Summer Scaries (pt. II)

The Burning

Turistas

Greetings and salutations, my dear readers. We’ve made it to the hottest month of the year, the last breaths of Summertime, when the kiddies make their way back to school and I pretend like Autumn has started even though I’ll be wearing shorts until November (yay, Texas, yay, climate change…) Most of the year, I’m just sitting around, waiting for October to come around, so the rest of the world can join in on my favorite pastime of horror-movie-watching. But in my heart, the Halloween spirit begins to creep in around this time, no matter what the temperature may be. I couldn’t wait till actual spooky season to break out the horror movies, so let’s celebrate the dog days of Summer with a round of horror films set in the Summertime. The last time I ventured into the realm of scary Summer cinema, I noted how scary movies set during the Summer are so common that you may have never taken note of them, but it’s this critic and Autumn’s opinion that the sweltering Summer season is the perfect time for horrors to take place. Something about the heat, the vacations, the pressure to have fun and get things done before returning to work or school, forces our guards down and leaves us vulnerable to danger and despair. And as shows like The White Lotus so perfectly capture, we can get so caught up in having a good time that we may end up having the worst time during this season, so leaving a lot of potential for horror. Friday the 13th, Jaws, Cabin in the Woods, IT, The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, Jeepers Creepers, and I Know What You Did Last Summer all place their victims into a cruel Summer, and tonight’s two sun-and-blood-soaked spectacles were no different.

I began in a subgenre that is a staple of Summer scary movies—the Summer camp horror—which, in my indoorsy soul, is a redundantly-titled genre. Summer camp was always used as a threat in my household, ie: “do your chores or else I’m sending you to Summer camp”, because the idea of being separated from my family during the hottest, most competitive and outdoorsy time of the year to stay in a cabin or tent with no privacy or TV or AC or pest control has always been the epitome of horror to me. But even if I weren’t afflicted with Summer camp anxiety, the movies surrounding this setting would still fill me with enough dread to avoid it all. Between the Friday the 13th movies, Sleepaway Camp, Cabin Fever, and countless others films I’ve intentionally skipped, Summer camp is frequently depicted as a horror show—and I’m traumatized enough by the camp prank scene from Lindsay Lohan’s The Parent Trap to explore this subgenre too much. That being said, I think I’m in the minority here, because no amount of horrifically-depicted campers, counselors, or campside killers can stop the American Summercamp Industrial Complex. So, I got over my fears momentarily to watch Tony Maylam’s 1981 Summer scary classic: The Burning. The Burning is centered upon the legend of Cropsy, which has had several iterations over the years, but The Burning’s version of the myth tells tale of a sadistic camp groundskeeper named Cropsy who is the victim of a prank gone wrong—where scorned campers, in an attempt to scare Cropsy, accidentally set his cabin on fire. Who Cropsy is and how he exacts his revenge depends on who’s telling the tale, but in The Burning, he has a long, sharp pair of gardening shears. After witnessing this brutal burning, an unknown amount of time passes, and we’re transported to Camp Stonelake, where it is nearly impossible to tell the difference between campers and camp counselors (mostly because everyone looked much older than they actually were in the 80s and absolutely every single person is smoking cigs—perhaps there’s a correlation.) Before anyone even gets slashed, there’s trouble at Camp Stonelake, because one of the male campers has been peeping in the girl’s showers. He is given a surprisingly strict talking-to for the typical, early-80s, nonchalant attitude toward being creepy, but this is a misleading moment of progressivism, because the rest of the film is filled to the absolute brim with some of the most pathetically horny dudes I’ve ever witnessed in a horror film—which is saying something. There is more talk of masturbation and lube and titties than anything else, not just because the film is set within a co-ed camp, but because Cropsy doesn’t really crop up right away and they had to fill the movie with something, I guess. When he finally does appear, it is gruesome and severe—particularly because this a camp comprised entirely of boys and girls who cry wolf and have played enough pranks to never be trusted. There’s not much I can discuss without giving away the best parts of this movie, but I’ll just say that I was already afraid of canoeing and skinny dipping and sleeping in the woods before I saw this movie, and The Burning only added to these fears. The best tension is built by the slow revealing of our main antagonist, who we do not see in his full, melted form until the very end. I refer to Cropsy as the “main antagonist” because The Burning really is overflowing with disgusting, depraved dudes who were just as villainous. More than once, the words “don’t fight it” and “you know you want to” are spoken to women being forced to hook up with these equally-gross jocks and nerds, and more than once, the female party is slashed before their predators. This became not only frustrating, but incredibly tired. It began to feel just like a series of rapey scenelets, punctuated by unceremonious deaths by garden shears. The most memorable deaths were in the aforementioned canoe scene, but given the oversaturation of Summer camp horror that came before it, I expected The Burning to be a bit more competitive and therefore, creative. Even the two level-headed leads of this film (Brian Matthews and Leah Ayres) weren’t particularly compelling, but the more notable cast members like Jason Alexander, Holly Hunter, Fisher Stevens, Larry Joshua, and Ned Eisenberg felt slightly more developed as characters. To see Fisher Stevens so young was wild, and to see Jason Alexander with HAIR (a mere 8 years before he’s balding in Seinfeld) was wild—and Jason Alexander’s impeccable comedic timing and Constanza-flavored charm obviously stole the show for me. But once I began my research, I uncovered the source of the patriarchal stench that pollutes The Burning—it was written and produced by the king of the rapists: Harvey Weinstein. See, in the 1970s, Weinstein and his brother were desperate to make any kind of movie, and the low-budget slasher genre had proven to be very successful at this time. But this being the sole driving force for making The Burning had negative effects on its box office sales and critical reception, as the public was already inundated with almost identical movies released simultaneously. The Weinsteins rushed the writing, the casting, and production—with the cast wearing their own clothes and SFX legend Tom Savini only having a couple weeks to design and execute the horror effects. The film went over-budget, and under-seen, even in their strategy to give the movie different titles in different screenings (in an attempt to fool audiences into seeing it), the sales and reviews were abysmal. It debuted at number 23 behind slasher films Happy Birthday to Me, Friday the 13th Part 2, Final Exam, The Fan, Graduation Day, Eyes of a Stranger, and a very successful re-release of The Texas Chain Saw Massacre. Even still, The Burning kickstarted the Weinstein’s careers and their production company Miramax, and it also began Harvey Weinstein’s reign of abuse, manipulation, and retaliation. In October 2017, former PA Paula Wachowiak alleged that Weinstein harassed her on the set of The Burning, when she was tasked with getting him to sign checks and he allegedly answered his hotel door wearing only a towel and asked her for a massage. When Wachowiak refused, Weinstein harassed her about the incident through the rest of the film’s production, all the way up until the May 1981 premiere. Suddenly, all of the creepy men in this movie who barely die a gory death made sense, but it doesn’t make it any more pleasurable to watch, obviously.

I needed a Summer-set horror movie where creepy men actually die a harsh, gory death, so I’m really glad I watched John Stockwell’s 2006 movie Turistas next. This Summer scary takes us out of the Summer camp setting and into the more adult and open-ended world of travel horror, as we witness Josh Duhamel, Olivia Wilde, Melissa George, and Beau Garrett as an annoyingly-optimistic group of backpackers travelling around Brazil. We meet them on a tense, rickety bus ride up a mountain, where the driver and pedestrian chaos leads to the bus falling off the edge of a cliff, just after the passengers miraculously escape. The next bus won’t be there for ten hours, so all the riders take advantage of a beachside bar just down the hill, and get to know one another. Josh Duhamel is Alex, who is the cautious travel companion of his sister Bea (Olivia Wilde) and her bestie Amy (Beau Garrett), and they quickly form a friendship with Australian backpacker Pru (Melissa George) and two British brothers named Finn and Liam (Desmond Askew and Max Brown.) As Alex explains to Pru, he’s there to protect his sister from creepy dudes hitting on her, to which Pru cheekily responds, “Who’s gonna protect you from creepy girls hitting on you?” Their fun flirtation evolves into drinking and dancing and living it up on the beach with the locals, who are portrayed on a spectrum of mindless hedonists to backwards savages—but more on that in a moment. Alex is so anxious and mild-mannered that he orders a coke at the beach bar, but Pru tries to bring out the adventurer in him, and her bravery and ability to speak Portuguese opens the door to friendships with fellow tourists, and the cute and friendly local named Kiko (Agles Steib.) A gorgeous female bartender casually makes a call to a mysterious doctor, alerting him that she’s, “got eight tourists here”, and the doctor responds with a smile, “it’s a little Christmas present.” Suddenly, the fun-filled night ends, and our tourists wake up disoriented and disheveled on the beach. Not only have they been robbed of all of their money, phones, and clothes, but they’ve missed their bus and have no way of getting off this beach. They wander around, barefoot and dirty, barely speaking the language, and do not react well when they see a child wearing one of their hats. Foolishly trying to get answers and hoping the police will help them, the tourists are completely lost until Kiko pops back up, and saves them from an angry mob. He tells them that the town is too dangerous for them, that rumors about murderous American tourists have made the locals wary of their presence, so Kiko takes them on a hike up the mountain to a safe house his uncle owns. But fate has other plans for these turistas, as they soon discover this house is merely a cover for an illegal human organ market. “If it makes you feel any better, I’m doing this for a good cause” the surgeon says as he slices into Amy’s belly, and as the other tourists await their turn outside in dog cages. It is a legitimately terrifying premise, that really didn’t need all of the xenophobia and stereotyping that’s added in. Turistas came out at the peak of the torture porn subgenre’s prominence, which was pretty much directly inspired by the American-made horrors of the wars in Iraq, Afghanistan, and the atrocities that occurred at Abu Ghraib. Films like Saw and Hostel also fall into this subgenre, but there were countless versions of this kind of low-culture horror at the time. It is probably my least favorite horror subgenre, but I found Turistas to be slightly more compelling than expected. There were twists and chase sequences and jump scares that were shockingly well-executed for such a poorly-written script made by a director who was simply inspired by being robbed on a Peru trip. The Americans are irritating, the Brits are revolting, and the way Brazilians are depicted is so offensive: they are truly only shown as murderous, horny, or stupid, and very little is done to humanize them in any way. Melissa George, in her native Australian tongue, is the only voice of reason here, and even she has some Bo Derek cornrows on. As one Brazilian person said on Quora: “Portraying violence, crime and danger in an exaggerated way only makes it look less serious and, instead, more like a parody or a nightmare by easily impressionable foreign snowflakes.” Turistas was the first American film to be shot exclusively on location in Brazil, but many Brazilians boycotted the movie, of course, with director John Stockwell responding, “I feel a little badly that the Brazilians, mostly who haven’t seen the movie, maybe they’ve seen the trailer, have been very upset about what they perceive the film’s depiction of Brazil to be. I’m like, did you guys see City of God? That wasn’t the most flattering of portrayals.” Which, I’m sure, the population of Brazil really appreciated. (Lmao NOT.) All this being said, I don’t mind a horror movie where dumb Americans are victimized for being dumb, but I don’t know if these tourists really suffered all that much. This is coming from someone who has travelled very little but has seen numerous horror films with far higher stakes than the ones presented in Turistas, but I always want to be taken by surprise—and rarely does that happen. What was surprising is how many underwater cave scenes were captured, and in such thrilling, claustrophobic ways that almost killed Olivia Wilde. I’m glad Olivia Wilde is okay, and I’m glad the movie was better than I’d anticipated, but I would’ve been really glad if both of tonight’s movies had had a tad more chutzpah. Well that’s enough Summer fun from me this week, but I thank you for reading along and soaking up the scary sun with me again. Until next time, HAGS!!!!