The Acid Eaters (1968) is a typical late sixties titty flick written, produced and photographed by none other than David F. Friedman. Regular readers know that he is a personal favorite, most especially for The Erotic Adventures of Zorro. Sad to say, this is a much lesser effort, but does score several points for weirdness.

We open with close ups of people going through their workday. Finally, it is quitting time, and a group of them take off on motorcycles to enjoy the weekend. They start at a swimming hole, topless of course, then indulge in body painting. Finally, one of the women gets intimate with the wrong man, so they get into a knife fight. The transgressor falls into quicksand, and flips the others off as she goes under. Not to worry, she comes out in a room with an Indian and a miner, and then later reappears when the Indian performs magic. The group then takes off in search of the "sugar cube pyramid" which is an unlimited supply of acid. They find it, and it is so large it is visible from the road a couple of miles away. The group enters the pyramid and descends into hell, where they discover that one of their own has become the devil. Then all of the women show their tits again on one pretext or another, and everyone heads back to work on Monday.

This odd film pretty much bites the big one,  but there is some good news. This oddity is available on a Something Weird double feature, and the other film is a gem. Rather than add a second exploitation drug film, Something Weird included a documentary film made by hard core legend Alex de Renzy as a reaction to a Presidential Commission on Marijuana. This is a wonderful time capsule, and a real oddity from someone who mostly made hardcore porn. To give you some idea of the context, they are interviewing GIs when armed forces radio announces the Charles Manson verdict. It shows the legal and illegal use of weed, the procedures of anti-drug enforcement, and the easy availability of the drug in places like Nepal and Vietnam. The documentary was obviously edited such that the logical conclusion was to legalize it because, as the film said, criminalizing pot use essentially turned a sizable percentage of American youth into criminals, and that couldn't be a good thing.

Scoopy's (Johnny Web's) notes:

This film sounds like a bummer, but Friedman is one fascinating guy. If you can find a copy at a reasonable price, I highly recommend his memoir, A Youth in Babylon: Confessions of a Trash-Film King. He is a very funny, smart guy who might have succeeded in many different fields, but life's twists and turns led him into exploitation cinema. The book is not only highly entertaining and sometimes laugh-out-loud funny, but is a complete education in every aspect of the world of trash films. It's an insider transporting you into a world that he knew better than anyone and, unlike the authors of many such efforts, Friedman is one insider with a gift for relating a good yarn, even he he has to stretch the truth a tad to do so.

The Acid Eaters is incoherent and the sex/nudity is inexplicit, but it is competently filmed and is thus a D, more or less.