The Burning
 

This in my opinion is THE best slasher movie of the 80s. Its weird it never spawned any sequels (probably a good thing I guess).
Here's a link about it:
http://www.terrortrap.com/underratedslashers/burning/
Anyone else agree with me about it being one of the best?

Re: The Burning
 

havent seen it but i'll check it out but saying its the best of the 80's is throwing it up against freddy.

I love that movie!! Saw it like a hundred Years ago When it first came out!! LOL

Looks like the clock tower guy!

Nope...never saw it, although I'll prob check it out if it's on dvd anywhere...

I'm not sure if it is out on DVD yet.... one of those classics they haven't putting out yet could be wrong tho...

it is on R2, I have it. Not sure about other regions.

^SO gay...^

Great once it actually does what it came to do.
40 minutes gone before we get the first kill!
Way too much 'teen high Jinks'/wandering around the woods beforehand.




**SPOILER*********************
Some great bits though. The raft killing is still a powerful thing and still pretty damn unique in the way it took out so many in so short a time.

For sure a top slasher film, but the very end provides the best shock with that sudden snarl to the camera.

Yeh it is a great tense ending. Very well done movie up there with the best of them.

alas poor cropsy

its funny what time will do in the horror film genre.
I remember when this came out people were shitting all over it for being a poor mans friday the 13th.
I loved all things horror so I thought it was ok ..
(didnt Fisher Stevens get his fingers snipped off ?)

i havent seen it since it was released.

but give 20 years or so and these films can stand on their own..

somebody lost their fingers.....not sure who's though.

with music from rick wakeman

Very good scrore too, i have it on tape.

The fingers is during the raft scene. It may be Fisher Stevens.

Still a very dull film for half it's running time though.
very neraly HALF OVER before ANYONE dies!

Compare that to "Sleepaway Camp 2" which is nearing double figures by then!

Great in parts. but way too slow to get going and do what it was designed to do.

do you guys remember that other loony in the woods pic with daryll hannah, Rachel Ward, Adrian Zmed - called The Final Terror ?

its cool to go back to these films and see people who are 'names now'

Hannah did horror even before that in The Fury..

The best thing about "The Final terror" is the great location and cinematography.
Those trees look amazing.

well, i never said it was a good movie :)

Great glop fx by Savini, but does take ages to get going.

Great pic Zwoti! Yeh The Burning is quite slow moving but that adds to the tense horrible shit when it does happen. There is always the fast-foward button to skip thru all the boring bits.....and head straight to the killing/nudity ;)

great movie. fortuanate enough to have seen the uncut version. Wouldnt say it was the best but i will be buyin it when they release it in the U.S. (assuming they will)

Was there quite a bit cut out?

from what i understand it was released edited (not sure how much) for a short time then completly pulled from shelves. I had to download it (which i rarely do maybe 1 every 2 months and only films not available in the U.S.)

I still have it on VHS just to see Tom Savini's work (I got it years ago since I was a big fan). I heard that it will be released on DVD in the very near future on another chatboard.
CK

Well...not really. It's just walking throught woods, walking around the lake and lame teen hijinks.

Not much happens in "Halloween" for the most part...but there is a film that does build up suspense.
"The Burning" just bores with unfunny teen cliches and people pushing each other into the lake. Oh what terror!

There was so much time wasted that could have been used to build up some real suspense, peppered with a couple of killings, but instead was spent on the 'National Lampoon' antics of boring characters.

The best way to build suspense is to develope characters so that you have an emotional involvement with them, so that you actually fear FOR them and care if they live or not.

Unfortunately there are few directors/writers in the horror genre that understand this, and even if they do they are too inept to handle such subtleties and pull it off correctly.
It's either done in a hamfisted manner, or not at all.

The Burning was more the Ham Fisted approach i guess.
Most of the Fri 13 movies don't bother. Just a bunch of teenage machette fodder.

Or you can go 180% and serve up Franklin from the origional TCM and give you a character that you pray will be killed.

Seriously - character developement is the hardest thing to do in cinema. A drama will give you 120 minutes to do it but in horror you have about 20 before the typical audience wants to bail.
Generally not known to be a patient demographic.

Well... not really.

Too many films - particularly slashers - are tiresome and predictable for this very reason; if audience expectation is challenged by The Burning not launching straight into the usual murders every 10 minutes or so then good for it - and of course the patient viewer is then rewarded with some splendid scenes including the oft-mentioned boat/fingers sequence.

The lampooning around of the teens prior to Cropsy getting down to business is hardly that deflating for the movie, and not even that unexpected; after the nasty calamity of the opening death scene there's nothing wrong with a chunk of character building, and if The Burning's victims are to be goofy teens then I'm afraid teens goofing around is what we must see.

I agree...But don't call the 40 minutes of boredom (leaving only about 35 minutes of the film left!) spent with cardboard teen cliche non-entities 'character building'.

Of course it is - what else does the writer have in mind for these 40-odd minutes?

The characters might not be all that interesting, but gormless chicks, alpha-males and pervy Porkies-style adolescents are essential to any 80's summer-camp slasher.

Few horror movies make us actually care about the demise of the victims, but it was nice to see that dweeb (whoever he was) survive at the end.

The Burning is out of DVD but it's Region 2. Raptor put it out as a Special Edition limited to 3000 pieces. We've got some in stock. If anyone is interested shoot me a PM as I don't know if supplying promotional links is allowed here.

It is tantamount to suggesting the moderators' mothers are of ill repute and their children are the bastard sons of a thousand whores.

But it's up to you.

The Burning was a fun slasher flick. I usually watch it on a double feature with Madman.

I wanna see Madman but I haven't been able to track it down over here.

That's a nice looking edition. I didn't know it was called Burning Revenge. I think I prefer the original title.

I'm glad there are people that still appreciate this movie. Its sad that so many horror fans have never heard of it.

Me too. It never really gets mentioned anywhere. Everyone seems to be all about Halloween, Freddy and Jason when it comes to slashers. But it's become quite a hard movie to track down at times so this might be preventing people from seeing it.