Shrooms

I remember laughing at the poster for this movie. It was so preposterous, this giant skull and the word "shrooms" plastered across the bottom. About a subtle as a chainsaw. And while watching the film you know exactly what's going to happen about five minutes before it does, which I suppose is kind of funny given the movie is about a girl who eats a poisonous mushroom that gives her the ability to see about five minutes into the future.

Tara and her friends travel to Ireland in order to camp and eat shrooms. But then Tara eats the wrong kind of mushroom, takes a bad trip and wakes up psychic. Then her friends start dying and instead of hiking back to the main road and finding help, the survivors get high (again) and run around the woods for a while. Unfortunately, Tara's newfound ability doesn't help much in either avoiding death or discovering the mysterious killer (drugs, in case you still don't get it).

Like so many of the cautionary tales that have come before, Shrooms' simple message--don't do drugs unless you're with someone who knows his shit--gets lost in an overly ambitious story. There's some nonsense about an abandoned asylum, a feral boy, and a couple of Irish hillbillies, all of which detracts from what should be a straightforward mystery piece. And when the mystery is finally solved, the answer is so impossible, it begs the question, was everyone on this project high like all the time?

When the movie ended, I couldn't decide whether I liked it or not. Now, I think not. I mean, who hallucinates talking to a cow? Seriously.