This 80s slasher takes place at a summer camp where a former camp groundskeeper (Cropsy) was the victim of a prank gone seriously awry many years before. What was the said prank? The campers thought it would be HILARIOUS to wake Cropsy up by tossing a flaming skull into his cabin. For some reason they weren't expecting Cropsy (or anything else) to catch on fire, but that's exactly what happened! Five years later, horribly disfigured and garden shears in hand, Cropsy's begins his quest for revenge against a backdrop of POVs shots, continuity errors, and adults portraying teenagers.
One of the fantastically gory highlights of this film is a massacre scene that takes place in broad daylight, in a canoe, with a bunch of teenagers. We're treated to fingers getting chopped off (fully in frame), someone getting garden shears through the neck, and blood basically exploding out of campers. It's glorious. And, that particular scene was what got the film on the UK's “video nasties” banned list!
But as much as the special effects bring to this film (thanks to a young Tom Savini's reluctance to do the Friday the 13th sequel) the score brings that much more. Personally, I consider the main theme of this film to be nothing other than classic. The score was composed by Rick Wakeman, who's name you might recognize for a number of reasons, but the most notable reason would be he was the keyboardist for the band Yes. (Which should give you an idea as to how fantastic this score is, I mean, classic prog rock meets 80’s slasher score? What more could you want!?)
This film also has often been brushed off as a Friday the 13th rip off, but it was apparently written before Friday was released, and was based off of a classic campfire tale that circulated around the east coast about “Cropsey” a maniac who was reported to have murdered children in a wooded Staten Island. That makes this movie all the more creepy and that much more worthy of it's cult classic status!
