They don’t mean that it is actually like an acid trip.

When people say “X is like Y…on acid” they usually just mean that X is fairly over the top. It’s a drink) and depiction of the death of the 60s era of peace and love, Fear and Loathing provides a more flailing, hallucinogenic counterpoint to Withnail & I. Bruce Robinson was at one point in line to direct, before he declined, but in its excessive consumption of drugs (although, of course, technically alcohol isn’t a drug. For those of us who weren’t young, let alone alive, in the 60s, it puts our experiences of idealism being crushed and floundering aimlessly into sharp relief. Endorsed by Thompson, and featuring the kind of performance from Johnny Depp that many of us miss, its DVD release has seen it gain an audience outside of America, the country its cinema release was limited to.īut then, it is a very American film, set in a very particular time and in a city that embodies excess. Fear And Loathing (as I will now refer to it) is, unsurprisingly considering its source material and cinematic distribution, a cult movie that stands on its own within its director’s niche of cult movies. Raoul Duke and Dr Gonzo are characters based on Thompson and his associate Oscar Zeta Acosta. According to Johnny Depp, who has read the original notes that the story was based on, the reality of situation may have been even more extreme than the published account. It is the only one of Thompson’s oeuvre to be shelved in the fiction section. This book is the ramblings of a drug-addled loon on a bender, which touches on the declining condition of a country, a movement and a way of life. As an adaptation of Hunter S Thompson’s semi-autobiographical 1971-set novel, documenting both 60s counterculture ideals and the American dream in prose both woozy and impassioned, how could it be? This backdrop is set against the foreground of Raoul Duke and Dr Gonzo’s voracious ingestion of uppers, downers, screamers and laughers. Compared with other Terry Gilliam films, Fear And Loathing In Las Vegas was made under no illusions that it would be a mainstream movie.

The fear and loathing in las vegas