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A group of
friends travel to Ireland as they've been
promised the trip of a lifetime by an Irish friend.
They head out into the woods to pick some magic
mushrooms which are supposed to be awesome, but when
one of the friends accidentally eat a bad mushroom,
all hell breaks loose. The friends are soon terrorized
by ghostly creatures but no one can tell whether these
visions are real or not. Will anyone come out alive?
Shrooms has a decent and original concept, a decent
cast and a decent atmosphere and its overall a pretty
decent movie, but the thing is, there's not a whole
lot more to say about this flick so this review is
going to be difficult to write. We can start with
breaking down the story. A couple of American teens
go to Ireland to visit their friend who has promised
them the trip of a lifetime - literarily. See, the
goal with this trip is to get ridiculously high on
magic mushrooms. But it doesn't take long before things
take a turn for the worse as one of the friends
unknowingly eats a Death's Head mushroom (I think you
can tell by the name that this is not a good shroom
to eat) and starts having horrible visions of her
friends dying - what she doesn't know is that her
visions are about to come true.
Shrooms is basically like The Grudge on acid. The
villain is a mysterious, long-haired man covered in
mud with a disgusting grin, but the thing is, we never
really know whether he's real or not. Still, the teens
start to die one by one (off screen for most of the
time) so obviously something is killing them (the
ending is pretty predictable just so you know). The
movie has more positives than negatives but let's start
with the negatives anyway, just for fun.
The characters are all very stereotypical and I found
it rather difficult to root for anyone. The story is
ridiculously predictable even if it's fairly original.
The deaths are off-screen for most of the time which
bugged the hell out of me - especially since this has
been rated R. Those are about the only things that this
movie has going against it though. Now let's get to
the positive stuff. The directing is surprisingly
enough very impressive despite its low budget. The
cinematography is just beautiful and makes the movie
very easy for the eye. The actors take on their
stereotypical characters fairly well and they all pull
of believable performances. And finally, as I said
before, I loved the fact that the movie had an original
concept - something which is quite rare these days.
As you might suspect though, Shrooms is indeed fairly
similar to The Tripper but Shrooms is clearly the winner
of the two. It doesn't want to make you laugh, it
actually does want to scare you (it's just unsuccessful
at that for most of the time). So as disorienting as
it may be, Shrooms still comes out as a pretty decent
horror flick. It's not the kind of movie that you'd
pay to see in the cinema, but as a DTV flick it's
definitely worth a rent. Sorry if this wasn't a very
complex review but there's just not a whole lot to say
about the movie. You get what you expect - nothing
more, nothing less.
A bloody body, an axe in the head, a gory broken leg,
some stabbings. Nothing special here.
Again, it's a decent score for a decent movie. Competent
rock music and a tight suspense score. Works for its
intents and purposes.
Ireland is really trying hard these days to break into
the horror scene but it just doesn't seem like it's
going to happen. Shrooms is a decent horror movie but
not very memorable. It's fairly entertaining while you
watch it but if you happen to miss it, it's not the
end of the world. Worth a rent.
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