The Acid House (1999)

Just because The Acid House is based on a trio of short stories by Irvine Welsh, just because it's about furious, flea-bitten, on-the-dole Scottish slobs bleary with drugs and drink, and just because it's filmed all cockeyed doesn't make this skanky anthology ''Trainspotting II.'' Gibbering Derailment, more like. Director Paul McGuigan, feverishly trying to top Danny Boyle's grotty ''Trainspotting'' style, instead bangs and smashes each episode to smithereens. In the first and best, ''The Granton Star Cause,'' a loser becomes a Kafkaesque fly; in ''A Soft Touch,'' a loser suffers while his slutty wife gets it on with a punk neighbor; in the unintelligible title story, a loser (''Trainspotting'''s Spud, Ewen Bremner) takes a really bad acid trip. The English subtitles provided for the utterly incomprehensible Scottish slang and accents are a nice but ultimately useless touch.