'The Burning' (1981) - Tony Maylam.

While oft disparaged as being too derivative, capable director, Tony 'Split Second' Maylam's 'The Burning' (1981) is one of the more prototypical, enjoyably pyrotechnical examples of the 1st especially bloody wave of post-Voorhees slashers. Even today, 'The Burning' arguably remains the most blatantly 'influential' reference material for a great many of the retrograde slashers luridly fashioned in its exploitative, wickedly wrong-headed wake.

'The Burning' is predictably set with the meticulously mounted murder milieu of bucolic, lakeside 'Camp Blackfoot'. Wherein a fearmongering plot by vengefully conspiring unhappy campers to cruelly rebuke the sadistic camp caretaker Cropsy (Lou David)proves disastrous. Their fiery shenanigans unexpectedly usher in the bloody, lake-stalking, limb-lopping legend of 'Cropsy'! That insidiously forest-foraging, raw meat purloining perpetrator of twin-bladed, body cavity calamity which also inadvertently brought out the unnecessarily censorious scissors of the British censors!

The years pass, allowing for Cropsey's psychosis to murderously percolate to an apocalyptic level of maniacal hatred! A sinuous slew of sleek-limbed nubiles have noisily sojourned at a near-by camp, one fortuitously close to killer Cropsy's hunting ground! Not long after the prerequisite pop-topping hi jinks, the sensationally sanguineous, Tom Savini-wrought slaughter begins in evil earnest! The infamous carnage energized by some expertly sinister synth vibes from prog maestro, Rick Wakeman. Excluding Evilspeak's skeezey satanic Creep, Coopersmith (Clint Howard), The Burning's very own asinine uber-dweeb, Alfred (Brian Backer) is quite possibly one of 80s Slasherdom's more eminently expendable characters!

'The Burning' certainly isn't the most innovative of its kind, but, happily, the pervasive cult of 'Campfire Cropsy' remains undiminished largely due to its almost reverential adherence to delirious Drive-In terror tropes. Murder maestro, Maylam's exciting, plasma-slick slasher still provides considerably grisly grist for the current crop of celluloid perpetrating Cropsyites! 'The Burning' is the blood-soaked death-dealing daddy of Campfire carnage! Don't even breathe!!!.......or you're DEAD!!!'

(For any yet to see the film, close scrutiny of the youthful cast will swiftly reveal some singularly notable visages!)