ACID BURN
A darkly comic, edgy, drama involving two messed up teenagers, an oppressive catholic school, magic mushrooms and an underground all night acid house party.
March 1988: After being expelled from a posh boarding school for setting someone on fire, Richard Mould finds himself at St. Gabriel’s College, an independent day school in Manchester with few boarders, of which he is one – even though his parents live around the corner. Richard in no way looks or behaves like a fire-starter. Softly spoken, he is deeply religious and intelligent but his insecurities are glaring, especially to Martha, the school outsider with ghost-like beauty, who picks up on this intriguing character as she gives him the school tour.
Richard is equally taken with the off-beat MARTHA, a mixture of immediate infatuation and someone showing genuine interest in who he is, something he has never had. They click, in a weird way. And when MARTHA spies RICHARD purposely burning his hand in chemistry class, she decides to let him in to her secret...and her secret planet – and tells him to meet her outside school at two in the morning.
Sat in her parents car, MARTHA makes RICHARD drink some mushroom tea with her which will release his true ‘holy spirit’ – then after a fantastical car journey, takes him into an underground party where there is ‘no school, no parents…no religion’. As Richard falls in an hallucinogenic state, with the acid house music washing over him – he declares his love Martha. A love which becomes very dangerous as Martha begins to toy with his affections during the course of the party.
The film is a dark and often funny, exploration of religious repression, parental neglect and teenage desire, It will purvey a particular revolutionary time in Manchester’s musical and youth cultural history when Acid was still underground and pre-rave.
The story covers a whole range of themes: catholicism, sexual attraction, drugs, youth culture – but it’s heart is the battle between freedom and repression, of both the individual and emotions. And the fact that some emotions are better off being repressed forever.
There is a touch of ‘film noir’ to the story, a surrealism as the characters and environments are far from everyday normal. They are an odd couple in an odd place. But basically it’s a dark twisted take on boy meets girl.
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