The Fungus Among Us

A bunch of dipsh*t American college kids go to Ireland in search of mushrooms with which to consume and get high. Puts a whole new spin on “higher learning.” Off they go into the woods and start picking ’shrooms, except one chick eats the dreaded Death’s Head mushroom and almost dies. Unfortunately.

She spasms out and her heart and lungs don’t explode as promised by their guide, but she does gain premonition-esque powers and sees her friends all die graphic deaths via an unnecessarily complicated backstory-heavy local folklore involving a nearby abandoned all-boys Catholic school and the sadistic schoolmaster who tortured and murdered 78 students (all but two were reconstructed from the pieces).

The kids get high and the requisite jock with gangsta rap leanings goes off in the woods and meets a talking cow that warns him to not go any further or else he’s dead meat. (That’s the pot calling the kettle black.) But this sets up the first of many misdirections that do little to keep you from predicting the outcome. (C’mon – kids on psychedelic drugs vs. ghost legend. Who do you think is to blame for the stabbings, hackings, chokings, drownings?)

Dressed up in high (sorry) stylish photography and trick edits, they want you to believe Shrooms (2007), with its butt awful movie title, is not your standard “college kids die” horror crap. Not so much. That said, they really fumbled the ball by not giving the talking cow more lines.

Religion Gone Wild

To say the uber-strict Sister Ursula gets into her job is an understatement. She tortures “godless and impure” girls at the Catholic convent school, stuffing passed notes in mouths and sticking a water nozzle where God hadn’t intended a water nozzle should be stuck. Clearly, religion holds a special place in her heart.

Fed up with being nozzled, stuck and stuffed, the students turn on Sister Ursula and drown her in a bathtub. Baptized with bubbles. Homework assignment completed, they haul the Sister’s body out to the school’s deep pond and give her a proper burial at sea.

Twenty years later the pond was drained, which means Sister Ursula’s revenge-driven soul was allowed to escape. (Her bones, though, were probably eaten by pond sharks.) Because she died by water, so does that become the method of her revenge.

The ordained effects in The Nun (aka, La Monja/2005) are kinda cool, what with the floating Sister doing stuff with water only a Catholic Aquaman could do. No nudity (dang), colorful dismemberment (sweet), and a mystery that couldn’t stump a bone dry Nancy Drew. All in all, not a bad way to spend an hour and a half. That, or in a confessional.