Spoiler Alert: The following post for the Sunday “Bad”
Movies will spoil the endings of a few movies.
One such movie is this week’s film, Shrooms. A second movie will be one that I thought of
while watching Shrooms. It was a movie
called High Tension. The third film that
will be knowingly spoiled is a 2003 movie called Red Riding Hood. If there are any of the three movies that you
have not yet seen and don’t want spoiled for you, stop reading this post
now. Ready any further is your own
fault. I don’t want to see any
complaints about spoilers. Not that
anyone actually reads these posts. But,
you know, I felt that I should warn you.
There are a lot of ways that writers try to make a story
interesting, and one of the most well-known and accepted parts of making a
captivating tale is for it to contain a twist ending. You leave the audience in a state of shock as
what happened prior in the story is turned on its head in the final moments
before the conclusion. Something happens
that changes everything. Happy can take
a left turn into morbid sadness. Or one
detail can be revealed that makes all of the prior events have a different
meaning. The point of it is to be
impactful and leave the audience thinking about what they have
experienced. But, sometimes the thinking
can lead to the realization that some things do not add up.
This whole idea of things not adding up when the twist
occurs in a movie was inspired, of course, by Shrooms. No, not by me taking hallucinogenic drugs and
going on some sort of out-of-body mind trip.
I am talking about the movie Shrooms.
This 2007 film is about a group of friends who travel to Ireland for a
trip of mushroom gathering. The wooded
area in Ireland that they travel to is the former grounds of an insane asylum. One by one, the friends are being murdered by
someone who may be an escaped asylum patient hiding out in the woods.
Now, this might seem like a fairly straight forward
movie. Friends dying as a mental patient
is murdering them. It is your basic
slasher flick. That is, until it
isn’t. One of the friends has ingested
one of the most powerful mushrooms and it is revealed at the end of the movie
that she was actually murdering all of her friends. There were no escaped patients attacking the
people that came into the woods. It was
one of the main characters all along.
She was doing the killing. She
was the reason that all of her friends were dead. That was the twist and it made some sense,
but it didn’t make complete sense. There
were some things that seemed off about it.
Most of the problems with the twist come in the form of the
character’s ability to actually be in those places. It was set up early in the movie that the
mushroom that she took could give the ability of premonition. She would be able to see into the future and
know what was going to happen to people.
Every once in a while, she would have a vision about the death of one of
her friends. All of the visions came
true. The only difference was that she
was the reason for their death, not some dark entity. However, in certain instances, there was no
way that she could possibly have been in the location of the death at the time
of the death because she was with another friend. The whole “main character is a killer” twist
is shared with another movie I mentioned at the beginning of this post.
High Tension was directed by Alexandre Aja and released in
France in 2003. It would be two more
years before an American release. I saw
it around 2006, so my mind is a little foggy on the details of the movie. I do remember the twist ending, though. In a final turn of events very similar to
Shrooms, it turns out that the main character whom the audience has sympathised
with throughout the entire movie is, in fact, the serial killer they have been
dealing with. I remember feeling
betrayed and not being able to figure out how everything could have worked out
with her being the murderer. I probably
should have rewatched the movie before writing this stuff in order to get my
writing right, and to see if I still feel that way. Oh well.
The two movies I have already outlined show the difficulties
in having the main character be revealed as the killer in the movie. However, this is not the only variation of
this kind of twist. While watching Red
Riding Hood, the 2003 horror film directed by Giacomo Cimini, I experienced a
similar revelatory twist at the end of the movie. The entire film had set up the premise that a
girl was committing vengeful murders with her dog. It was revealed at the end that the dog was
not real and the girl was actually killing all of the people by herself. This particular version of the twist made
more sense than the other two because the girl was at the scene of the crime
each time anyway. In terms of logistics,
it all added up and made sense.
Not all the movies that use the twist of the main character
being the killer make sense. A lot of
the time they make very little sense.
That does not make the movie less enjoyable up until that point. If you enjoyed it before the twist, you
enjoyed it before the twist. You cannot
change that. It can change your view on
the movie as a whole, but it can’t change how much you enjoyed the movie before
the twist was revealed. I enjoyed
Shrooms before the twist ending. It was
a fun little horror movie that played on the slasher clichés while adding in
another layer with the mushroom premonition stuff. The lackluster twist doesn’t change
that. I might think the movie does not
hold up as a whole because of the twist, but I enjoyed it until the twist
happened. It is worth checking out, even
if it gets a little weird and dumb near the end.
I have a few notes for you, of course:
- Shrooms was suggested to me by @SincereBC. He also suggested 8213: Gacy House, one of the movies in the Paranormal Entity group of movies.
- Another horror movie that was influenced by drugs was Hansel and Gretel Get Baked.
- Have you seen Shrooms? Do you like the ending? Do you like the movie? Are there other movies that you can think of with similar twists? Feel free to write about the movie in the comments.
- I am also taking suggestions for future movies to watch, like I always am. You can suggest in the comments or you can hit me up on Twitter.
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