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No-budget
goofiness that’s enjoyable, imaginative and, surprisingly, quite politically
astute. It’s almost certainly the
greatest mutant-zit movie of all time!
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Illinois-based
filmmaker Rusty Nails, the writer, producer, director, editor and star of ACNE,
began it as a student project at
Columbia
University
. The film, shot on black and white
16mm film in and around the filmmaker’s
Chicago
hometown, ended up taking several years to reach its 2002 fruition.
It’s been met with mostly enthusiastic reception on the festival
circuit, earning raves from the likes of John Waters and George Romero--it
seems appropriate, then, that Rusty Nails has since gone on to make the
documentary DEAD ON: THE LIFE AND FILMS OF GEORGE ROMERO.
(For those interested, ACNE was made available on DVD in 2005, from
www.neweyefilms.com.)
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Franny
and Zoe are teenagers who wake up one morning to find giant zits on their
heads that promptly explode, leaving ugly crown-like scar tissue where hair
once grew. Thus afflicted, they
froth at the mouth, spurt pus from their heads and lose all appetite except in
their giant acne scars, which they smear with cream cheese and other greasy
substances, as they’re what the tissue craves.
It seems a contagion has gotten into the town’s water supply and is
doing to teenagers throughout the area--only
teenagers, not children or adults--what it did to Franny and Zoe.
The contagion is also apparently rampant in the nearby Mershey’s
chocolate factory, which continues to sell its product even after it learns of
the mutations.
Authorities
promptly ban the sale of Mershey’s chocolate to minors, which inspires
underground chocolate salesmen to peddle the stuff to unsuspecting teens.
Franny and Zoe get together with a bunch of their “zithead” friends
and decide to storm the Mershey’s chocolate factory, thus putting it out of
business for good. But the
authorities get wind of their intentions and send helicopters to intercept the
zitheads on their way to the factory, unleashing nerve gas that stuns them
all...but also, in at least two cases, causes the zit scar tissue to melt
away.
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If
you’ve seen many no-budget horror flicks then you won’t be surprised by the
ultra-grainy black and white film stock, jerky camerawork, play doh-ey
prosthetic effects and muffled sound. All
are elements of ACNE, which conversely has in its favor a quality impossible to
buy or rent, no matter how substantial a budget one has: genuine inspiration.
Sure, the pacing is erratic and the narrative uneven, but the premise is
inspired, and undergoes a number of imaginative twists.
Yes, the humor is often unnecessarily dopey (a romance between a
military man in denial about the fact that he’s losing his hair and a
co-worker is plain asinine), but there’s a political dimension to it that
grows increasingly pressing. For
all its goofiness, this film has some decidedly prescient things to say about
the exploitation of teenagers in our society.
In the end, though, it works for one simple reason: its fun.
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ACNE
New
Eye Films
Director/Producer/Screenwriter/Editor: Rusty Nails
Cinematography: Richard Menzia, David M. Russell
Cast: Rusty Nails, Tracey Hayes, Jim Darley, Timothy Hutchings, Mary Luckritz,
Randall Stanton, Matthew Falkowski, Meg Arader, Michael Zoll, Reina Sosa
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