The Acid House
Zeitgeist Films | Release Date: August 6, 1999 CRITIC SCORE DISTRIBUTION
55
METASCORE
Mixed or average reviews based on 15 Critic Reviews
Positive:
6
Mixed:
8
Negative:
1
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Critic Reviews

Critic scorePublicationBy date
80
Chicago ReaderStaff(Not Credited)
It's MTV meets Merchant-Ivory, at once manneristic, hallucinatory, and exhilarating. Read full review
75
San Francisco ChronicleEdward Guthmann
A blast of manic energy in the form of a film. Read full review
70
The A.V. ClubTasha Robinson
The Acid House comes across as a shadow of "Trainspotting," albeit a vibrant, noisy, frantic shadow. Read full review
70
VarietyBrendan Kelly
The Acid House makes "Trainspotting" look like a mild-mannered youth comedy. Read full review
70
Los Angeles TimesJohn Anderson
A virulent but thoroughly entertaining trilogy of tales about the besieged lower classes of Edinburgh, ripe with vulgarity, self-loathing, violence and economic disorder. Read full review
63
The Globe and Mail (Toronto)Liam Lacey
There are flashes of excitement in this film, mostly from the verbal play and sulphurous humour of Welsh's perspective, but there's a lot that makes you wonder why you're sitting through it. Read full review
60
The New York TimesStephen Holden
With a cackling nihilistic glee, the movie rubs our faces in the stinking, screaming muck of raw human appetite and insists that that's all there is. Read full review
60
Village VoiceJessica Winter
There's so little leavening humor here, and so much physical and emotional violence visited upon the already abject, that the film seems as pointless as the wasted lives it purports to examine. Read full review
60
TV Guide MagazineMaitland McDonagh
God moves in mysterious -- some might say positively spiteful -- ways in this trio of scabrous tales adapted from short stories by "Trainspotting's" Irvine Welsh. Read full review
58
Seattle Post-IntelligencerPaula Nechak
It's not the direction that feels flaccid in this film. Surprisingly, it's the stories themselves, which provide a bit of a giggle but little else. Read full review
50
L.A. WeeklyPaul Malcolm
Sympathy is disturbingly cast aside so we can wallow in the pathetic. It’s a bad trip, man. Read full review
50
San Francisco ExaminerWesley Morris
It feels like a trumped up trifle, disinterested in narrative exercises, using instead technique (cinematography, editing and, omigod, a soundtrack!) to swing moods and heighten reality, then send it crashing to earth. Read full review
40
Film ThreatRon Wells
Over all, the short stories never gel together or create a unified whole. Read full review
40
Austin ChronicleMarc Savlov
A mess, albeit one with occasional flashes of brilliance. Read full review
25
Entertainment WeeklyLisa Schwarzbaum
Three stories by the guy who wrote Trainspotting, banged and smashed into a film by Paul McGuigan with none of Trainspotting's charm and all its grotesquerie. Read full review
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