In which Ryan reviews the movie 'Shrooms'

I try to keep this blog generally comic and/or superhero themed. But, sometimes things just come along that are too fantastic not to discuss. In this case, it is a masterpiece of modern horror cinema known as Shrooms.



This movie follows 6 college-aged kids who decide to go out into the backwoods of Ireland and trip their nuts off on psychedelic mushrooms. The kids are as follows:



Troy: The hippie stoner kid. This guy is pretty blatantly a direct rip-off of Jay (from Kevin Smith's movies) but without all the funny jokes and things that make you hope he doesn't die. Troy is basically in this movie for two reasons.

A) To constantly tell his girlfriend to calm down

B) To get brutally murdered



Holly: Troy's hippie girlfriend. For some unknown reason, Holly doesn't shave her underarms, but unexplainably has smooth, freshly shaven legs. She exists pretty much only to be killed.



Bluto: The jock. Bluto is the tough-guy of our troupe. He openly admits to using steroids, and has two rings on each hand. One says "Death" and the other says "Coma". He also wants to fuck anything that moves



Lisa: Bluto's girlfriend, who is a total bitch to everyone all the time. That's pretty much it.



Tara: The central character of the story, Tara is one of the few who doesn't fit into an easy classification. She exists to make you want to kill her yourself.



Jake: The only semi-likable character in the bunch. Jake is an Irish guy who these kids know somehow. He's like that guy in high school who knew everything there was to know about drugs and everyone thought he was so cool, but then everyone had to generally straighten up after college and so now he hangs out with high school kids. The only difference is that these kids aren't in high school.



They never really explain how these people all know each other, which really wouldn't be a big deal, except for the fact that almost from the very start of the movie they all hate each others guts. That's really all you get to know about them. What they don't tell you straight-forward is that these kids are the smartest people alive. Which is what makes the movie so hard to grasp, because it seems like they make all the right choices, but still somehow they end up getting chased by a psycho.



They get off their plane and hop in Jake's van to drive out to the woods where they'll be picking the shrooms. On the way there, they see a car parked out in the woods, which prompts Jake to explain the concept of "dogging" to his friends. Apparently dogging is where a couple parks their car in the woods and has hot make-outs while other people watch. Then they flash the cars lights which tells the onlookers that they can approach the car and get a BJ from the passengers. Make sense? Yeah, didn't for me either. They also run into some hobos. Anywho, they reach their destination and set out to pick some mushrooms. This is when we learn that apparently there are two kinds of shrooms growing this season. The normal kind you want to take, and the Death's Head Mushroom, which looks exactly the same, except for a little black dot on it.



The Death's Head will apparently do one of two things:

A) Kill you very painfully

B) Give you crazy psychic powers that show you how people are going to die.



Guess what happens next!



You guessed it, Tara eats one and starts having a seizure. Unfortunately, she survives. They all head back to camp to start boiling their mushroom tea and Jake decides to tell the story of a giant brutal massacre that occurred at a home for unruly children on the very land they are camping at. Apparently the guys who ran the place were sadists and tortured the kids, so the kids put a few pounds of death's head shrooms in their soup and then everyone went crazy and killed each other, except for two of them who were never seen again. He then proceeds to tell them about how people are always finding dead, mutilated bodies in the area during mushroom-picking season. They decide to stick around anyways because, like I said, they're geniuses.



That night Bluto and Lisa have an argument, so Bluto decides it's a good idea to drink half their mushroom tea, vomit all over himself, and then take a stroll into the woods by himself. On the way, he meets a talking cow. No really, I'm not joking. After talking to the cow, he spots that car they had seen on the way there, and sees that it's lights are flashing. Obviously from what we know about Bluto, he can't resist getting a little action from some strangers. So he goes over and pops his willy into the window. And, it gets bitten off then he gets an axe to the head or something. While this is happening, Tara is having another seizure and dreaming about the exact same thing.



They all awake the next morning to find Bluto gone, so they figure the best thing to do would be to drink some shroom tea themselves and wander into the woods to look for him. They find him all dead and shit, which causes them to lose it and run around in the woods for a while. For some reason, even though they just saw his dead body with a big blood hole in it's head, nobody seems to think that maybe they should get the hell out of there. Instead they decide to argue amongst themselves and stare off into the woods a lot.



I might want to sidetrack here and explain that about 70% of the footage for this movie is just long shots of nothing but trees and empty hallways, interspersed by a shot of Tara looking all freaked out and then screaming and running.



Anywho, in order to solve the mystery, they decide to split up and meet back at the abandoned children's home. Scooby and Shaggy go this way, and... oh wait, wrong review. The three ladies go one way, and the remaining men go the other. Holly gets split from her friends and gets killed. We then see Tara having another seizure by the edge of a lake, which is followed by her telling Lisa that Holly is dead and is in the water. Lisa finds Holly and decides to ditch her friend and walks off into the bog. Tara has another seizure/premonition about Lisa, so she decides to follow her. Lisa dies.



Tara decides that the best idea is to just keep walking around in the water some more on the way over to where they had agreed to meet the guys. Because really, when you have a history of debilitating seizures, what could be safer than standing in waist-deep water? Then we get to the death of Troy, which was surprisingly really uninteresting. He just kind of goes away. This prompts Jake to freak out and jump out of the window and break his legs.



Tara finds him and they start walking back to civilization and live happily ever after. Actually, the killer finds them and kills Jake too. Which is unfortunate, because then we're really just left with the one person we wanted to die from the start.



Really all that's left now is the big surprise twist ending that you probably already saw coming from the first 5 minutes. But, I'm not going to ruin it for you. Watch it yourself.



All in all, I give this movie 4 out of 5 Torgo's