Unimaginative Shrooms a bad trip

Unimaginative Shrooms a bad trip

by Nick Ardizzone - SGN Staff Writer SHROOMS OPENING FRIDAY In Irish director Paddy Breathnach's horror flick Shrooms, a group of five American college students heads out to the Irish wilderness to scrounge up some magic mushrooms and spend a psychotropic weekend together. The group includes lovesick Tara (Lindsey Haun, a dead ringer for Kirsten Dunst and a surprisingly suitable actress), the inexplicably-named fratboy Bluto, a couple of forgettable girls and a long-haired, wool-capped stoner so familiar you'll wonder where Silent Bob is hiding. The cheerfully oblivious group lets their Irish buddy confiscate their cell phones before they trip, and doesn't even seem to mind that their campsite is across the lake from an abandoned asylum, apparently used for decades as a torture chamber for a ghoulish cult. These kids just want to hang out, take some shrooms and dry-hump in their tents, and they won't let a lurking pair of inbred, lesion-covered refugees from Deliverance spoil their fun. Of course, things don't quite turn out as they planned. In an amazing coincidence, their field trip falls during the rare emergence of a mythical mushroom which ancient Irish druidic folktales say grants the power to open portals to other dimensions and talk to the dead. Predictably, Tara wolfs one down and is quickly hallucinating Samara's video from The Ring - jerky black-and-white creepies intercut with footage of her friends' deaths. She tries to warn them, but they're preoccupied after a campfire ghost story explaining that the forest is stalked by the Black Brother, a shambling cross between Freddy Krueger and Emperor Palpatine. Spooked, the gang downs their mind-expanding tea, but when unexplained figures move through the tents at night and one of the girls receives a mysterious haircut (really), they begin to doubt their senses. And then the killing starts - the dreadfully dull killing. The movie blows all its creativity on its first death, which has a grinning Bluto talking to a CGI cow before getting a lethal blowjob from a skeleton. Everything after that point is standard horror movie fare, with liberal cribs from The Blair Witch Project and Silent Hill. The kids run screaming through the woods, getting picked off one by one, until the predictable twist ending lands with a thud. Truthfully, the premise is great: A group of sexy college kids running from creatures that might or might not just be in their minds. But aside from Tara's premonitions (and Bluto's bizarre trip), none of the other characters hallucinate or act any differently than the luckless camp counselors who usually get slaughtered in these movies. Why bother having the victims tripping on shrooms if there are no freaky visions or cool colors? Shrooms' slight afterimage visual on the trees doesn't cut it. There isn't even a self-referential druggie line, nothing like "we can't stop here, this is bat country!" before someone gets hit with a bat. The movie falls far short of its potential. In lieu of actual scares, the movie weakly offers threats ranging from a little ghost wearing a burlap sack to a feral wolf-boy, but the way they appear (in Tara's alternately blurry and grainy visions) is so overwrought that it sucks all the suspense from the scenes. There isn't even distracting scenery; the only reason to set this movie in exotic Ireland is to give the drooling natives unintelligible accents. The nondescript forest could just as easily be somewhere in Alabama. Shrooms isn't scary, isn't gory, and isn't even weird after the first 20 minutes. It's tedious, uninspired, and done without a trace of irony or fun. In short, it's not worth taking the trip.