerous lurker in the woods.

When a group of campers goes on a weekend canoeing trip, their canoes drift away in the night, trapping them on a wooded island where Cropsy is waiting with his wickedly sharp garden shears. The campers are overwhelmingly numerous, but the ones we really need to keep track of are Todd (played as a teenager by Brian Matthews), the handsome and easygoing head counselor; Michelle (Leah Ayres), his counselor girlfriend who wishes he would be more stern with the camp troublemakers; Glazer (Larry Joshua), one of the aforementioned troublemakers, and a supposed hunk with an alarmingly lumpy musculature; Sally (Carrick Glenn of Girls Nite Out), Glazer's coy girlfriend; Karen (the excitingly-named Carolyn Houlihan), Sally's BFF who is such a virgin that it's hard to walk because her legs don't open all the way; Eddy (Ned Eisenberg), a horndog supernova whose latest target is Karen; and Alfred (Brian Backer of Fast Times at Ridgemont High), a weird loner who expects our sympathy because he's picked on, but is hard to love because he's a voyeuristic creep who watches girls in the shower and stalks couples who trundle off to bang in the woods. If he were that age today, he'd probably be writing My Little Pony fanfiction on his dad's computer while he's at work.

Now don't get any ideas, ya little creep.

So, why am I not as huge a fan of The Burning as I probably should be? Well, for one, the sheer mass of characters in the quivering blob of the film's cast is pretty overwhelming. Because the genre was still new and not completely, soul-witheringly desperate in 1981, the slashers didn't have the Weimar-esque hyperinflated body counts that would come into play later in the decade. Thus, The Burning couldn't compensate for the terrifying size of its ensemble, and far too many of the campers survive without being put into any sort of danger at all.

It's a little hard to be terrified for poor trembling Katie CounselBoob when you know that about 200 other kids are happily splashing in the water just down the riverbank without a care in the world. And, just like in every Ryan Murphy show, there's far too many cast members jostling for attention to really nail down the characterization of any of them.

And don't even get me started on the pacing of the film, which lurches to a halt after an arbitrary opening kill, contenting itself with Parent Trap-esque camp escapades for a good 40 bloodless minutes. The music is stomach-turningly bland, like eating a gallon of oatmeal, and the acting is needlessly showy. When the kills finally arrive, they do offer a shot in the arm of the film, but some of it comes too little too late, and it doesn't help that the effects haven't aged particularly well. It's still Tom Savini, so there's no doubt that it's a master class of latex and Karo syrup, but his work here is the least convincing that I've ever seen from him. 

He's allowed a minor reprieve, though, considering that his work in the same year's The Prowler is far and away the most gruesome, effective kill work he's ever contributed to splatter cinema.

And Cropsy's weapon is too awe-strikingly rad to even quibble about some minor elasticity problems.

One more major complaint: When the ending finally comes around, instead of lining Michelle up as the obvious Final Girl, The Burning tosses her aside and shoves Todd and Alfred into the fray to split duties in a perfunctory sequence that has some decent effects work, but falls flat with a big pffffbt. By its closing moments, the movie has sputtered and spilled out over the sides like an overheated soufflé.

Now keep in mind that while these unfavorable moments are foregrounded, they still exist in a well-shot, well-edited (by Nightmare on Elm Street 2 director Jack Sholder, of all people), high-energy camp slasher that is still one of the best in the business. These issues drag it down somewhat in my esteem, but The Burning is still worth anybody's time as a camp slasher curio of the highest order.

There's sex, pot, hijinks, wacky dialogue about sex, pot, and hijinks, a blissfully generous helping of female and male nudity, and a cool weapon/killer. Cropsy being based on a real urban legend of the New England camping community, his presence adds an extra dimension of cyclical urban legend terror to the film, which is already pretty decently successful in its scare sequences, including [SPOILERS FROM HERE ON OUT] the film's notorious raft massacre.

In a flurry of choppily-edited action that is reminiscent of the post-Hitchcock era of classic horror, Cropsy raises the average kill count of the movie tenfold, bursting out of a drifting canoe and mowing down a pack of campers right after the film's longest stretch of goreless paradise. It's shocking and visceral, liberal with its grue, and downright nasty in its brevity. It would be the best part of any slasher film it was placed in, but here it's the cherry on top of a pretty, well-made, if insubstantial classic work of slashcraft.

The shots AND the men are pretty, so there's really no losing here.

So, heed my warnings if you want to dive into The Burning anytime soon: Don't expect unparalleled greatness. But rest assured that you'll have a terrific summer at Camp Stonewater, whatever the downsides are.

Killer: Cropsy (Lou David)

Final Girl: Todd (Brian Matthews) and Alfred (Brian Backer) and very slightly Michelle (Leah Ayres)

Best Kill: THE RAFT SCENE (Skip to 2:30 - gore warning)

Sign of the Times: This is perhaps the only decade of film history where the men's swimsuits were at least three times as revealing as the ladies'.

Scariest Moment: THE DAMN RAFT SCENE

Weirdest Moment: A hospital orderly attempts to scare a new intern (who is middle aged and balding) by showing him Cropsy's burns, openly comparing him to a monster and an overcooked Big Mac while in the room with the notorious psycho.

Champion Dialogue: "Maybe it's because she likes you, you dumb bastard."

Body Count: 10

1. Prostitute is stabbed in the gut with scissors.
2. Karen has her throat slit with shears.
3. Fish is sliced in the chest with shears.
4. Barbara is stabbed in the stomach with shears.
5. Woodstock has his fingers cut off and throat slit with shears.
6. Eddy is stabbed in the throat with shears.
7. Diane is sliced in the forehead with shears.
8. Sally is killed offscreen.
9. Glazer is impaled in the throat with shears.
10. Cropsy is stabbed in the back, axed in the face, and burnt to death. 

TL;DR: The Burning is probably the least exciting of the A-list slashers, but you can never go too wrong when Tom Savini is in the fray.

Rating: 7/10

Word Count: 1713

Census Bloodbath: Back To Back To Skull - Day 3

Year: 1982

Director: Robert Deubel

Cast: Julia Montgomery, James Carroll, Suzanne Barnes

Run Time: 1 hour 36 minutes

MPAA Rating: R

One of the fun (read: intensely aggravating) things about documenting slasher history is that, just like the internal morality of the genre, its timeline is monumentally dubious. With big Hollywood movies, it's easy to track when they came out, what theaters they played in, and all sorts of nonsense like that. Everyone who was alive enough to participate remembers when Die Hard came out. It's freaking Die Hard.

But slashers are generally formed in the other end of the Hollywood spectrum. Although several were released or even produced under the wing of some of the big studios (Paramount wide-distributed Friday the 13th and MGM gave the world Killer Party), but many of the upwards of 300 slasher films made and released in the decade weren't so lucky. A vast majority were cobbled together in someone's backyard with the hopes that, once they were finished, they could find a home with some local distributor looking to make a quick buck.

This system means that many of the lower tier slashers have an infinitum of names, poster art, recuts, and release dates. Such is the case with today's collegiate slasher, a 1982 film known widely (or about as widely as these things can possibly be) as Girls Nite Out, a title it was given during its 1984 re-release. Its original title was The Scaremaker, so if we want to be period-accurate, we might as well call it by that name. But if we want to be popularity-accurate and not make fools of ourselves because that original name is a turd, it might be better to stick with Girls Nite Out.

You can see where things might get a little confusing. At any rate, the film we're looking at is going to be called Girls Nite Out throughout this review, because if there's one thing I know, it's that if I just pick the name that I prefer and stick with it, nobody will complain because I guarantee not a single person born post-1990 outside of a very select group will ever make motions to view this film. And not a single person born in or before the 80's is likely to have overly fond memories of this decent but forgettable flick, so I'm pretty much diplomatically immune from stirring the waters of nerd rage.

Anyway - on with the show!

Raise your hand if you wish I was obsessed with romantic comedies.

Girls Nite Out takes place on the campus of DeWitt University, a small but sprawling college in Weston Hill, Ohio which - in the heady tradition of slasher movies ripping off of one another to the point of farce - is about 90% comprised of heavy woodland. After an inmate named Dickie Cavanaugh hangs himself in the nearby asylum, his gravediggers are murdered by a mysterious assailant, who then heads toward the school to reward its reliably teeming pool of sluts and whores with premature, bloody death.

After killing the school's mascot and taking his costume - a dancing bear - the shadowy figure pimps itself out with a set of knives shaped like a bear's claw (this is two years before A Nightmare on Elm Street, mind you, though there is no reasonable evidence that this film could have been seen by Wes Craven - or anybody else - prior to that film's release) and gallivants around during the annual sorority scavenger hunt, whispering sweet nothings about promiscuity while slicing co-eds to bits.

It's perhaps not quite as menacing as I've made it sound.

Also check out these knife claws! It's like the No Fear Shakespeare version of Freddy Krueger.

Of course, before the killing can begin we must Meet the Meat, who up until this point have been partying the night away at a post-game basketball celebration that is either a costume party or an Oldies party, nobody is quite clear on that. The incessant repetition of the song "Yummy Yummy Yummy I've Got Love in My Tummy" is a substantial clue, but one gets the sense that the producers dug through their garage and all they could find was this and a Lovin' Spoonful record, so they decided to make the most of it. So it's still up in the air, but what you need to take away from this is that everybody is dressing up, getting drunk, and hooking up, as randy collegiates are wont to do.

At the center of this hormonal firestorm are Lynn (Julia Montgomery), a slightly prudish but fiercely loyal and jealous blondie; Teddy (James Carroll of He Knows You're Alone), Lynn's boyfriend and captain of the basketball team; Dawn (Suzanne Barnes), a gold digger and the object of Teddy's illicit affections; Peter "Maniac" Krizaniac (Mart McChesney), star ball player and the object of Teddy's repressed homoerotic fascinations, at least as evidenced by how much time they spend together shirtless, feeding each other Jack Daniels; Leslie (Lois Robbins), Peter's ex-girlfriend who finally realized she couldn't compete with the twin temptations of basketball and Teddy's firm chest; Benson (Mathew Dunn), the horned-up president of Delta Phi who moonlights as the school's mascot; and Sheila (Lauren-Marie Taylor of Friday the 13th Part 2), Benson's second cousin/penis recipient who is carelessly cheating on her boyfriend Mike (David Holbrook), an early member of the Nice Guy movement who gives us our first suspect when he storms out of the party shouting about how everyone is whores.

And that's not even mentioning the hip waitress Barney (Rutanya Alda), Mac (the Hal Holbrook) the campus police officer with a dark past, and a gaggle of individuals with speaking parts who resolutely refuse to die, including a radio DJ, two hyperactive theater kids, a nerd, a rich douche, and a modest sprinkling of sorority bimbos. So now that we've given every struggling actor in 80's Hollywood their fifteen minutes of fame, let's get down to the good stuff.

Smokey the Bear here, reminding you that only you can prevent forest skewerings.

As the bear stomps around killing pairs of sorority girls after they inevitably split up when trying to decipher cryptic clues, a problem becomes immediately apparent. Though a couple of the murders are smeared with enough ketchup blood to pique the interest of any slasher buff, they are of a piece that ill-defined type of murder where their corpse ends up covered in blood from no discernible source. Slasher films get their power from specificity - fans want to see the gore and know exactly what painful thing is occurring where. That's what makes gory kills so squeal-inducing.

The noncommittal murders just don't really cut it, and the killer's incessant whispering devalues the whole experience. Much like someone hugging a concerto when you're trying to make out with them, whispering killers are just a huge distraction. In the genre, the two big archetypes are "silent, masked killer" and "killer who only speaks in terrible puns," so I suppose there's room for a solid median, but this bear's endless, gravelly ruminations on the whorelike qualities of his victims just doesn't cut the mustard (er- ketchup).

And the grand reveal in the finale [Barney is secretly Katie Cavanaugh, Dickie's twin sister, who is keeping his body in the freezer and channeling his vengeful spirit] ends the film with a whimper, exposing the killer's identity but refusing to extrapolate what that might actually mean for the narrative, ending on a macabre image without pursuing the implications of it. It's like fading out on the chorus of a great song, never giving it a chance to end on a real corker.

Although, in fairness, maybe that was never a possibility to begin with.

In addition to the clumsy kills, the plot is more like a series of disconnected vignettes with an overlong police procedural tacked on after it should have ended. And the acting is... challenged. Peter especially performs like his lips were stung by a bee and are slowly swelling while he speaks. Hal Holbrook is decent (as he should be), but his parts were clearly shot separately from the rest of the cast so he is penned in either by talking on the phone or joining conversations from a shadowy limbo zone. So no, Girls Nite Out is not a great film. But what strengths it does possess lie solely in the realm of the bizarre, an area I have a great deal of respect for.

A large portion of the plot is devoted to the characters partying, which is generally the more tedious segment of the slasher formula, but with such a vast array of incredibly strange characters, Girls Nite Out becomes a fascinating curio of retro eccentricity. One common slasher trope that I have noted time and time again is the tendencies for characters to pull impressions out of thin air, but this film takes that idea and runs a marathon with it.

In a three minute scene, the pair of comic relief theater kids trade off approximately 679 impressions, waggle their tongues enough times to make Gene Simmons uncomfortable, and run off smacking their asses and chanting like tribal warriors. This carries on into just about every male character in the bunch as Benson spouts a drunken limerick, Teddy imitates cowboys and gentlemen and Peter imitates Mrs. Bates from Psycho and some sort of... sex Frankenstein. 

Hey, I didn't say they were GOOD impressions.

On top of that blanket of peculiarity, Girls Nite Out is full of gem moments like Mac drawing hair over a newspaper picture to discover what the man's twin sister would look like, a whole day being skipped without anybody really noticing, and - most importantly of all - the ponderous amount of time devoted to depictions of shirtless men in just about every scenario imaginable.

This is perhaps the single most exciting element of the film, and yes I do mean academically (to a point). In a genre notable and derisible for exploiting the female form, Girls Nite Out not only exploits the men with fervor, it has a big honkin' zero boob scenes. The women always demurely cover themselves with bedsheets or bubbles, leaving the men free to bandy about their firmer bits for the world to see. In fact, some scenes are so shameless that for a second I thought the uploader had accidentally switched the tape with something called "Locker Room Bonanza LXIX."

Don't believe me? Take a gander.

Things are about to get steamy for young Maniac.

These gentlemen are one Brokeback away from mounting each other.

So despite the deficiencies of Girls Nite Out, its predilection for male flesh sets it apart from its kin. It's not an easy film to recommend, but the costume is unique (if campy), the weapon is clever for a pre-Freddy slasher and the scavenger hunt framing device, though not thoroughly explored, is a clever setting for what could have been just another generic campus slasher. Though it may not be a diamond in the rough, it's forgotten, unorthodox films like these that keep me coming back to the slasher well after all this time.

Killer: The DeWitt Bear [Katie Cavanaugh/Barney (Rutanya Alda)]
Final Girl: Lynn Connors (Julia Montgomery), I guess.
Best Kill: Benson is stabbed in the pecs. He died as he lived, resolutely shirtless.
Sign of the Times: Peter's post-game outfit of choice is a pair of bright green Converse high-tops draped around his neck over a tastefully timeless fringed leather jacket.
Scariest Moment: A nurse walks into Dickie Cavanaugh's room and his hanging corpse drops down from the door frame.
Weirdest Moment: When Teddy and Lynn are relaxing post-coitus, he says "I think I heard something outside!" then farts in bed.
Champion Dialogue: "What are you gonna have for dessert, a stomach pump?"
Body Count: 8

1. Dickie Cavanaugh hangs himself.
2. Gravedigger #1 is hit with a shovel.
3. Gravedigger #2 is hacked with a shovel.
4. Benson is stabbed in the chest.
5. Jane is clawed in the throat.
6. Kathy is killed offscreen.
7. Sheila is clawed in the throat.
8. Leslie is killed offscreen. 

TL;DR: Girls Nite Out is a slasher with uncomfortable and ill-rendered kills, but its clever framing device and ample male flesh slightly make up for that.
Rating: 5/10
Word Count: 2044