The problem with The Acid King is that there's literally nothing except about 5 seconds of Kasso video and nothing else except questionable accounting from a series of local burnouts. So it's a 15 minute documentary spread out thin to a 2-hour doc. Nothing at all can really be corroborated here, so it's just legend mostly. There's a nice angle of the so-called national Satanic Panic which grew from the excellent Rolling Stone article about the murder, and that's really the limit of this little murder. A well written magazine-length article did it justice, a two-hour doc with locals reliving their glory years drags this down until you're hoping the ghost of Kasso will appear and put them all down and end the film quicker. It all feels like a 15 minute doc padded to two hours. If you're new the the murder, READ THE ROLLING STONE ARTICLE. If you must have more, watch the doc, but it's kind of weak.
2 Reviews
Fascinating and Intelligent Documentary About Satanic Panic
thalassafischer17 January 2024
Warning: Spoilers
This doc is heads and shoulders above the more recent Satan Wants You, as it intimately relates the story of summer of 1984 as told by the 50-something Gen Xers of Northport, Long Island. It's a rag tag bunch of people, ranging from "Obvious Alcoholics Anonymous Sponsor in Harley Davidson Clothes" to "The Academic Who Keeps Talking About Human Alienation" to "Indie Film Maker Who is Just a Bit Too Jolly About All This" and "Ayn Rand Collected Social Security Man" (my personal fave of the interviewees).
But it works, it very smoothly works, in fact, because these people either knew Ricky or were peripherally affected due to being tweens or teens themselves in the same era in the same neighborhood. This epic tale being told in a different way by each different sort of old man was a simple but genius way to tell what is essentially now an urban legend "in a drinking town with a fishing problem."
Furthermore, it's enhanced by the one single journalist from Rolling Stone who had the heart to talk to the neglected and abused kids of the town, and the documentary all but instructs you to go read his 1984 article "Kids in the Dark" rather than pretending it doesn't exist. Snippets of tape-recorded conversation with these teens in 1984 are interspersed throughout the film.
The Acid King intelligently shows how belief in Satan was a real influence on the horrific murder and suicide that took place among a group of 17 year old drug addicted street kids, but balances it with information about how the real issue here was that Ricky's father was an abusive monster who abandoned his mentally ill son to the streets, where he fell to pieces from lack of basic needs and an extremely unfortunate amount of angel dust.
My favorite part of the documentary has got to be though that it ends by convicting Ricky's awful, evil father of leaving the boy's ashes at a funeral home for a year after his suicide, then putting them in the basement beside old Christmas decorations until he died seven years later. Interestingly, the father was similarly struck with extreme mental decline before his death, in his case from Lyme disease...which seems awfully poetic in this stranger than fiction tale about the woods.
But it works, it very smoothly works, in fact, because these people either knew Ricky or were peripherally affected due to being tweens or teens themselves in the same era in the same neighborhood. This epic tale being told in a different way by each different sort of old man was a simple but genius way to tell what is essentially now an urban legend "in a drinking town with a fishing problem."
Furthermore, it's enhanced by the one single journalist from Rolling Stone who had the heart to talk to the neglected and abused kids of the town, and the documentary all but instructs you to go read his 1984 article "Kids in the Dark" rather than pretending it doesn't exist. Snippets of tape-recorded conversation with these teens in 1984 are interspersed throughout the film.
The Acid King intelligently shows how belief in Satan was a real influence on the horrific murder and suicide that took place among a group of 17 year old drug addicted street kids, but balances it with information about how the real issue here was that Ricky's father was an abusive monster who abandoned his mentally ill son to the streets, where he fell to pieces from lack of basic needs and an extremely unfortunate amount of angel dust.
My favorite part of the documentary has got to be though that it ends by convicting Ricky's awful, evil father of leaving the boy's ashes at a funeral home for a year after his suicide, then putting them in the basement beside old Christmas decorations until he died seven years later. Interestingly, the father was similarly struck with extreme mental decline before his death, in his case from Lyme disease...which seems awfully poetic in this stranger than fiction tale about the woods.
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