The Acid HouseMovies like The Acid House
- Key Features:
- Anthology, Drug culture, Surrealism, Black comedy, Social satire, Existentialism, British culture, Dark humor, Counter-culture, Nudity-high, Violence-moderate, Cult classic
- Tone:
- cynical, humorous, gritty
- Target Audience:
- Fans of Irvine Welsh, Cult film enthusiasts, Fans of dark comedies, Counter-culture audiences
- Emotional Arc:
- Disorientation → Dark Humor
The Acid House

A surreal triptych adapted by "Trainspotting" author Irvine Welsh from his acclaimed collection of short stories. Combining a vicious sense of humor with hard-talking drama, the film reaches into the hearts and minds of the chemical generation, casting a dark and unholy light into the hidden corners of the human psyche.
The Acid House
Heroin addict Mark Renton stumbles through bad ideas and sobriety attempts with his unreliable friends --Sick Boy, Begbie, Spud and Tommy. He also has an underage girlfriend, Diane, along for the ride. After cleaning up and moving from Edinburgh to London, Mark finds he can't escape the life he left behind as Begbie and Sick Boy come knocking.

Across different eras, a poor family, an anxious developer and a fed-up landlady become tied to the same mysterious house in this animated dark comedy.

Five strangers board a train and are joined by a mysterious fortune teller who offers to read their Tarot cards. Five separate stories unfold: An architect returns to his ancestoral home to find a werewolf out for revenge; a doctor discovers his new wife is a vampire; a huge plant takes over a house; a musician gets involved with voodoo; an art critic is pursued by a disembodied hand.

After 20 years abroad, Mark Renton returns to Scotland and reunites with his old friends Sick Boy, Spud and Begbie.

Two drug dealers on the lam seek refuge inside their mentally unstable friend’s mansion. But in order to stay, they have to participate in her elaborate, and increasingly dangerous, game of permanent make-believe.

A bigoted junkie cop suffering from borderline personality disorder and drug addiction manipulates and hallucinates his way in a bid to secure promotion.

Emma, a French novelist aged 27, decide to go to Berlin and join a brothel to uncover the prostitution world, the subject of her new book. Such as gonzo journalism, Emma become a prostitute and her experience, which was supposed to last a few weeks, will last two years. Was writing her book an excuse for Emma to live a shameful fantasy?

Down a seedy city street in her neighborhood, young Enola Penny is obsessed with what appears to be a long abandoned theatre. One night, she sees that the front door is slightly ajar and impulsively decides to sneak inside. But there in the dark, decrepit auditorium, a show unlike any other unfolds before her eyes. Its host is an eerie human puppet named Peg Poett who will introduce Penny to six tales of the bizarre: A couple traveling in a remote part of the French Pyrenees cross paths with a lustful witch; A paranoid lover faces the wrath of a partner who has been pushed to her limit; The Freudian dreams of an unfaithful husband blur the lines between fantasy and reality; The horrors of the real world are interpreted through the mind of a child; A woman addicted to other people's memories gets her fix through the vitreous fluid of her victims' eyeballs; And a perverse obsession with sweets turns sour for a couple in too deep.

A teenager stops off to see his dealer to test a new drug before heading off for a night of partying. On the way home, he picks up an injured woman, and the night takes a surreal turn.

After his wife leaves him, a disillusioned director dives into the drug scene, trying anything his friend suggests.

Jeremy and Julian Lewis, the "Lewis Twins", are two unruly brothers who terrorise the city of Swansea from the caravan park where they live with their family. When their father, Fatty, is injured while working on a roof for local kingpin Bryn Cartwright, they try in vain to claim compensation. Thus begins a campaign of terror, which local policemen Terry and Grayo are ill-equipped to prevent, involved as they are in a drugs deal with Cartwright.

It's Ted the Bellhop's first night on the job...and the hotel's very unusual guests are about to place him in some outrageous predicaments. It seems that this evening's room service is serving up one unbelievable happening after another.

During an opulent and luxurious banquet, complete with hordes of servers and valets, eleven pampered guests participate in what appears to be a ritualistic gastronomic carnage. In this absurd and grotesque universe, an unexpected sequence of events destabilizes the endless symphony of abundance.

Celebrities recall their most mind-bending trips via animations, reenactments and more in this comedic documentary exploring the story of psychedelics.

In a pseudo-futuristic 1994, a square couple enter the corrupt world of the music industry, and subsequently a maze of drugs, sex, and temptation.

A group of American teens comes to Ireland to visit a friend who takes them on a camping trip in search of the local, fabled magic mushrooms. When the psychedelics start taking hold, the panicked friends are attacked by ghostly creatures; but how can they determine whether what they are experiencing is reality or hallucination?

In underworld terms, Chas Devlin is a 'performer,' a gangster with a talent for violence and intimidation. Turner is a reclusive rock superstar. When Chas and Turner meet, their worlds collide—and the impact is both exotic and explosive.

During a heat wave, strange clouds start pouring down acid rain, wreaking devastation and panic throughout France. In a world teetering on the edge, a girl and her divorced parents must join forces to confront and try to escape this climate catastrophe.

A Ronald Reagan-obsessed serial killer targets a bunch of hippies who are heading to a weekend-long concert.

A research scientist explores the boundaries and frontiers of consciousness. Using sensory deprivation and hallucinogenic mixtures from native American shamans, he explores these altered states of consciousness and finds that memory, time, and perhaps reality itself are states of mind.

When Kylie Bucknell is sentenced to home detention, she's forced to come to terms with her unsociable behaviour, her blabbering mother and a hostile spirit who seems less than happy about the new living arrangement.

In a desolate community full of drug-addled Marines and rumors of kidnapping, a wild-eyed stoner named Lou wakes up after a crazy night of partying with symptoms of a strange illness and recurring visions. As she struggles to get a grip on reality, the stories of conspiracy spread.

A fading celebrity decides to use a black market drug, a cell-replicating substance that temporarily creates a younger, better version of herself.

A newly dead New England couple seeks help from a deranged demon exorcist to scare an affluent New York family out of their home.

A young American woman traveling through Italy finds herself in a strange Mediterranean villa where nothing seems quite right.

A formal dinner party starts out normally enough, but after the bourgeois group retire to the host’s music room, they inexplicably find themselves unable to leave.

Alain and Marie moved to the suburb house of their dreams. But the real estate agent warned them: what is in the basement may well change their lives forever.

Two men, part tramp, part pilgrim, are on their way to Santiago de Compostela in Spain. On their way they meet a whole assortment of people—some truculent, some violent, and some bizarre; they experience many adventures—some mysterious, some erotic, some even supernatural.

Lynch's first film project consists of a loop of six people vomiting projected on to a special sculptured screen featuring twisted three-dimensional faces.

A series of interconnected short films are the backdrop for a maniac screenwriter who pitches insane storylines featuring some of Hollywood's biggest and brightest.

A writer secludes himself in the mountains and falls in lust with local Berta. After realizing the oddities of the rural community the author starts to question the lines between reality and fiction.

Undiagnosed, untreated and generally untethered schizophrenic Julien lives with his pregnant younger sister Pearl, anorexic would-be wrestler brother Chris, sympathetic grandmother, and severely depressed German father.

Centered around a television station which features a 1950s-style sci-fi movie interspersed with a series of wild commercials, wacky shorts and weird specials, this lampoon of contemporary life and pop culture skewers some of the silliest spectacles ever created in the name of entertainment.

The film tells futurist, architect, and inventor R. Buckminster Fuller's incredible story through two teens hoping to get laid, become punk gods, and survive high school.

After making a harrowing escape from war-torn South Sudan, a young refugee couple struggle to adjust to their new life in a small English town that has an unspeakable evil lurking beneath the surface.

Mousse and Louis are young, beautiful, rich and in love. But drugs have invaded their lives. One day, they overdose and Louis dies. Mousse survives, but soon learns she's pregnant. Feeling lost, Mousse runs away to a house far from Paris. Several months later, Louis' brother joins her in her refuge.

An outrageous collection of surreal, short attention span non-sequiturs largely revolving around Guitar Brother, his randy older sibling, and the pair's portly Caucasian brother.

An experimental, psychedelic odyssey through Japanese subculture experienced via the eyes of a disillusioned young man, who must contend with intense familial dysfunction, psychosexual alienation, and existentialist malaise.

The small town of Paris, Australia deliberately causes car accidents, then sells/salvages all valuables from the wrecks as a means of economy.

Raoul Duke and his attorney Dr. Gonzo drive a red convertible across the Mojave desert to Las Vegas with a suitcase full of drugs to cover a motorcycle race. As their consumption of drugs increases at an alarming rate, the stoned duo trash their hotel room and fear legal repercussions. Duke begins to drive back to L.A., but after an odd run-in with a cop, he returns to Sin City and continues his wild drug binge.

A seductive stranger prowls the streets of Glasgow in search of prey: unsuspecting men who fall under her spell.

José Sirgado is a low-budget filmmaker whose heroin addiction distorts his perspective of the real world. Although he is a depressed and unstable individual, his mood improves when he receives the mysterious films of Pedro, with whom he shares his passion for cinema.

A mentally disturbed man takes residence in a halfway house. His mind gradually slips back into the realm created by his illness, where he replays a key part of his childhood.

An American master chemist plans to score big on a once in a lifetime drug deal. All does not go as planned and he is soon entangled in a web of deceit.

A trio of interweaved transgressive tales, telling a bizarre stories of suburban patricide and a miraculous flight from justice, a mad sex experiment which unleashes a disfiguring plague, and the obsessive sexual relationship between two prison inmates.

A man on the verge of a promotion takes a mysterious hallucinogenic drug that begins to tear down his reality and expose his life for what it really is.

Straight-laced nerd Alistair moves into a college dorm with hardcore marijuana users, who order an old giant bong that proves to have strange magical powers, which sends people to a bizarre drugged-out alternate realm from which there is no easy escape.

In a bleak Inverness midwinter, Luisaidh is careening off the rails after the suicide of her best friend. She medicates her misery with joyless sex, chips and a belief in the power of positive drinking. Surrounded by bittersweet memories, she struggles to find someone to talk to or some reason to make life worthwhile at the most stressful time of the year.

Themroc, a bachelor house painter living at home with his mother, leads a sad and colorless life. One day, after a run-in with his boss, he rebels. He wrecks his apartment, rejects every facet of bourgeois life, and begins acting like an urban, modern-day Neanderthal.

A straight-laced pharmacist's uneventful life spirals out of control when he starts an affair with a trophy wife customer who takes him on a joyride involving sex, drugs and possibly murder.

The wife of an abusive criminal finds solace in the arms of a kind regular guest in her husband's restaurant.

In this surrealistic and free-form follow-up to the Monkees' television show, the band frolic their way through a series of musical set pieces and vignettes containing humor and anti-establishment social commentary.

Francie and Joe live the usual playful, fantasy filled childhoods of normal boys. However, with a violent, alcoholic father and a manic depressive, suicidal mother the pressure on Francie to grow up are immense. When Francie's world turns to madness, he tries to counter it with further insanity, with dire consequences.

Julie, a daydreaming librarian, meets Céline, an enigmatic magician, and together they become the heroines of a time-warping adventure involving a haunted house, psychotropic candy, and a murder-mystery melodrama.

When Steve Coogan is asked by The Observer to tour the country's finest restaurants, he envisions it as the perfect getaway with his beautiful girlfriend. But, when she backs out on him, he has no one to accompany him but his best friend and source of eternal aggravation, Rob Brydon.

Residents of peaceful Pebbles Court, Homesville, are being used unknowingly as test experiments for a new 'Body Drug' that causes rapid body decomposition (melting skin etc.) and painful death.

In a dystopian near future, single people, according to the laws of The City, are taken to The Hotel, where they are obliged to find a romantic partner in forty-five days or are transformed into animals and sent off into The Woods.

When some very creepy things start happening around school, the kids at Herrington High make the chilling discovery that confirms their worst suspicions: their teachers really are from another planet!

A one-time (and now one-handed) master film editor toiling in the cinematic sweatshops of 1970s Italy becomes the prime suspect in a series of brutal murders.

In a near-future Britain, young Alexander DeLarge and his pals get their kicks beating and raping anyone they please. When not destroying the lives of others, Alex swoons to the music of Beethoven. The state, eager to crack down on juvenile crime, gives an incarcerated Alex the option to undergo an invasive procedure that'll rob him of all personal agency. In a time when conscience is a commodity, can Alex change his tune?

It's the closing night at the last drive-in theater in America and Cecil B. Kaufman has planned the ultimate marathon of lost film prints to unleash upon his faithful cinephile patrons. Four films so rare that they have never been exhibited publicly on American soil until this very night! With titles like Wadzilla, I Was a Teenage Werebear, The Diary of Anne Frankenstein, and Zom-B-Movie, Chillerama not only celebrates the golden age of drive-in B horror shlock but also spans over four decades of cinema with something for every bad taste.

A group of people gather in the California desert to watch a "film" set in the late 1990s featuring a sentient, homicidal car tire named Robert. The assembled crowd of onlookers watch as Robert becomes obsessed with a beautiful and mysterious woman and goes on a rampage through a desert town.

An anthology of five macabre short stories about hungry ghosts, comatose brain dead, a group of bright-eyed actors, an unscrupulous car salesman, and careless backpack tourists.

After being released from prison, a young gangster with a chip on his shoulder decides to punish society by making snuff films.

Summer 1994, Scotland. Johnno and Spanner are best mates, but Johnno’s family are moving him to a new town and a better life, leaving Spanner behind to face a precarious future. In pursuit of adventure and escape they head out on one last night to an illegal rave before parting ways indefinitely.

In Los Angeles at the turn of the 1970s, drug-fueled detective Larry "Doc" Sportello investigates the disappearance of an ex-girlfriend.

Young Augusten Burroughs absorbs experiences that could make for a shocking memoir: the son of an alcoholic father and an unstable mother, he's handed off to his mother's therapist, Dr. Finch, and spends his adolescent years as a member of Finch's bizarre extended family.

When a small-town Irish cop with a crass personality is partnered with a straight-laced FBI agent to bust an international drug-trafficking ring, they must settle their differences in order to take down a dangerous gang.

Broadway producer Max Bialystock and his accountant, Leo Bloom plan to make money by charming wealthy old biddies to invest in a production many times over the actual cost, and then put on a sure-fire flop, so nobody will ask for their money back – and what can be a more certain flop than a tasteless musical celebrating Hitler.

Failed architect, engineer and vicious murderer Jack narrates the details of some of his most elaborately orchestrated crimes, each of them a towering piece of art that defines his life's work as a serial killer for twelve years.

Richie and Eddie are in charge of the worst hotel in the UK, Guest House Paradiso, neighbouring a nuclear power plant. The illegal immigrant chef has fled and all the guests have gone. But when a famous Italian filmstar, Gina Carbonara, who is in hiding from a fiance she doesn't want to marry, arrives at the hotel, things get very interesting!

An aimless adolescent joins several itinerant misfits who live on the fringe of society and welcome at-risk youths into their fold.

The luxurious villa of Mark and Jessie Bannister, a yuppie couple, is overrun by loads of uninvited guests who turn the house up side down.

While on a coach tour, The Beatles and a few dozen friends experience strange happenings caused by magicians.

Poet/lecturer Charles Serking awakens from his alcoholic haze long enough to take a bus back to L.A. and plunge into an orgy of drink and sexual depravity.

A comedy set on New Year’s Eve 1999 in a luxurious hotel in the Swiss Alps where the lives of various guests and those who work for them intersect.

Jon Lansdale is a comic book artist who loses his right hand in a car accident. The hand was not found at the scene of the accident, but it soon returns by itself to follow Jon around, and murder those who anger him.

Broadcasting through a makeshift network of discarded televisions, this story is tangled up in the aftermath of Los Angeles's worst earthquake nightmare. Travel between screens and aftershocks into the twisted lives of the survived.

Five bizarre stories with no apparent connection to one another eventually become intertwined, resulting in surreal circumstances.

Two miners agree to guide a mysterious woman, who has appeared in their camp from nowhere, to a nearby town; but soon, because of her erratic behavior, they begin to suspect that her true purpose is quite different.

A group of people gather at a Copenhagen suburban home to break all the limitations and to bring out the 'inner idiot' in themselves.

When a dance troupe is lured to an empty school, a bowl of drug-laced sangria causes their jubilant rehearsal to descend into a dark and explosive nightmare as they try to survive the night—and find who's responsible—before it's too late.

After a friend overdoses, Spoon and Stretch decide to kick their drug habits and attempt to enroll in a government detox program. Their efforts are hampered by seemingly endless red tape, as they are shuffled from one office to another while being chased by drug dealers and the police.

A grieving couple move to a remote Irish village in the wake of their baby daughter's death. They soon take in an orphaned autistic girl, only to become involved in a series of strange occurrences.

1950s America. Since his mother‘s confinement to an institution, Andy has lived in the shadow of his stoic father. A family acquaintance, Dr. Wallace Fiennes, employs the introverted young man as a photographer to document an asylum tour advocating for his increasingly controversial lobotomy procedure.

After a stint in a psychiatric hospital, a young woman returns to the house where her father killed the entire cast of The Artist during his exorcism.

Graham Young is a teenage misfit living in suburban London in the 1960s. He hates his stepmother but loves chemistry, and the two impulses unite in a wicked plot to slowly poison her. After she dies, he's found guilty and sent to a psychiatric hospital, where an idealistic doctor thinks he can be cured.

Blessed with a keen sense of smell and cursed with a philandering pornographer husband, a parasitic mother, and a pair of delinquent children, the long-suffering Francine Fishpaw turns to the bottle as her life falls apart -- until deliverance appears in the form of a hunk named Todd Tomorrow. Originally screened with "Odorama" scratch and sniff cards so the audience could (at their own risk) smell along with the film.

In Los Angeles, a colorful assortment of bohemians try to make sense of their intersecting lives. The moody Dark Smith, his bisexual girlfriend, her lesbian lover and their shy gay friend plan on attending the wildest party of the year. But they'll only make it if they can survive the drug trips, suicides, trysts, mutilations and alien abductions that occur as one surreal day unfolds.

Five short stories loosely dealing with the roles of women in society. A superstar actress travels to a mountain resort, only to evoke jealousy from women and lust from men. A woman offers to take an injured man to the hospital. A widowed father and his son seek for a new wife/mother. A man seeks revenge for a woman's honor. A bored housewife tries to explain to her husband that he's not as romantic as he used to be.

Blonde Betty Elms has only just arrived in Hollywood to become a movie star when she meets an enigmatic brunette with amnesia. Meanwhile, as the two set off to solve the second woman's identity, filmmaker Adam Kesher runs into ominous trouble while casting his latest project.

American expat Mickey Pearson has built a highly profitable marijuana empire in London. When word gets out that he’s looking to cash out of the business forever it triggers plots, schemes, bribery and blackmail in an attempt to steal his domain out from under him.

Aaron Quicksilver is a mysterious storyteller whose listeners invariably end up as the subjects of his gruesome, grisly tales. He tells a new bride stranded on a desert highway a horrifying account of a set of carnivorous toy teeth, then entrains a pickpocket with the spine chilling story of an army of murderous, disembodied hands.

A young college student who’s struggling financially takes a strange babysitting job which coincides with a full lunar eclipse. She slowly realizes her clients harbor a terrifying secret, putting her life in mortal danger.

When a housewife finds out she is pregnant, she runs out of town looking for freedom to reevaluate her life decisions.

A young couple go on an adventurous vacation to Thailand only to find themselves haunted by a malevolent spirit after naively disrespecting a Ghost House.

A sixteen-year-old boy insinuates himself into the house of a fellow student from his literature class and writes about it in essays for his French teacher. Faced with this gifted and unusual pupil, the teacher rediscovers his enthusiasm for his work, but the boy’s intrusion will unleash a series of uncontrollable events.

The story of a heartbroken man who attends a spiritual retreat, only to discover that the course releases more than everyday toxins and traumatic experiences.

