Producer David F. Friedman and director Byron Mabe occupy one of those peculiar corners of exploitation cinema where enthusiasm consistently outruns money, good taste, and occasionally basic narrative logic. The Acid Eaters (1968) and Space Thing (1968) make an appropriately deranged double feature because both operate according to roughly the same philosophy: give the audience nudity, give them something strange enough to advertise, and worry about explaining it later. The Acid Eaters follows a group of seemingly respectable young people who spend their weekends abandoning responsibility for motorcycles, sex, drugs, and assorted psychedelic activities, eventually encountering a gigantic pyramid devoted to LSD. Space Thing takes the same basic formula into science fiction, where secret agents, alien spacecraft, beautiful women, and interplanetary intrigue collide with production values that rarely convince us anyone has traveled farther than the nearest soundstage. These are exploitation pictures without embarrassment, and that lack of shame remains a significant part of their charm.
The Acid Eaters is the more visually memorable of the pair, largely because it eventually stops behaving like a movie and starts resembling somebody's increasingly troubled hallucination. Mabe piles motorcycles, bodies, colored lights, bizarre compositions, and drug imagery together until the thin narrative becomes almost irrelevant. There is something fascinating about watching filmmakers attempt to capture the psychedelic counterculture while approaching it from the perspective of exploitation veterans who clearly understood that LSD was another marketable attraction. The infamous acid pyramid alone earns the movie a place in the stranger corners of 1960s cinema. It is ridiculous, strangely hypnotic, occasionally beautiful, and completely sincere in ways that make its excesses considerably more entertaining than calculated camp ever could.
Space Thing somehow manages to be even cheaper and considerably funnier. Science fiction provides Friedman and Mabe with an excuse to exchange motorcycles and psychedelia for cardboard technology, cramped spacecraft, suspiciously familiar rooms, and women whose futuristic uniforms demonstrate that fabric apparently becomes extremely scarce in outer space. The plot involving Colonel James Granilla infiltrating an enemy spacecraft is almost beside the point. What matters is the wonderfully straight-faced manner in which everyone treats this bargain-basement universe as completely convincing. The sets wobble between ingenious and absurd, the performances maintain admirable seriousness, and the sexual material eventually overwhelms whatever espionage story might have originally existed. It plays like Star Trek imagined by filmmakers who had seen the publicity photographs but never actually watched an episode.
Neither The Acid Eaters nor Space Thing should be mistaken for some misunderstood masterpiece awaiting critical rehabilitation. They are cheap, opportunistic exploitation movies designed to separate adventurous adults from their money, and pretending otherwise would rob them of much of their personality. What survives nearly sixty years later is their wonderfully handmade quality and the sense that Friedman, Mabe, and company would attempt absolutely anything if they thought audiences might pay to see it. The Acid Eaters offers psychedelic insanity while Space Thing supplies cardboard science fiction, and together they capture a period when exploitation filmmakers could turn whatever happened to be occupying the culture—LSD, free love, the space race—into a movie almost immediately. They are sleazy, ridiculous, frequently hilarious, and unmistakably products of their moment. That is exactly why they remain worth watching.
Includes Space Thing / Slipcover in Original Pressing / Limited - 2,000 copies
Home Video Distributor: AGFA
Available on Blu-ray - September 29, 2026
Screen Formats: 1.37:1; 1.85:1
Subtitles: English SDH
Video: 1080p
Audio: DTS-HD MA 1.0
Discs: Blu-ray Disc; single disc
Region Encoding: Region-free playback
American Genre Film Archive teams with Something Weird Video to rescue another pair of David F. Friedman oddities from the exploitation wilderness. The Acid Eaters sends weekend thrill seekers into a psychedelic world of motorcycles, sex, drugs, and the legendary LSD pyramid, while Space Thing launches low-budget sexploitation beyond the atmosphere for a delirious mixture of spies, aliens, spaceships, and very little clothing. Presented together and restored from their original 35mm camera negatives, the films make an appropriately unhinged celebration of the outer limits of 1960s American exploitation cinema.
Video
Both films receive English DTS-HD Master Audio mono tracks that respect their original low-budget sound design. Dialogue remains clear, music has sufficient presence, and the assorted effects retain the thin, sometimes wonderfully artificial character appropriate to the productions.
There isn't much dynamic range to demonstrate, nor should there be, but the tracks are clean and stable without attempting to manufacture a modern soundscape that never existed. English SDH subtitles are included.
Audio
Though there isn’t much to show off with a film like this, the DTS-HD 5.1 Master Audio is clean, clear, and mixed well. All the sounds of the bust streets of Paris to the dialogue and music are heard with a crispness.
Supplements:
Commentary:
- See below
Special Features:
AGFA and Something Weird Video give this double feature a healthy collection of archival material, particularly valuable for fans of David F. Friedman and the history of American exploitation filmmaking.
- Previously unreleased archival commentary for The Acid Eaters with producer David F. Friedman and Something Weird Video founder Mike Vraney
- Archival commentary for Space Thing with David F. Friedman and Mike Vraney
- Drug Freaks — approximately 18-minute Something Weird archival short sourced from S-VHS
- This Is the Moon — approximately 10-minute Something Weird archival short sourced from S-VHS
- The Acid Eaters trailer
- Space Thing trailer
- Extensive photo gallery
- Booklet featuring essays by Britt Rhuart and Something Weird Video's Lisa Petrucci
- Limited Edition spot-gloss slipcover, limited to 2,000 units
The Friedman/Vraney commentaries are the real attractions here. Their recollections provide the historical context these pictures deserve, with Friedman particularly entertaining when discussing the practical realities of producing and selling exploitation movies rather than attempting to elevate them into something they were never intended to be. Combined with the Something Weird archival material, the extras turn an already bizarre double feature into a compact little history lesson in the disreputable end of American independent filmmaking.
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