| Shrooms edit tahsa | |
|---|---|
 Theatrical release poster |
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| Directed by | Paddy Breathnach |
| Produced by | Paddy McDonald and Rob Walpole |
| Written by | Pearse Elliott |
| Starring | Lindsey Haun, Jack Huston, Max Kasch, Maya Hazen, Alice Greczyn, Don Wycherley, Sean McGinley, Robert Hoffman |
| Music by | Dario Marianelli |
| Cinematography | Nanu Segal |
| Editing by | Dermot Diskin |
| Distributed by | Vertigo Films (UK) |
| Release date(s) | November 23, 2007 |
| Running time | 86 min |
| Country | Ireland |
| Language | English |
Shrooms is a 2007 horror film about a group of American students[1] and their Irish guide who are stalked by a serial killer while out in the woods looking for psilocybin mushrooms. The film was written by Pearse Elliott directed by Paddy Breathnach, and stars Lindsey Haun, Jack Huston, and Max Kasch.
Contents |
The film opens with grisly scenes of torture and a young blonde woman running through a forest.
While on an airplane we are introduced to American student and nice girl Tara, and her best friend Lisa who is more sharp and feisty. They discuss their visit to Ireland to meet with local resident and friend Jake, on whom Tara has a crush. They intend to go camping in woodlands surrounding a long-disused children's home to find mushrooms with hallucinogenic properties.
After they land they meet the other students: martial arts wannabe Troy, his earthy girlfriend Holly, and Lisa's arrogant jock boyfriend Bluto. Lisa is repulsed by Holly's appearance and makes jokes about it to Tara. Troy looks Lisa as she bends down to collect her suitcases, and Bluto threatens Troy.
After meeting Jake they drive towards the woods and accidentally hit a goat with their van. As the students look at the dying creature in pity, Bluto suddenly kills it, much to the disgust of everyone but Lisa, who says that it's out of its misery. Tara gives Bluto a despairing look and asks him if he would like that done to him. Two men appear, both with strange stereotypically inbred looks and mannerisms, and they take the goat carcass away.
After setting up camp and relaxing for a while, the students then go collecting Magic mushrooms for later consumption. Jake then notices the very dangerous deathcap mushrooms and warns Lisa and Troy not to eat them as they can cause horrible and even fatal poisoning. Meanwhile Tara listens in on Bluto trying to make advances towards Holly. Holly dismisses him because she loves Troy and leaves, Bluto following. Tara then falls back and lands near to a deathcap mushroom and out of curiosity, not knowing the danger, eats it. She then suffers a horrific seizure, and envisions Jake coming to save her, which he soon actually does. From this point on, Tara begins to experience frequent dream-like trances in which she has premonitions of future events.
Around the evening campfire, with Tara resting in her tent, Jake tells a ghost story of the empty children's home nearby, and of a violent sadistic monk belonging to the religious cult who owned the orphanage. He was called the black brother. This monk would painfully kill any child that dared to defy him and then make it seem as if they had killed themselves. The black brother found two twins throwing stones at the church and he burned one of the twins' faces and put a potato sack over his head to hide the injuries. He then hanged the twin's brother. The burned twin, now called the lonely twin, took his revenge by grinding three pounds of deathcap mushrooms into the black brother's food.
After consuming the soup spiked with deathcap mushrooms the black brother went berserk and horribly slaughtered everyone in his order except for a feral child that was forced to live with the dogs. Only two bodies were never found: the black brother and the lonely twin. Overhearing this causes Tara to have premonitions of the murders of her friends one by one. She leaves the tent and scolds Jake for telling the story, and the students go to their tents.
Troy and Holly sneak some of the mushrooms into their tent and begin to have sex. After hearing noises outside, Troy starts yelling at Bluto, who was in his tent with Lisa. Tara runs up and claims that she has seen Troy get hurt. Bluto immediately punches Troy and breaks his nose. Lisa quickly defends Bluto which causes an argument between her and Holly. Jake appears and splits up the fight.
As Bluto gets back in his tent, Lisa scolds him for going outside Holly and Troy's tent. Bluto swears it wasn't him and then makes a crude sex remark to try and make things better. Lisa grows angry and tells him that she is sick of his perverted behaviour and his mood swings. Bluto immaturely farts at her and she kicks him out of the tent in disgust.
Bluto drinks some of the hallucinogenic tea (supposedly for all to share in the morning) and experiences a trip that send him in to the forest, vomiting and seeing strange nude women walking away from him. He then finds a talking cow which tells him that he is "dead fucked." Bluto dismisses it and continues looking for the woman. He finds a car and thinks that the woman is inside it and he asks her for a blowjob. While he is pleasured, strange hair wraps around his hands and he realises that something is wrong. He is then castrated and as he crawls across the floor in agony, he is murdered in the same way the goat was, seemingly at the hands of the rogue monk from the children's home.
In the morning, Lisa wakes up alone and she discovers that someone has cut most of her long straight hair to her shoulders, leaving a few strands on one side still long. She enters Tara's tent in a rage, wanting Bluto's "balls in a sling". The two girls go looking for Bluto but eventually give up. The others, unconcerned by Bluto's disappearance, consume the mushroom tea, enjoying its effects. Lisa and Tara return, and Lisa immediately starts drinking the tea.
The students realise all of their cell phones have gone missing. Soon they look through the forest in search of Bluto and their phones, Tara is worried but the others are unconcerned. The girls are separated from the boys whilst under the shroom's effects. Tara takes Holly and Lisa far into the forest in their search. Lisa moans as Tara suddenly sees the black brother emmerge from the trees and he walks towards them. Tara panics and runs and despite not being able to see the monk, Holly and Lisa follow. Soon, after they are safe, Lisa scolds Tara for having them run from nothing, while Holly cries and regrets taking the shrooms.
Meanwhile, Jake and Troy search through the forest and hear someone calling their names. Suddenly two large stones are hurled at them and the two of them flee in a panic. Among the girls, Lisa complains about her feet which causes Holly to make a crack about her choice of footwear; Lisa retorts that if Holly took better care of herself then Troy wouldn't be staring at Lisa whenever Holly turned her back. Holly attacks Lisa and while they squabble, they lose their footing and fall down the bank. Holly hits her head against a tree while Lisa lands in a ditch. She sees a hand and reaches for it but she then realises that it is Bluto's bloody corpse which falls on her. Lisa screams and cries as Tara tries to comfort her. However the black brother soon appears and Tara screams at the two girls to run.
Unfortunately Lisa and Holly both run in different directions in the panic and Tara accidentally falls to the ground, where she ahs a vision of Holly finding a cabin in the woods. Holly is then greeted by the two inbred men who took the goat, who reveal that they were once children at the nearby school. They tell her that their names are Ernie and Bernie and they are also taking the mushrooms; both of them appear deranged, constantly drooling and leering at Holly. After unsuccessfully trying the telephone for help, Holly nervously asks to be allowed to use the restroom. She searches for an escape and looks through one of the small holes in the door only to see the feral child, now adult, attacking Ernie and Bernie. They flee the cabin and the feral man tries to attack Holly through the door, but she defends herself with a long piece of metal.
Tara's vision ends and she searches for her friends. Soon she finds Holly's bag in the river, and then she meets up with Lisa. As the two of them walk through the forest they see Troy and Jake across the other side of the lake who tells the two girls to meet them at the house where the children were kept. Tara says that they can't just leave Holly, and Lisa replies that she could. Tara tells her that she has a feeling that Holly is in trouble but Lisa grows irritated and asks her what is going to happen next. She then pushes Tara into the mud and tells her that she can't see everything that's coming... but then Tara has another vision of Holly.
Holly has climbed up a tree and is screaming desperately for help. Ernie tells her that there isn't any point in screaming as there isn't anyone who can hear her. Suddenly the feral man attacks and murders Bernie. Holly jumps down from the tree and runs until she finds somewhere she thinks is safe. Suddenly the feral man appears holding an axe, but now he seems timid and frightened. Holly feels sorry for him and puts down her weapon. He does too. She attempts to comfort him by offering him sweets. She then says "I just want to be your friend," but the feral man turns vicious again and kills her. Images flash of an axe in the water and Tara with her eyes closed under the surface.
Reviving, Tara tells Lisa about Holly's fate. Lisa seems disbelieving but Tara tells her to search in the water. Lisa does so and finds an axe, she then proceeds onwards and finds Holly's corpse. She screams and falls back into the water. Lisa asks Tara who is next and Tara tells her that Tara herself is next to die. Lisa quickly flees from Tara and into the water, apologizing but saying she's too frightened to help her. Tara begs her to stay but is plagued with another vision which shows that actually Lisa is the next to die. As Lisa goes far into the lake, the black brother rises and grabs her, pulling her under the surface and drowning her.
Jake and Troy locate Tara on the opposite bank of a river, and instruct her to meet them in the abandoned children's home to summon help. Upon investigating the property, Troy is apparently killed by the lonely twin. Jake makes his escape by sprinting down a corridor and leaping from a high window, breaking his leg as he lands. Tara finds him and the two flee the haunted scene. Then, while resting his injured leg, Jake is murdered by the monk.
Tara awakes as a Garda helicopter hovers over the camp, and is dispatched into an ambulance as the sole survivor. She sees one of the woodsmen being arrested, presumably under the belief that he was the one who killed the campers. As her mobile phone rings, she experiences a rapid flashback, along with Jake's knowledge of deathcap mushrooms, which boost rage in those who consume them and survive. She sees herself in the place of the ghostly killers murdering her friends, and realizes that the lonely twin, feral child, and monk were all figments of her imagination due to the hallucinatory properties of the mushroom... masking the fact that she was the true killer.
At this point Tara asks the paramedic to help her. Tara kills the paramedic offscreen with a pair of scissors. The movie then ends with Tara running through a forest.
When Shrooms was released, it opened to generally negative reviews. As of 2009 it holds a 24% approval rating on the film rating website Rotten Tomatoes.[2] Variety described it as "A shake-'n'-bake slasher movie that shows just how difficult it is to do effective, modestly budgeted horror".[3]
An Irish and Danish co-production, Shrooms was shot over a period of seven weeks - largely in Rossmore Park in Monaghan, Ireland.
   | Official site for the movie - SHROOMS THE MOVIE - OFFICIAL UK SITE - TRIPPIN OUT IN CINEMAS 23rd NOVEMBER |
| | Interview with Pearse Elliot on 'Shrooms' - Culture Northern Ireland |
| | Shrooms Review - Shrooms Review - Read Variety's Analysis Of The Movie Shrooms |
| | ''SHROOMS'' at OMGhorror - - OMG Horror - The Blog of the Living Dead: Horror Movie News, Features, Reviews, Games, Free Horror Films, Splatter, Gore, Puppies |
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