September 29th

Shrooms (2007) directed by Paddy Breathnach

My cousin decided to schedule her wedding during the Six Weeks and tapped me to be the cameraman.  In olden days, this might've made my horror-movie-a-day goal difficult.  At a minimum, I'd have been up super-later after the reception ended, watching a movie on my laptop and struggling to keep my eyes open.  Not so now. Welcome to the wondrous 21st Century, where a huge network of towers can supply my hand-held communicator with a constant stream of video even when traveling in excess of 75 miles per hour!  Screw hoverboards: the future is here!

Yeah, about that...  I can't think of any worse way to watch a full-length movie than on a tiny cellphone screen during a noisy car ride.  The glossy glass of my phone nicely reflected the sunlight streaming into the car whilst also showing me the details of my smudged fingerprints.  Additionally, I was given the weird experience of watching myself watch a movie, as the glass neatly reflected my face staring at the screen.  Somewhere behind all that was the movie, but I'll be damned if I could tell you exactly what was going on during the nighttime scenes.  The audio fared a little better, but the movie's soundtrack was forcibly mixed with engine noise and the crappy songs coming out of the car's radio.

From what I could tell, this movie really sucks.  All of the characters are immediately unlikable and incredibly stupid.  For one, they fly all the way to Ireland in order to trip out on mushrooms.  I'm not sure why no one told them that their local drug dealer in college could've helped them out in that regard and saved them thousands on plane tickets.  Instead, their plan is to have an Irish friend take them out into the middle of nowhere to pick fresh shrooms from the floor of the forest.  Apparently, the fear of accidentally eating a misidentified mushroom and dying was not sufficiently drilled into them by their parents.  And, in fact, that's exactly what happens: the female lead, for some reason, eats a death cap mushroom by accident.  Instead of dying in agony as her organs shut down, she has an intense trip and wakes up with psychic powers.  Or so she thinks.  In reality, this film is a shameless ripoff of High Tension and the lead's psychic visions of her friends deaths are really just her mind covering up her memory of murdering them herself.  Ugh.

And that's why you choose a movie that's likely going to suck should you need to watch one on a telephone: the fact that I could barely see or hear the thing just made the experience not as horrible.

Watched: stream on Netflix.