Ok, I have no idea why this film has an 80% rotten tomatoes meter. The acting and dialog is amateurish at best. The directing and editing is jumbled and confusing. The only good of this film and only reason why it's even worth mentioning is legend Tom Savini's gore effects, but even then most of them are obscured by the horrendously janky directing. Plus no one starts to die until more than halfway through the film. This movie is relatively short (only 90 minutes) yet I felt like I watched the entire LotR trilogy watching this with how slow the pacing is.
Ok, brief story synopsis. An abusive camp caretaker Cropsy has a practical joke played on him by the camp goers who are fed up with his abusive treatment play a practical joke only meant to scare him. It goes wrong and severely burns him. After 5 years of failed skin grafts and treatments, a disfigured Cropsy seeks his revenge. And the twist ending reveals that the person leading the new camp was one of the boys who performed the prank. Yes, the movie thinks we're that stupid to not put two and two together. I mean, they must think we all work like this: Killer on a revenge mission? I wonder why he's after these guys then. (90 minutes later) WHAT!? THE PERSON SEEKING REVENGE IS AFTER THE PERSON WHO DID SOMETHING TO HIM!? WHAT!?
This movie is also practically a shot for shot rip off of Friday the 13th Part 2. Like, no joke, this is just Friday the 13th part 2. A camp is opened next to a camp that closed due to an incident. A character tells a ghost story of what happened at the other camp (even down to the "he hunts what he catches line") and has their friend scare everyone in a costume. A scene in which a woman skinny dips and has her clothing scattered and hidden from her. The final showdown has the killer hide in an old abandoned building. Except in Friday the 13th Part 2 it was believable that Jason could build his makeshift shack in the middle of the woods without anyone knowing. In the Burning, however, it takes place in a mineshaft that was never established to exist in the first place.
I understand how this is just an early slasher film but with the high critical reviews (especially on Rotten Tomatoes) I had much higher expectations. But again, Tom Savini's effects are really the only reason to even be looking at this movie, even if many are obscured by the strange directing. They are bloody, gruesome, and gory. A person is slashed with garden shears in the head, a person has their fingers chopped off, a person is stabbed through the windpipe and pinned to a tree. Some amazing effects are done for the villain's burned face. And speaking of which (SPOILERS) the villains death is the best of all. He is stabbed through the back with his garden shears, hacked in the head with an axe, and set on fire. But frankly it's best to watch a YouTube video of a channel like Dead Meat cover that stuff and not have to suffer through the boring and overall just bad experience of a film.