Shrooms starts out as a promising low-budget horror with an interesting slant: a group led out into the Irish woods in search of hallucinogenic mushrooms (AKA 'shrooms'). However, following this decent first act everything soon descends into tedium, a state that, sadly, lasts for the rest of the film. Hence, from the time that Tara takes the wrong mushroom the film just becomes an interminable series of dream sequences, jump scares and a plethora of those annoying jerky edits that were all the rage in the mid-noughties to convey supernatural ghostly forms and creatures. As such, the film shifts from a bunch of bickering characters 'round the campfire to showing the same characters running around the woods, barns, a lake, and an old abandoned juvenile offenders house that was the scene of dread and violent acts (and the apparent source of the annoyingly jerky moving ghosts that punctuate the film). Of the characters, the young women start out as friends, but they mysteriously act like they are all mortal enemies as soon as they hit camp, while the males are split between the zen-like guide who knows the ways of the shrooms, an obligatory jock, a would-be Karate Kid, and a couple of ostensibly menacing Deliverance-style wood-dwelling yokels. There are various murders, with some gore (but nothing extravagant), and there is an apparent twist ending. However, of said twist, if you were listening to Jake's very detailed and curiously precise list of what happens if you imbibe the forbidden black-topped mushroom, then the conclusion is absolutely no surprise at all, and is thus very disappointing if you were expecting supernatural hi-jinks. In sum, I find films that are laced with dream-sequences to be a bit of a bore (although to be fair, since this one deals in psilocybin mushrooms then I guess such things are par for the course - but that does not make them any less tiresome). However, the final scene of the film, with a bloodied Tara, hands and face pressed against the glass of the back window of an ambulance for a very long time, is somewhat amusing. In fact, the scene is so protracted that you can almost see in the actor's eyes that she is thinking, "I've been madly staring out of this window for ages, when is the director going to shout "Cut?" Or did I miss that?" "Please shout "Cut!" as I feel really daft madly staring out of this window in my lame twist ending that is not a twist at all if you were listening to Jake's very detailed and curiously precise list of what happens if you imbibe the forbidden black-topped mushroom!"). Nevertheless, in the film's defence, Shrooms does have a talking cow, so that is something.

Shrooms takes a potentially interesting premise and goes nowhere with it. It has a unique setting in Ireland, but turns into a standard American-style killer in the woods movie. It has hallucinogenic mushrooms but little trippy imagery, and it has an ending you'll see coming miles away. In short, it has nothing.American college students go off to the woods for a bit of psychedelic mushroom hunting. Things start to turn bad when one of the students takes a particularly toxic shroom. This does not bode well for them or the viewer.The film has a number of issues one could go after. The characters are just too dumb to live. First, they decide it's a great idea to go gallivanting around the woods even after they learn there are a pair of creepy inbred shepherds wandering around. Then, they don't leave the woods to seek medical attention after one of them ingests a lethal mushroom that the resident shroom expert knows causes psychotic reactions. The ending, in which the protagonist turns out to have killed her friends in a toadstool-induced delirium, is all too predictable.However, the main flaw is that the filmmakers don't take advantage of their concept. With the exception of one scene involving a talking cow, there is no real hallucinogenic imagery in the movie. Had the director had any sense, he would have turned the movie into an hour and a half of psychedelic thrills. Even if it wasn't scary, it would at least have been interesting.

With all the genuinely interesting ideas (and yes, talent) going on in this movie, it is a pity that the result is so fudged and directionless. Worse, there are the clichés which basically make up the screenplay. Roughly a third of 'Shrooms' is taken up by several repetitions of 'someone approaches something very, very slowly and then something jumps out at them.' Once or twice is fine, but more than that and the effect is to bore the viewer with a slowdown of narrative flow. Then there are the moments when a character just happens to stumble on the exact spot where a corpse/weapon/etcetera is hidden, which occurs far too often. There is a rather welcome twist ending which earns an extra point out of ten, but it is not enough to entice one to view this whole confusing and slightly tedious movie again.

What is it with Ireland and hallucinogenic mushrooms? This the second movie about mushroom and Ireland I've seen recently. Shrooms isn't as dismal and unwatchable as Puffball fortunately.Five American kids travel to Ireland for the sole purpose of getting high in the woods. They meet up there with some expert junkie. He teaches them what shrooms to gather and tells them two campfire tales at night, one erotic one and one horrific one. Both come true for the kids once they start taking shrooms.The main character, Tara, takes the wrong kind of shroom, one that gives her the power of premonitions and epileptic fits, and also, postmonition so to speak. She starts seeing all the horrible things that will and do happen to the kids. There's no shortage of villains, there are the local country folk, who in good movie fashion are these scary inbred types, there is some hairy creature thing, some other creature that looks like a witch with sharp teeth, and something else with a bag over its head. Despite all of Tara's warning the kids do everything wrong and get in trouble.The 3 girls are beautiful and the entire cast can act. There are some cool foggy forest images. Overall, things though are pretty slow and dull. Until, you get to the end and the surprise twist. That was really good and surprised me. Hard to recommend a movie solely for the ending though.