*sigh* Look, you knew I was going to hate this. It's a film called Shrooms, for god's sake. Well, what do you want me to say? Stupid teens go on holiday to Ireland, ingest hallucinogenics, get murdered, scream a lot, picked off one by one, celtic legend that turns out to be real yadda-yadda.
Oh, more detail required, right. The film is just excruciatingly terrible, and is, if anything, worse than Shelter. At least we knew why Shelter's characters interacted in the first place. These intensely dislikeable people don't even seem to be friendly to each other. Which of these characters are actually friends? I don't know. There is simply no believable reason these people are even on good terms. We have two bitchy girls who look almost the same, a long haired guy called Troy who resembles Jay from Clerks and a short haired steroid-pumped dickhead called Bluto. Our designated lead is Tara, a shrieking pile of hallucinating uselessness who spends 90 percent of the film on an acid freak-out. This results in her screaming and weeping nearly all her dialogue, making her marginally more irritating than a tropical skin disease. And how could we forget about Jake, the mysterious-yet-curiously dashing English boy who is their guide to the emerald island and also of course Tara's object of affection. Interesting how he's a native of the area, and yet is English, but hey, that's the least of this film's worries.
This wise-beyond-his-years character has an encyclopedic knowledge of Shrooms, and naturally serves as Mr. Exposition throughout the film. The trouble starts from the beginning, when we establish this bunch of people don't like each other much. We also establish their motivations are largely magic mushroom related, given that every second sentence in the opening fifteen minutes goes along the lines of:
'So, we gonna have fun with SHROOMS on this trip?'
After plenty of forced and awkward dialogue, they set up camp, and pick mushrooms. Naturally Jake Exposition explains to NOT pick the Deaths Head mushroom, because it is highly dangerous and could kill. So obviously, within five minutes, guess what happens. Tara, the braindead mass she is, ingests the mushroom for no reason other than that a) she's a fucking idiot and b) she literally falls into the patch of them and just sort of goes 'what the hell'. She starts going all trippy, and for the rest of the film has this annoying tendency to periodically go into spasm and have visions of what is going to happen, far more irritating than it sounds believe me. I won't go through the film minute by minute, but it just gets more and more stupid as time goes on. One of the group goes missing after arguing with his girlfriend, drinking mushroom tea and hallucinating weird shit, so the next day, they all go to look for him. There is a dangerous assumption made by the filmmakers, when they assume they can justify stupid behaviour because drugs are involved.
Tara has an axe to grind. Sorry, I just couldn't be arsed.
The inanity starts before drugs are even taken. Andy entrusts their phones to Bluto, saying that they all needed to hide their phones so they didn't do anything stupid on drugs. Assuming the americans even know the Irish emergency services number, why the hell give trust of all your phones to one other person who also plans on getting high? It gets much, much worse of course, when Bluto (gee, the guy who happens to have all of the mobile phones?) hallucinates a lot after a childish argument with his girlfriend, and promptly goes missing. The plot then goes into moron overdrive when the search attempt begins, because by this point a trembling and moaning Tara is convinced he is dead, and so they go on the hunt for Bluto. Naturally, they decide the best way to facilitate this is to all get absolutely steaming on magic mushroom tea because, according to one girl 'there's nothing else to do'. Well, yeah, there is. Looking for a missing person you stupid fuckheads! Seriously, is it any surprise it all goes wrong? They scream, they run off, they split up, there are regular hallucinations of a prophetic nature, they're all high, there's murder and mayhem and of course the compulsory plot twist that 'turns everything on its head!'
It's hopeless stuff. The whole back story involving an orphanage and abusive guardians is forgettable, and it does get to that depressing point where you're just waiting for them all to get killed off one by one so the film can end. Shelter was bad, but Shrooms is insulting. Everybody in it is more stupid than a dog with brain damage. Everybody runs off, walks into rotting wooden shacks asking its hillbilly inhabitants 'if they have a phone', and ask what the hell is going on up until the final five minutes. One final point; it isn't funny either. The film is filled with drugs related humour, such as a hallucination of a talking cow, and it's just beyond sad.
I am cow. Here me moo.
I have a low tolerance for stoner comedies as it is, without films like this trying to combine horror and stoner comedy. Do I have much else to say? Well, one thing:
SPOILERS: DO NOT LOOK BELOW IF YOU GIVE A SHIT ABOUT THIS FILM
The big twist is that, Tara, in her ineffable stupidity, ingested the shrooms and essentially hallucinated most of the film's events, and she actually killed her, ahem, friends. This might work if it wasn't abundantly clear that this ending was made up as it went on. The ending is basically an apology for the film. Again, I repeat: a film can ONLY do a twist if it deserves it. Here, it just feels like the film is trying to compensate for its own lack of imagination by telling you at the end that it had imagination all the time, it just wouldn't tell you.
SPOILERS END
So, that was Shrooms. I almost became nostalgic for Shelter after seeing this pathetic attempt to try my patience. It isn't scary enough to be a horror, or funny enough to be a comedy. It's only worth seeing if you hate yourself and really fancy seeing painful stupidity worthy of the early days of Friday 13th. So yeah kids, don't do drugs, or you'll go on holiday to Ireland with morons and get killed. True dat.
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