Hanging out with Rusty Nails is like watching a performance of Dada nonsense–he’ll slip into the voices of different characters, cite health statistics, then suddenly belt out his favorite song. He seems to be incapable of providing simple answers.
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Call him offbeat, or maybe calculating. His 74-minute black-and-white debut belongs to the Roger Corman school of horror comedies, following a brother and sister as they search for the diabolical corporate and government conspirators behind the contamination of a city’s water supply. Without warning, hapless citizens feel compelled to rub their noggins with chocolate, butter, or cheese to nourish themselves, causing sales of oily foods to skyrocket–precisely the greedy schemers’ plan.
Nails grew up primarily in Boston. When he was 16, his mother bought him a Super-8 movie camera, and he started creating collages of “crazy” images. “I would do little things with stop motion,” he says, “and I would just make short, skitty films and horror movies.” One of the shorts was screened in a Boston art gallery.
–Kathryn Bertram
