Initially, the film version of The Acid House was meant to consist of three separate tales, each adapted by a different director, from Trainspotting author Irvine Welsh's anthology of the same name. But once Welsh and his producers saw what first-time feature director Paul McGuigan did with the first installment, "The Granton Star Cause," they turned the entire project over to him. As a result, all three segments share the same notable flaws. They also share Welsh's gritty, black sense of humor and bloody-minded cynicism: In "The Granton Star Cause," a hapless loser (Stephen McCole) is fired, evicted, dumped by his cheating girlfriend, kicked off his neighborhood soccer team, arrested, and brutally beaten, all within the space of a few hours. As he nurses his depression in a pub, God (a raddled-looking Maurice Roëves) shows up to chew him out and punish him for his weaknesses and failures, which mirror God's own. Transformed into an insect, McCole begins avenging himself. In the movie's second and slowest installment, "A Soft Touch," Trainspotting's Kevin McKidd plays a petulant young father whose wife is openly cheating on him with the aggressive slob upstairs, who sometimes comes down to brag about his sexual skills and suggest that McKidd could borrow his wife back for a small fee. McGuigan pulls out all the MTV-inspired stops for the third installment, the headache-inducing title story, in which a babbling, football-obsessed acid-head (Trainspotting's Ewen Bremner) is struck by lightning and switches brains with a newborn infant, with grotesque results. In Welsh's nihilistic world, events like these only sometimes change people's lives, and never for the better; mundane marital infidelity and magical physical transformation are equally ineffectual at causing their victims to examine and improve themselves. McGuigan heightens that ineffectuality by letting his stories drag at times—all three have interminably slow segments—and at other times pounding viewers with numbing, spastic fast cuts. The overall effect is herky-jerky and occasionally annoying, as are the scattered attempts to imitate Trainspotting's far more coherent style. Still, Welsh's bizarre creativity and inventive sadism leak through in the surprising scripts; the stories don't lead anywhere, but they travel with style. Welsh is far less imaginative on his sporadic DVD commentary track, which covers a few random production stories; that track might benefit from the subtitles used frequently throughout the film to make the thick Scottish accents and slang comprehensible. Given its casting, source material, directorial style, and punchy, hit-spattered soundtrack, The Acid House comes across as a shadow of Trainspotting, albeit a vibrant, noisy, frantic shadow.