Shrooms

Shrooms is one of those movies you should already know everything about before even watching it, just based on the premise. A group of friends experiencing mushrooms trips in the wilderness, turns into a deadly fiasco indistinguishable from reality. A standard run-of-the-mill campy horror flick, complete with a horror movie starter-set cast; the smart and relatable lead female character, the annoying idiot jock, the goofball stoner, the b*tch, the outcast female, and the handsome nice guy (who also is occasionally, like in this case, the foreigner).

The movie has good, maybe even great moments. I especially like the 2 "locals," their characters aren't new to this genre, but they're fun and quite creepy and add an interesting flare to the movie. Some of the effects are well done, and the story is entertaining enough to keep you interested, and the very end gives the movie a nice touch.

However, the movie is riddled with clichés, the predictable jumps scares, and the gore effects aren't as good as they could have been. There's a part towards the end of the movie where they had so many chances to make to good, but it turned out rather boring.

Everything else is pretty standard, nothing special or particularly bad about the acting, directing, or screenplay.

In short, it's an average run-of-the-mill horror flick. If you're looking for something amazing, this isn't it, but if you're bored or are just a horror fan looking to enlarge your viewing collection, it's definitely worth a watch.

My favorite scene: The scene in the home of the two locals, I love the dialogue between them, very unsettling.

Shrooms basically is a Slasher Movie. 3 couples go to Ireland woods to collect magic mushrooms and trip out. Of course on their way they already meet some strange inhabitants of the woods and it doesn't take long until a creepy story is being told at the campfire which of course is more than just a story. So strange things happen, people start disappearing, silhouettes move through the woods and the creepy story starts to melt into reality. The idea of blurring the lines between reality and imagination is quite nice and works after the horror kicks in along with the effect of the mushrooms. Problem is that the pacing of the movie is damn slow and doesn't really pick up much till the end. So I often looked at my watch since it seemed and eternity. Shrooms is not a bad movie, it has some nice modern elements like the typical washed out colors, some nice tripping ideas like a speaking cow mixing in with the classic campfire story and haunted woods themes. Anyway its hard to be sucked into the movie... it tries to be hypnotic with the trippy visuals and permanent uncertainty of reality and imagination. But it just rides that horse too long and too slow... so when you get the ends twist you already might be too sleepy to care. If you want to see a trippy mix of Evil Dead, Blair Witch Project and High Tension go check it out, but don't expect too much action and gore.

Six dopes go looking for magic mushrooms in the backwoods of Ireland. While tripping on the shrooms, they encounter someone determined to kill them off and must fight for survival.

Awful, awful film! It's a disjointed, achingly dull mess. It feels like there is nothing happening 90% of the time. Watch as the lead runs from a cloaked figure that's anything but scary, then repeat ad nauseum. The editing, intended to be trippy or not, is just pathetic. I hated the characters. They're bitchy and obnoxious to the extreme. Terrible dialogue too, a great example being when two of the girls talk to a third about what she sees in her boyfriend. There are attempts at humor, but they all fall flat. The kills, or lack thereof, are weak. With a film this poor in all other areas, good kills were it's only hope of being anything but a total waste. Alas, we don't get to see half of them, and the others are nothing to write home about. I can't forget the ending, which is just laughable. I haven't been this annoyed with a movie in quite some time.

While browsing the DVD section around the time this was released, I had the misfortune of deciding to grab it on an impulse buy. Bad move! I fought the urge to just throw it in the trash, but the urge eventually won out. This thing belongs in a landfill.

I cannot remember the last time a horror movie irritated me to this degree...SHROOMS is about a group of American friends (who actually don't appear to like each other much) who go to Ireland for vacation. They're obviously spoiled brats because the only thing on their mind when they're in freakin' IRELAND is getting their hands on some magic mushrooms ASAP. They meet up with some Irish friend (who is obviously British faking a bad Irish accent) that the lead girl (played by the creepy little girl from JC's VILLAGE OF THE DAMNED--the rest of her face has now caught up with her forehead, thank goodness) is creaming over. They immediately go camping in the woods and searching for shrooms. VotD girl gnaws on a mushroom that the Irish-but-British guy specifically said not to eat because it's poisonous. Soon she starts flipping out and having flash-forwards about her friends dying. It's up to her to save her friends from the ominous backwoodsmen, the creepy black-hooded ghost that pops up between people legs and/or above their heads, and the obvious overused plot twists in the script.

It seems like every line of dialogue spoken by the obnoxious 20-somethings in this movie features the word "shrooms." And you thought JUNOisms were annoying! If you took a sip of your Irish coffee every time someone in this movie said "shrooms," you'd be dead before the first jump scare.

The only good thing about SHROOMS is the movie poster, which features a skull shaped out of SHROOMS in the moonlight. Cool!

Shrooms boiled down to its basic level, is your standard slasher movie.

A group of young people head off into a forest in Ireland, to sample the magic mushrooms to get high. While there, they learn of a ghost story involving a local school for boys, run by monks, where young boys suffered horrible fates at the hands of the black-robed monks. Soon, the teens are being stalked in the wood by a black-robed figure...

The twist here is that because they have taken magic mushrooms, and are on a high from them, they can't quite be sure if it's all real or not....

It's that twist in the proceedings, that makes the difference here. Without it this would just be your basic, standard slasher movie. However, like most other slashers sadly it's not really scary. It does have a couple of jump shocks as things loom into view and such, but there's not really a scary atmosphere to the movie.

The cast do okay, although the characters are a bit clichéd. The script does it's job, but the director, Paddy Breathnach does well with the material.

However..... what saves the movie is the ending, which I liked. Not the most original it has to be said, but a good one.

It's nice to see a horror movie from Ireland for a change, even if most of the cast are American, although I wish they had made a better one. It's not the worst of the horror movies this year, but sadly it's not one of the better ones.