ACID HOUSE
Reviewed by Harvey Karten, Ph.D. Zeitgeist Films Director: Paul McGuigan Writer: Irvine Welsh Cast: Ewen Bremner, Martin Clunes, Arlene Cockburn, Alex Howden, Stephen McCole, Jenny McCrindle, Kevin McKidd, Kirsty Mitchell, Jemma Redgrave, Annie Louise Ross, Garry Sweeney, Simon Weir, Irvine Welsh
For decades now, Americans have been told that they are the world's most violent people--with the largest prison population, the most murders, the most violent crimes, the most drug-taking, and the most obsessed with punishing miscreants with the death penalty. This may be true but the folks in the States have no monopoly on brutality. If we accede to the ideas in Paul McGuigan's off-beat, often savage and occasionally comic film "The Acid House," we get the impression that chaos is a product of the uncultured--the alienated working class, particularly of its youthful members. The area treated by the film is the northern reaches of Edinburgh, Scotland but presumably the disorder manifested in this surreal movie can occur anywhere.
What gives "The Acid House" a special flavor is not the subject matter. Working class mores have been done virtually to death, especially in European cinema. With Irvine Welsh ("Trainspotting") as the author of the book on which this is based, we expect the surreal, the tell-it-like-it-is attitude; and that's exactly what we get in this triptych of stories that are only loosely connected with one another. Just when you thought you've seen it all, McGuigan's film comes along to show you that there are still more innovative ways to satirize the lumpens and the lower-middles, ways that not even the great German director Fassbinder could have dreamt up. Unfortunately McGuigan does not have the aesthetic talent to keep his overlong work on an arresting berth, so that despite the novelty of it all, you may find yourself looking at your watch even as the character in the first story (who has been turned into a fly) is spying on his friends having graphic sex.
Shot principally on location with the backing in part of UK's Channel 4 and the Scottish Arts Council, "The Acid House" opens with Part One: The Granton Star Cause. The antihero is a young guy, Boab Coyle (Stephen McCole) whose life is falling apart all at once. Rejected by his pals for his failure on the soccer field, he is dumped by his girl friend Evelyn (Jenny McCrindle), fired by his boss, thrown out of the house by his father (Alex Howden), and just when he thinks nothing else could go wrong with his life, he is confronted by God (Maurice Roeves). This is not the gentle Deity of the New Testament but a genuinely vengeful One disgusted that He has created a jerk who is wasting his life. Metaphorphized Kafka-like into a fly, the new winged Boab--who is insect-size and in no way a large David Cronenberg construct--spies on the people he now hates, plotting his own revenge on them.
In "A Soft Touch," the most engaging of the three stories perhaps because it is the least dependent on off-the-wall surrealism, the eponymous Johnny (Kevin McKidd) is shotgunned into marriage with the very pregnant and chemically-addicted Catriona (Michelle Gomez). The father could be just about anybody who hangs out in the local pub. Soon thereafter Johnny finds himself cuckolded by his upstairs neighbor, the repulsive Larry (Gary McCormack), who takes advantage of the Soft Touch's beer and electricity while having his way with the poor guy's equally loathsome wife. Does The Soft Touch learn his lesson by the conclusion?
In the final segment, Coco Bryce (Ewen Bremner) has one pellet of super marios (LSD) too much, is struck by electricity and transformed into the body of a baby--at which point his entire sorrowful life passes in front of him. The tot's mother, aghast and amazed that the tyke can speak (especially obscenities), turns against her nerdy middle-class husband, who has become impotent when observed by the baby.
You sure can't accuse McGuigan and Welsh of putting on a talking-heads movie, of setting what is basically a stage work on the big screen. "The Acid House" takes full advantage of the power of technology, employing special effects to display the talking 4-month old, to track the path of a fly, to show characters overlapping, and presenting the spectacles suffered by hallucinating druggies. If heroin gives its taker the pleasure of orgasms multiplied tenfold, you wouldn't know it from "The Acid House." McGuigan resorts to all the physical and verbal vulgarities reminiscent of "Trainspotting." A fly makes a meal out of excrement, a baby throws up graphically after drinking a bottle of wine, a newborn is dropped from its mother's womb with umbilical cord dangling, and a host of four-letter words is uttered without the slightest subtleties that double entendres could bring. Subtitles are gratefully utilized to allow the audience to comprehend the utterances, all made in a dialect that not even Eliza Doolittle could otherwise have understood.
To what end? Lampooning the lumpenproles is like shooting sleeping ducks with buckshot: it's cheap, risk-free, and unfair. The boorishness, which comes across for a short time as hip, becomes numbing, the movie losing even a pretense of offensiveness. "The Acid House" might be enjoyed by an audience on acid, but after watching what these junkies go through on the stuff, who'd want to try it?
Not Rated. Running Time: 112 minutes. (C) 1999 Harvey Karten
The review above was posted to the
rec.arts.movies.reviews newsgroup (de.rec.film.kritiken for German reviews).
The Internet Movie Database accepts no responsibility for the contents of the
review and has no editorial control. Unless stated otherwise, the copyright
belongs to the author.
Please direct comments/criticisms of the review to relevant newsgroups.
Broken URLs inthe reviews are the responsibility of the author.
The formatting of the review is likely to differ from the original due
to ASCII to HTML conversion.
Related links: index of all rec.arts.movies.reviews reviews