Holy shit, people. This one might be the holy grail. You all know how much I love terrible movies — especially ones that achieve the so-called “triple crown of awfulsome,” which is a title I’ve just now invented. That is, a movie that fails miserably on the three most important levels: writing, acting, and direction. House Of Wax and AntiTrust are both triple crown winners. I’ve been searching for another candidate for nearly two years, and this past week a film arrived at the store that I swear to God…it was love at first sight. I knew that the film could very well reify my belief in terrible movies, so last night I sat down and enjoyed it. Ladies and gentlemen, let me tell you a little story about Shrooms.

The movie opens hastily on an airplane, where two girls are talking about how excited they are to be traveling to Ireland for a summer vacation. One of them blurts out that she’s mostly excited to take shrooms. The other girl expresses shock that her friend would do something like that considering she’s such a goody-goody, but the scene unexpectedly cuts to a baggage claim in Ireland, where the girls are meeting with the rest of their friends. Everyone is excitedly talking about shrooming. Well, that’s odd. How could one girl surprise her friend by expressing her desire to eat some mushrooms when its made abundantly clear that these five kids all came to Ireland simply to hang out in the woods and trip? Don’t worry, there will be plenty more inexplicably erroneous moments that force you to suspend belief while watching this film.

Next scene, the kids are in a van with their “guide” a local Irish fellow who appears to be a cross between Skeet Ulrich and Orlando Bloom. He’s got a big book of mushrooms and he’s telling everybody how wonderful the trip is going to be. They’re laughing, pointing at pictures of shrooms that look like cocks, and two of the dudes are smoking pot in the back seat. It’s a totally laid back, super-chill time. Just eat the mushrooms with the nipples on top that Skeet Ulrich points to in the book, and the rest of your stay in Ireland will be pleasant and spiritually enriching.

They reach the campsite, and begin foraging for mushrooms. One of the characters attempts to pick up a mushroom, but the Skeet Ulrich guy runs over and stops him. No you idiot, you’re supposed to eat the ones that look like they have nipples on the top, he says (to that one guy only), not the ones that look like they have black nipples on the top! Those ones will kill you, and if they don’t kill you, they’ll cause you to commune with the dead, make you utterly ferocious and violent, and probably fuck you up for the rest of your life! God, what a moron that character was, almost eating the mushroom with the black nipple instead of the mushroom with the nipple. It’s a very dumb moment, because if there were deadly mushrooms that looked exactly like the good mushrooms, you’d figure this guy would have said something to the entire group when he was showing them the book of all the different kinds of mushrooms they would be encountering, but…I guess it must have slipped his mind that the ones with nipples were good and the ones with black nipples would kill you. Also, he revealed this startling detail in the company of only one person, instead of warning the other people in the group. So, unsurprisingly, one of the girls eats one of the black nippled mushrooms not two minutes later, and almost dies.

When she wakes up, she’s convinced she can see into the future, and in that future everybody is going die. Her trip isn’t made any easier when the rest of the kids are sitting right outside her tent loudly telling ghost stories by the campfire. Meanwhile, not fifteen feet away, their poor, sick friend is trying to straighten out her mind. The tour guide decides — now that everyone has ingested the good shrooms — he should tell them the story about the murderous creepy people who live in these very woods! Yeah, that’s a great way to keep all the trippers in good spirits. Surely no one will descend into madness or have their experience soured.

If you can believe it, they all start dying one by one at the hands of either a guy who wears a bag over his head, or a dude in a black robe with a 3″ blade attached to a piece of wood (which some of us like to call an axe, but hey — I didn’t write the screenplay, if those guys want to keep calling it a three-inch blade attached to a piece of wood, that’s fine with me). The girl who ate the black nipple mushroom continues to see the deaths of all her friends before they happen, and you’ll never believe the surprise ending…which we successfully predicted less than halfway through the film.

I think my favorite moment (the moment that solidifies this film as winning the “triple crown of awfulsome”) comes at the very end of the story. Of course, there is one survivor. That person is seen running away from the scene of the last grisly murders, until they suddenly come in contact with…something. I don’t know if it’s a person or a tree. Anyway, the next shot is that person being airlifted out of the woods on a stretcher. But then, for some reason, the next scene takes place back at the camp site, where the survivor is being treated in the rear of an ambulance. So I guess the helicopter chose to fly her about a hundred yards to her tent rather than to a hospital. Interesting play, Mr. Director. Very interesting…

One might suppose that Shrooms is a horror story in the vein of Blair Witch Project, and the DVD case actually quotes somebody declaring it is “Blair Witch on acid!” I beg to differ. It’s obviously one of the worst modern horror movies ever conceived, but it’s also too funny not to suffer through. Wait a minute, is “horrorble” a better made-up word than “awfulsome”? Nah. Anyway, as a purveyor of all cinema terible (that’s a French term, I think) I highly recommend this film. Get it? I said “highly”? The movie is about drug use? Ah, blow me.

The only possible thing that could have made this movie better would be if the blonde girl was portrayed by Sarah Wheeler from that Flying Scissors movie that Ken worked on. I wonder what happened to her…

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