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!

Six Flags disappointment

We went to this theme park on our Summer holiday this year, expecting it to be one of the highlights. Having dropped it into a conversation with a few of my friends, I got a few exclamations from them telling me that it was the 'best theme park in the world' and was the basis of the game 'Rollercoaster typhoon'. As you can imagine, I was pretty excited and my expectations were high.

I'll hand it to the park, the rollercoasters were INCREDIBLE...the best in the world. The ride 'X2' was amazing, and I would have loved to go on it again - it was not only well designed but thrilling as well, and as you can imagine from a massive American theme park, it pulled out all of the stops in terms of 'Fear Factor'!

Now for the downside... prepare yourself- full on rant coming up!

At almost $50 a ticket, you expect to go on a lot of rides in a day. We were at the theme park from about 10.00 until about 4.00 and went on four rides. Four.

Why? Because the park is greedy. They let too many people in and didn't bother to warn us about the vast queues we would have to wait through. On our first ride, we waited 2 hours to get on. This was in the burning Californian heat in cramped conditions  with no shade and no water. After the first ride, we were already exhausted but pleased because the ride, X2 was brilliant, so we persevered and queued for a second ride. This was another rollercoaster that we waited about and hour and a half for and was disappointing. We then queued 30 minutes for another ride which literally took about a minute from buckling up to getting off. By this time, we were struggling to find reasons to stay at the park.

We went to find somewhere to sit and have a drink however unfortunately, everybody else had the same idea and we ended up paying $15 and queuing for 45 minutes to get a refillable cup, and then queuing for another 45 minutes to fill it up. Within 45 seconds it was devoured. Why didn't you save your money and use a water fountain you wonder? The few water fountains that actually worked had 20 minute queues in the exposed sun, the same with every toilet facility. We found that it wasn't just us struggling with this busy, over populated park, everybody was.

With little tolerance left, we got into a short looking queue for a water ride. It had no indication of how long it would take but we reluctantly guessed we would be waiting for about half an hour. An hour later we were still in the queue. Completely cramped and unable to move, not only because of the heat and our severe exhaustion, but because hundreds of people were surrounding us. As we waited, people around us started to get agitated - by this time, my parents had gone to the information desk and there were 4 of our group (all teenagers) left in the queue. Okay, understatement...people were shouting and swearing at the attendants, almost causing a riot! Every time a carriage for the next lot of people came, the fast track queue would be moved onto it and the rest of the queue would remain stationary. ...theoretically stationary -a lot of people behind us were giving a lot of abuse to these 'fast track arseholes who thought they were better than us'. After another hour, we finally got on the ride. The ride was terrible. We were so tired and in such a bad mood by this time that we could not be bothered to enjoy the 3 minute up-the-rail-and-underwhelming-drop ride.

After the ride, we were all extremely fed up and the 4 of us went to find our parents. They were making a complaint at the information desk, of which we never received any feedback or compensation. We had waited so long in the final queue that we missed our plans for the evening and were late home. I know I sound like a bratty teenager saying all of this, but it is the truth. In fact, as my parents were queuing at the information desk, they spoke to another unhappy customer who was disabled. Apparently they had been sold the ticket for the park, told they would be allowed on the ride and queued up (having an hour long wait) for a ride, only to be told that their disability meant they could not go on the ride. What's more, the attendants then failed to tell them that this would be the case for every other ride.

The park is greedy and overpriced, only caring about visitors and profit, not the welfare of their guests. If you ever plan to go to Six Flags, I thoroughly recommend saving your money.