Acid House, The

Chicago Reader Staff(Not Credited)

It's MTV meets Merchant-Ivory, at once manneristic, hallucinatory, and exhilarating.

San Francisco Chronicle Edward Guthmann

A blast of manic energy in the form of a film.

Variety Brendan Kelly

The Acid House makes "Trainspotting" look like a mild-mannered youth comedy.

Los Angeles Times John 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.

The Onion (A.V. Club) Tasha Robinson

The Acid House comes across as a shadow of "Trainspotting," albeit a vibrant, noisy, frantic shadow.

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.

Village Voice Jessica 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.

TV Guide Maitland 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.

The New York Times Stephen 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.

Seattle Post-Intelligencer Paula 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.

LA Weekly Paul Malcolm

Sympathy is disturbingly cast aside so we can wallow in the pathetic. It’s a bad trip, man.

San Francisco Examiner Wesley 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.

Austin Chronicle Marc Savlov

A mess, albeit one with occasional flashes of brilliance.

Film Threat Ron Wells

Over all, the short stories never gel together or create a unified whole.

Entertainment Weekly Lisa 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.