September 9–16, 1999

movie shorts

Acid House

Useful only as an answer to the question, How bad can a movie be?, this atrociously bad goulash of Irvine Welsh stories is so amazingly bad it’s hard to believe it was made by actual humans. Perhaps a handful of monkeys were given PCP and asked to make a thesis film, perhaps not. But even diehard Trainspotting fans — poor, poor creatures — would be hard-pressed to find anything of merit in this ludicrous waste of time. Featuring overexposures, jump cuts, and other, you know, trippy camera moves, this trio of meaningless stories features such heavy-handed devices as a God who hangs out down the pub and curses like a sailor, and an irresponsible club kid (Ewen Bremner, Trainspotting’s Spud) who switches places with a newborn baby. That this last story devolves into watching a baby suckle at his mother’s breast while Bremner’s voiceover talks about how much he likes tit gives you a pretty good ideal of the maturity level here — and the originality, too, since it inexplicably echoes the Look Who’s Talking movies. Overall, the film’s viewpoint — and, one must assume, Welsh’s too — is mired in the adolescent. Women are distractions or burdens, men’s (or, really, boys’) concerns never go beyond drugs, sex and the lads. Unbelievably fucking tedious, ennit?

—Sam Adams