Review: Devil's Acid

Director: Garrett Kruithof

Screenplay: Eric Gibson, Finch Nissen, and Garrett Kruithof

Year: 2019

“It’s the acid, stupid!”

Every now and then I run into the kind of movie that makes it hard to start writing a review about it. Sometimes the reason is its poor quality and other times it is because I’m not sure about what I have just seen, and other times it is both. If the beginning of this review doesn’t seem too optimistic, you got the right message. 

In “Devil’s Acid” a father tells a story to their kids where an eccentric man and his idea of spending a night in an abandoned prison with a group of people. While entering the prison, they all consume a drug named Devil’s Acid, a potent hallucinogenic. After this, they start having problems differentiating if what happens around them is real or not. 

If the purpose of director Garrett Kruithof and screenwriters Eric Gibson, Finch Nissen, and Garrett Kruithof was to simulate the effects of an acid trip in their story, they managed to do it. As well as the effects of the hallucinogenic, this movie makes no sense and it’s hard to follow its plot and where it leads. The plot has issues even defining its genre, that is never clear if it’s horror, thriller, or comedy, but failing in all of these fields.

The story presents a group of detestable characters, starting with the protagonists Johnny, who has the worst personality traits a person can have, being misogyny and racism the more evident. The rest of the characters are easily forgotten, and they do nothing worth mentioning. The acting leaves a lot to be desired and neither helps to make the plot any more interesting. 

To avoid unnecessarily extending this review, “Devil’s Acid” can be summarized as a movie that never gets to be interesting nor decide the genre it wants to develop in. What it does well is that its plot and characters are similar to the effects of an acid trip: incoherent and absurd. This is the kind of movie that could be definitive to bury the career of the people involved in it.