Hey hey everyone and welcome to another addition to Kristen D. Eats The World! Today I will be taking a bite out of a ‘horror’ movie called Shrooms. This should be fun!
[sarcasm\]
Shrooms (2007)
A Review by Kristen M. Dowd
Lindsey Haun plays Tara, a repressed teen who goes on vacation to Ireland to party hard with her friends and hunt for magic mushrooms. Is Ireland known for their magic mushrooms? Never heard that before. Jake (Jack Huston) acts as a guide and is Tara’s major crush or something. I’m not sure if they dated or not, because the movie never really explains it. In the end none of it matters anyway. He tells everyone about what to expect when they trip, that whole deal. On the way to the picking spot, Tara hits what appears to be a dog with the car. Upon closer inspection however, it looks like some sort of weird deer head/platypus hybrid. A few crazies come out of nowhere and make off with the carcass. See that right there would have been enough for me to go home. But alas, there would be no movie if it was realistic I suppose. Bluto (Robert Hoffman) decides to be a douche and calls the crazy guys ‘cracker motherfuckers’. Ten minutes in and already a wigger. Good God man, could you have not given me until at least the halfway mark before you start throwing unlikable characters at me?
The requirements to get in the Mystery Machine have gone down over the years
Jake tells them to beware of black tipped mushrooms, as those are poisonous and not so good for the brain. Of course Tara being a dumbass, finds a bunch of those and eats one. Soon after (like 3 seconds), she starts having a majorly bad trip. She starts sezuiring and passes out. She becomes the psychodelic equivilant to the annoying drunk girl at the party that everyone else has to look after, in effect ruining the good times. Jake helps her into his tent to rest up as the rest tell spooky stories by the fire. Bluto gets into it with Troy (Max Kasch) after Bluto is accused of peeping. He drinks a bunch of magic water and goes off into the woods on his own. He’s tripping BALLS and sees the shadow of a girl. As he follows, he runs into a cow, who tells him he’s fucked. At least someone has some sense. I know the cow bit sounds stupid, but it was probably the most entertaining thing in the movie. Bluto comes across an abandoned car and sticks his weenus into the open window. Really, dude, what do you think is going to happen? He gets his junk bitten into by an unseen person and falls down. He thinks he’s safe and tries to crawl away but Zombie Ozzy Osbourne drives an axe through the back of his head. But wait! He isn’t actually dead! Tara finds him still talking to that cow. Wait, what? Tara apparently has ESP from eating the mushrooms and can see someone’s death before it happens. That isn’t a guess, I’m dead serious.
They don’t make glory holes like they used to
Aside from Bluto the males barely get any screen time, especially Troy who I swear was killed off screen because I seriously can’t remember his death for the life of me. And come to think of it, the girls aside from Tara don’t get much either, apart from being catty bitches and later death fodder. And that’s kind of sad. There is no real reason why a cast of only six people couldn’t get decently divided screen time over 90 minutes. The next morning Bluto is missing again, and he cut his girlfriend’s hair (for some reason?) before going off. I guess you do things like that when you’re on mushrooms. Or something. Tara and his girlfriend Lisa (Maya Hazen) go to find him. They return to camp after finding nothing, and Jake informs them that Bluto drank enough magic water for six people so Bluto is probably out having a ball. Uh no, Bluto would be probably dead. I’m sorry, I keep forgetting this is a movie, logic doesn’t apply here. Everyone’s like ‘oh well, fuck it then’ and indulge. Damn, if everyone including your girlfriend doesn’t want to look for you, you may want to reevaluate how you treat people. Tara tells them that they’re assholes and goes back out to look for Bluto. I wonder if she ran into Popeye while she was at it. Zombie Ozzy shows back up and Tara runs to alert the other girls. They all get seperated (as you do in horror movies) and Tara runs into a tree, knocking herself out for the time being.
I’m not sure if she’s supposed to be scared or if she’s holding in laughter because someone farted off screen
Lisa finds a random shack with the two yokels from earlier in it. She tries to explain that she needs help but it doesn’t appear that anyone is home upstairs. She excuses herself to use the bathroom and then the yokels are chopped up. Lisa manages to get out of the back of the house and Tara hears her screaming. From this point forward everyone else gets offed except Tara. The film ends with a EMT attending to her, when suddenly we see everything that’s happened from her respective. And in one of those Saw-style flashbacks where it’s revealed that so and so has been the killer the whole time, Tara has been killing everyone. So she wasn’t having some kind of ESP episode triggered by the mushrooms, or on a drug induced rampage; she’s just fucking crazy.
Jazz hands!
So many things wrong with this movie. The main thing being the title. Mushrooms really play no part in the actual story other than being a conveint plot device to get the main characters into the secluded words. The characters have no personality and there is no reason to feel bad for them dying. You feel no connection to anyone. The story is unoriginal, the pacing is off, I felt bored throughout the entire thing. Also, If Tara was killing everyone, then why did Bluto or anyone else for that matter see the man/woman in the woods? Was it Tara to them and just that figure to us to fuck with our heads? Even if they were all messed up, how could they see the same thing that isn’t real? Why did Tara kill Jake, the guy she was fawning over the entire film? How did the cops know they were lost to begin with? This whole thing takes place over the course of like two days. Tara chucked the cell phones, so no one was around to tell anyone they were lost and needed help. Matter of fact, they weren’t even lost. They just decided to run around in the woods instead of going back to the car and getting help. WHY? Regardless of any explanations, the movie still sucked.
1 out of 5 Stars. Do not reccomend unless you REALLY have nothing else to do. Even then I would rather watch paint dry than sit through this shit again.