Shrooms - Get Ready To Get Wasted

When five American students arrive in Ireland to go on a camping trip with their old buddy Jake, they are in high spirits. Jake has promised them the ‘trip of a lifetime’ because he claims Ireland has the best magic mushrooms in the world. It sounds like a blast, but when they start tripping things don’t seem so funny. They’re off their heads in the middle of nowhere and something evil is watching. One of the gang is missing and another is having visions of their gory deaths. As the gruesome night unfolds it seems they really are going to get wasted...

Shrooms stars Jack Huston (grandson of John Huston and seen recently in Factory Girl) as Jake, the self-confessed mushroom expert. The young movie veteran Lindsey Haun (Children of the Damned) plays his sometime girlfriend Tara. Max Kasch is Troy, a would-be martial arts devotee and Alice Greczyn plays Holly, his quirky girlfriend. Bluto (Rob Hoffman) is the jock of the group, and his girlfriend, Lisa (Maya Hazen), is the resident glamour girl.

"The actual idea for the movie goes back to a time when I was taking mushrooms with friends," says writer Pearse Elliott, for whom Shrooms is his third feature film (he wrote Man About Dog and was both screenwriter and director on The Mighty Celt). "I thought it would be interesting to make a horror film about such an important aspect of youth culture."

For director Paddy Breathnach (I Went Down), the idea of making a film in the horror vein had always appealed. "The idea of making the story more psychological by using mushrooms was even more exciting and that's when we went ahead."

"This movie is taking the narrative drive of the American teen slasher movie," explains producer Rob Walpole, "and crossing it with the tone of the Asian horror genre, in that the thing that's doing the haunting and the scaring is coming from within." The movie has some tongue in cheek elements too, but he continues, ultimately "we want to scare the bejaysus out of people!"

A UK/Irish/Danish co-production, Shrooms was shot over a period of seven weeks in Ireland.

Vertigo Films and Destination Films will be releasing Shrooms in the UK (inc. Northern Ireland). BVI will be releasing in the Republic of Ireland.