After the remarkable success of Trainspotting, Irvine Welsh, set out on a conscious mission to weed out the type of popular vote that somebody like he could never be comfortable with. Praise the Lord because the product was a much darker, grittier second film called The Acid House, three short stories whose common ground is the Scottish working classes. In truth the third segment is actually a sprawling mess but it at least shows how horribly wrong some of Welsh's bizarre story lines translate to the screen. In spite of this, director Paul McGuigan, superbly brings Welsh's other two stories to life and it's surely praise indeed when one can exclude a full third of a movie and still class it as one of their all time favourites.
The first segment, The Granton Star Cause (named after a football team), is without doubt the most sidesplitting black comedy that this writer has ever seen. It follows Boab Coyle who is about to have a couple of days from hell. He loses his home, his girlfriend, his job, his place on the football team, gets a criminal record, and gets beaten up by a prison officer into the bargain. Welsh not only simulates real life brilliantly with these scenes but he also shows an immaculate contempt for political correctness and human nature in general as the selfish protractors of Boab's grief, all with their own agendas, insist on blaming circumstances rather than their saintly selves. His parents need space because they are going through `a dangerous phase'. His pretentious boss Rafferty tells him `it's important to remember it's not the person we make redundant, it's the post'. The police officers are perfectly understanding about a rape because `the hoor was askin' for it' but not so understanding about Boab smashing up a telephone box since one of the officers happens to be a BT shareholder! The hilarious coup de grace occurs when Boab, in the middle of drowning his sorrows, encounters a chain smoking, lager-drinking beardie who turns out to be God. It is here that one realises how much the Scottish brogue adds to the already colourful and entertaining dialogue (witness the brilliant Maurice Roeves: `that c**t Nietzche was wide by the mark when he said I was deed. I'm naw deed, I just dinnae give a f**k'). God takes his own self-loathing out on Boab, turning him into a fly and Boab himself then returns to haunt all those who caused him grief, lacing his ex-girlfriends curry with dog s**t amongst other things. But as if all that wasn't enough laughter for one day the film offers up a riotously funny finale whereby Boab catches his parents in the middle of a kinky sex role-play in the living room accompanied by Barry Adamson's suitably seedy The Vibes Aint Nothing But The Vibes. These what goes on behind closed doors' scenes are really where Welsh excels himself, portraying them as he does with hysterical imagination. The sweat dripping from his every pore Boab Senior, reminiscent of a circus strong man complete with black leotard, is admitting to sexual liaisons with Dolly Parton, Anna Ford and Madonna as his wife Doreen punishes him for his sins with a strap on dildo. Mercifully (even for the most hardened of Welsh fans) she is saved from delivering the ultimate punishment (to `S***e in your mouth') when forced to answer the phone to her `pester' of a daughter Cathy. But before getting back to work on her husband she knocks the final nail in Boab's pitiful coffin, swiping him dead with a newspaper, the melancholic Nick Cave by now drowning out the proceedings perfectly.
The second segment, A Soft Touch, never quite lives up to the first but is still very good and shares many of its themes. The victim of the piece is the gullible Johnny who is married to the detestable Catriona, who in turn is screwing the equally hateful new neighbour from hell Larry. The only light in Johnny's life is his daughter Chantel, who as it happens isn't really his daughter at all. This is Welsh at his very darkest. It is his commentary on the frustrations and consequent suffering of the working classes. At times it shaves so close to the bone as to feel utterly depressing, an effect driven home by Beth Orton's Precious Maybe and Arab Strap's I Still Miss You. However there are enough comic moments to lighten the burden, most notably when the cocksure Larry is dancing by himself in front of a mirror to the strains of T-Rex's Hot Love. Furthermore, Larry's sheer atrociousness is a source of much amusement during the film even if the cruel mental torture that he inflicts upon his neighbour is beyond what any decent man should have to bare. The tense encounters between Larry and Johnny turn into a gripping survival of the fittest contest. In a tragic but wholly realistic conclusion Johnny welcomes the pregnant and rejected Catriona back into his life, reflecting the vicious circle that Welsh is so keen to portray.
