Thoughts about 'Shrooms'

Tonight, I went round to my friend’s and was the first to arrive at his house. I naively asked him what movie we were going to watch, expecting (or rather, hoping) for a response such as ‘mamma mia’ or ‘you can choose, Louisa – as long as it’s a cheesy musical’. But no. With a smug grin, he thrusted a dreary looking trashy-horror film at me, and with disgust I read the blurb. I know you shouldn’t judge a book by its cover and all that, but it was called ‘Shrooms’ and was basically about a group of teenagers who experience a horrible trip after eating some mushrooms they find in the forest. Yeah, it’s as good as it sounds - find out for yourself here.

As soon as the others arrived, the host showed them the film and, typically, us girls all rolled our eyes and asked for the wifi code whilst the boys couldn’t wait to put it on.

As the film started, we immediately realised that the movie would bring more laughs than screams. At one point, it actually got a little bit good, when we were told about a ‘true story’ from the past which basically addressed the generic ‘something-bad-happened-now-people-die-here-and-are-found-mutated’ catch. It was actually quite scary, though (although I think this was provoked a little bit more by the fact that there was a really scary tree outside which kept swaying in the wind and making us jump).

As the climax built up, we gradually lost understanding of the storyline, although it wasn’t any good to begin with. Being a horror movie however, it had all of the right effects yet I don’t think these were executed to the best quality – the gore was very cliché and looked fake, and the ‘dark figure’ started off scary, but we saw too much of its face so it lost the mysterious and creepy element and the suspense therefore dropped. I think this was one of the main mistakes of the movie – showing the audience too much. Rookie error.

All in all, as far as trashy horror movies go, this was no different to the rest of them. One might describe the plot as ‘unique’ but to be honest, it was just stupid. Other elements of the storyline were actually quite gripping – such as the ‘horror story’ of the psychiatric men in the forest – yet the actual reflection of these in the film let down its potential. The film made us laugh a lot, particularly one of the characters who (we assumed) was supposed to scare the living daylight out of us. He was meant to be a psycho but my friend immediately saw a resemblance of Lennie from ‘Of Mice and Men’ in him, and from then on, none of us could take him seriously. Ironically, somebody spotted a dead rabbit hanging from the doorway of this character. I guess Lennie never got to tend to the rabbits in the end. The best part was the extremely unexpected catch right at the end. I won’t give it away but it did give ‘Shrooms’ the edge off other similar movies because it wasn’t as predictable as we had thought.

In summary, if you want a lazy night in with a couple of friends to have a laugh, rent this movie (don’t buy it – you probably won’t watch it again), but if you actually want a big scare and something to talk about for weeks after, I’d veer towards better quality horror films.   

What did you think about the film? Leave your comments below!