Fear and Murders in Ireland

I know it's been a while, and I did have this review up under another name for a while but it wasn't as good as I had hoped and I re-read it a few times and it was just, well, bad. So I'm giving it another shot.

Shrooms is a movie that depends on one thing, believing that the people in the movie are actually tripping on shrooms. Psilocybin mushrooms, or more commonly known as magic mushrooms, even more commonly known as shrooms, are mushrooms that cause hallucinations, both aural and visual. It's an entirely natural occurring drug, a drug that grows on cow dung. Old cow dung. So it's hardly the most romantic of the recreational drugs to film a movie about. The nearest I can figure is that the creators realized this, so made a horror movie about shrooms. Which actually could be a really interesting movie. Really, not a joke this time, I was thinking this movie may not be bad enough too review. A movie about people going crazy on bad trips and not understanding what is going on, why it is happening, and murdering just about everyone in the movie because they are tripping so badly, could be at least highly entertaining.

Unfortunately, this movie doesn't do that.

Instead of playing up the absolute loss of control induced by taking shrooms they introduce a new element, a made up shroom called the "Death's Head Fungi." Now a drug that already can make you think that trees are dancing is an intense enough drug that you don't need to make it "scarier". Apparently the creators disagreed, and so they created a shroom that grows once every seven years, and causes your heart to explode, and if you some how manage to live you will have a psychotic break. A murderous psychotic break, ooooo scaaaary. Well let me be clearer, according to a local legend, only one murderous rampage happened, it was one a sadistic catholic monk who worked at a school for troubled boys. He was fed seven pounds of these "Death's Head Fungi" and killed a bunch of people in terrible ways. I should also mention that the main character is catholic schoolgirl goody-two shoes. She also eats one of these super-shrooms.

I'm not going to reveal the "big twist" but I'm sure you can all figure it out.

The biggest flaw of the movie is actually the "trips" themselves. The movie only has one really interesting "trip" in it, and it actually doesn't even happen because it turns out that the trip was a dream sequence. The characters while tripping really don't seem to be hallucinating much. And when they do hallucinate it's not like a real hallucination is a very bland: "You see a person who isn't really there, and oh boy do they look ominus" sort of hallucination. When I think of a drug trip, hell when just about any movie viewer worth their salt thinks of a drug trip in movies, they think of Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas. Nothing was simple, it was big bold, and frankly pretty accurate to what can happen to you when you take hardcore psychedelics. I understand, this was a low budget movie, they had to work with what they had. But I'm pretty sure that you can do better than a blue filter and some blurring effects. I'm also pretty sure that no one on shrooms can speak nearly as articulately or clearly as the people in the movie did.

That's what I love about a movie like Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, it's a movie that does not shy away from showing you how scary a drug can actually be, how much of a yammering idiot you can look like. Shrooms doesn't do this, it passes off some cheap effects as being trips, and has clean healthy, alert looking individuals who do not look like they have had any experience with a psychedelic drug in their life. Maybe the rakish looking Irish rogue character, but that might be pushing it.

tl;dr

Watch this movie if you want to be convinced that psychedelics will make you a murderer.