Dear Stageleft:

I saw a horror film this week that achieved something no other horror film since Cronenberg’s “Rabid” has done…made me want to puke. And the amazing thing is, the film was only thirty seconds long.

I hate to give away the plot, but I will. If you’re attending any Cineplex-Odeon in Ottawa this week, here’s what you will see just before your movie starts.

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Open on a medium closeup of two teenagers. Attractive young girl with clear complexion, left frame, staring intently at a young man right frame gazing back at her. His skin is severely scarred by acne…including one large, red pimple on his upper cheek.

Slowly the young woman reaches up and gently strokes his cheek, then touches the pimple.

It bursts, and a slow trickle of blood and pus runs down his cheek. They continue to gaze into each other’s eyes as the pus pools on his chin.

The young woman leans forward, and licks the blood and pus from his cheek.

The shot fades, slowly (much too slowly), and is replace by a graphic:

“Bloody Zit. Now available at Winks.”

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Now, there are several possibilities here.

a) A conceptual artist from some avant-garde gallery smuggled his/her piece onto the commercial reel at our particular theatre just before this specific showing.

b) I was hallucinating.

c) A recently fired marketing director at Winks is wreaking revenge on his former employer by surreptitiously distributing fake ads.

d) We were on Candid Camera.

The one possibility I cannot contemplate is:

e) Some ad exec somewhere thought that this would sell product.

Help me, o Stageleft community. Was this some unbelievably cutting edge cultural reference that I, in my dotage, have failed to understand? Is this the harbinger of a new wave of pus-related humour about to sweep the nation? A clever parody of something I haven’t seen? Is there something about blood and pus running down a teenager’s cheek that makes everyone except me want to run to Winks and buy a Bloody Zit?

Yours truly,

Nauseated in Nepean.