This article is about the Irish horror film. For the hallucinatory mushrooms after which it is named, see
Psilocybin mushrooms.
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.
Plot
The film opens with grizzly 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 the more feisty bitchy girl. They discuss their visit to Ireland to meet with local resident and friend Jake, who Tara has a crush on, and go camping in woodlands surrounding a long-disused children's home to find shrooms. After they land we are introduced to the other students, the martial arts wannabee Troy, his earthy, hippie-like girlfriend Holly and Lisa's arrogant, jock boyfriend Bluto. Lisa is repulsed by Holly's appearance and makes jokes about it to Tara. Troy is looking at Lisa as she bends down to collect her suitcases which causes as a threat from Bluto. 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 is out of its misery. Tara gives Bluto a desparing look and asks him if he would like that done to him. Two inbred men appear and 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 mushroom and warns Lisa and Troy not to eat them as they are fatal and can cause horrible side effects, if not death. Meanwhile Tara listens in on Bluto trying to make advances towards holly, as Lisa is growing irritated at his behaviour. 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, eats it. She then suffers a horrific seizure after which she experiences dream-like trances in which she begins having premonitions of future events. She sees Jake save her and then he actually does.
Around the evening camp fire, 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 seenm as if they had killed themselves. The black brother finds two twins throwing stones at the church and he burns one of the twins' faces and puts a potato sack over his head to hide the injuries. He then hung the twin's brother. This twin, now christened the lonely twin took his revenge by grinding 3 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 and that was 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, the students then 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 row. As Bluto gets back in his tent Lisa scolds him for being 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 he goes on. 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" which Bluto dismisses 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 realised that it is not a woman in the car. 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 had 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, after Holly laughs at her new appearance much to her irritation. All of their cell phones have also gone missing. Soon the students look through the forest in search of Bluto and their phones, Tara is worried but the others don't care less. 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 the 3 of 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. Back to the girls and Lisa complains about her feet which causes Holly to make a crack about her choice of footwear which then makes Lisa say that if Holly took better care of herself then Troy wouldn't be staring at her whenever Holly turned her back. this cause Holly to attack Lisa and while they are arguing and squabbling, 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 reveal themselves to be children who were once at the school. They tell her that their names are Ernie and Bernie and they are also taking the shrooms. After unsuccessfully trying the telephone for help, Holly nervously asks to be allowed to use the restroom. She looks the door and tries to search for an escape, however, she then looks through one of the small holes in the door and sees the feral child (now adult) attacking the two inbreds. 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 meets up with Lisa, after she found Holly's bag in the river. 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 cant just leave Holly, in which 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 cant see everything that's coming. Tara then 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 is now acting 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 viscous again and kills her. Then we are shown an axe in the water and Tara with her eyes closed under the surface. Back to the two girls and Tara tells Lisa 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 it is herself who is next to die. Lisa quickly flees from Tara and into the water, apologizing but saying she's too frigthened. 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 drowns 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, and Jake makes good his escape by 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 deathcaps (which boost the rage in someone, as well as apparently contact the dead, and gives the gift of foresight- if you 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 and masked the fact that she was the true killer.
At this point Tara asks the paramedic to help her. Tara kills the paramedic off screen with a pair of scissors. The movie then ends with Tara running through a forest.
Cast
Reception
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]
Production
An Irish and Danish co-production, Shrooms was shot over a period of seven weeks - largely in Rossmore Park in Monaghan, Ireland.
References
External links
