Granted, I really don’t “get” the horror genre. But Shrooms comes off as nothing so much as an extended Public Service Announcement about the dangerous silliness of experimenting with mind-altering substances.

I suspect that’s really part of the point of Paddy Breathnach’s low-budget horror-suspense film. As Jack Huston’s character Jake says at one point, enjoyment of a fireside ghost story relies not on its being true, but on your believing that it’s true enough that it just might happen to you.

So what ghost story is at the heart of this breathless cinematic tale? Well, it seems that a now-abandoned school on the grounds of an Irish nature reserve once housed a passel of abused orphans. The primary culprit—the Black Brother—was one of the monks who helped run the place, and now he (and one of his legendary victims) are said to roam the woods of the reserve, sometimes whacking an unsuspecting psychedelic-mushroom gatherer, at other times merely tossing stones at them.

Jake’s audience? A group of American college students who have recruited their pal Jake as a guide to mushroom Nirvana.

Well, you can see where this is all headed.

Then again, you may not. Breathnach’s film keeps the action and point of view vague enough—and influenced enough by the effects of those ’shrooms—that we’re never quite sure exactly what’s going on as these three pairs of guys and gals wander their way through woods, swamps, abandoned buildings, and the Irish version of Deliverance backwoodsmen. The central protagonist of the story is Tara, who’s got an unrequited crush on Jake and really poor judgment about the kind of people she hangs out with.

If you can figure out Tara’s disorientation, you can probably figure out the film’s conclusion; but seeing that this is a horror film, you know that “someone’s got to die every ten minutes.” Given that Tara is our guide, it’s probably not going to be her; and given that her love interest is Jake, he’s probably going to last a while, too. (It helps that Huston has got some of the familiar family charisma, and is pretty watchable in this role.)

So Lisa, Holly, Troy, and particularly Bluto are all sort of like extended-lease Star Trek redshirts filling up space in the story and movie set. Yes, all is as it should be in the genre, and the “worst” of the bunch bite the dirt first. Hooray!

If you’re a horror fan, you’ll probably get your briskly-paced and arty money’s worth out of Shrooms. If you’re not? Well, this one is only suggestively filthy and bloody. There’s very little nudity and the gore is fairly restrained.

But I have to say, I’m still puzzled. I simply don’t get the appeal, and never have. I guess I can never quite believe that this kind of stuff might just happen to me. And I really wish that the setups for these stories weren’t quite so close to reality for other folks.

Shrooms, anyone? I’ll pass, thanks.

Shrooms is being released unrated. That’s really curious, because I can’t imagine it getting an NC-17 rating. This is pretty standard R territory, with plenty of raunchy and suggestive sexual references, and the requisite level of blood and body parts.

Courtesy of a local publicist, Greg viewed a promotional screener of Shrooms.