REVIEW: Red Mist (2008)

Several years ago, I reviewed a movie called Shrooms. It was one of my first reviews and helped shape the way I do things on this blog now. But little did I know that the director of Shrooms came out with another movie just a year later, and it is called Red Mist! Who am I, after all, to deprive you of the works of a man who gave you a film with a talking cow in it? Let’s see what ole Paddy Breathnach has been up to since the last time we caught up with him...

Director: Paddy Breathnach

Starring: Arielle Kebbel, other people maybe

Website: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1185264/

We start off with a bunch of medical students joking around and acting like jackasses, because hey, why bother having characters who are in any way likable or human at all? The lead girl is Arielle Kebbel, most famous for being in the holocaust of all things holy and good, The Uninvited – seriously, send this girl some flowers! She plays a girl named Cat. Her thing is that she’s independent and tough and doesn’t want a boyfriend, the last one being by far the most important aspect of her character, because 99% of women don’t have personalities outside of their boyfriends and relationships! So in this respect, Cat is a good character.

Really!

She and the rest of the jackasses go to some bar and exchange some dull dialogue trying to set her up with some guy, but she’s too tough to fall into a man’s arms right now, preferring instead to wait until the third act of the film to do that. This lasts until the crazy janitor guy, Kenneth, comes over and tells them that he knows they’re doing illegal drugs and threatens to go tell on them like a five year old, so they invite him back in and goad him into doing those drugs with them until he has a seizure from the blinking lights and goes into a coma!

Ah yes, don't YOU remember when YOU left comatose creepy janitors on the side of the road when you were in grad school? What, you don't? Oh...well I'll shut up then.

Then we get those tired scenes from every shitty-ass horror movie like this where the characters debate whether or not to tell the authorities – are we supposed to be invested or something? “Oh, I might actually have to face consequences for the stupid things I did? The horror!” Shut up Red Mist, you’re neither compelling nor relatable here. Oh, I forgot, and for some reason they all call him “Freakdog,” because that’s a sensible insult, right? You might as well have just called him “poopy pants,” like a proper two year old. But I guess this does serve as a poorly done way to shoehorn in a serial killer catchphrase, and it is better than anything My Soul to Take could come up with, so there is that.

Cat thinks about telling the authorities but eventually decides she doesn’t want to risk losing her scholarship either, and so she does the sensible thing and just starts pumping him full of illegal experimental drugs! Wait, what?

Yes, apparently that’s the conclusion this girl draws when she feels bad about something – just play God and use the person you feel bad for as a guinea pig. Truly a wonderful example of human decency this girl is! How do you even come to the conclusion to do this anyway?

Oh, and there’s also this guy:

He’s some kind of older doctor who works in the hospital and constantly acts like he’s a villain in a spy movie, constantly too serious and too over dramatic for this kind of performance. He’s supposed to be a doctor? Seems more like a disgruntled corporate lawyer than anything…

So yeah, if you can’t tell by the fact that I’m just rambling on now, the movie doesn’t have much substance. There are a lot of scenes of the characters talking about the same things over and over again. “Oh, we should tell the authorities, this is serious!” “No, we could lose our scholarships and reputations!” “Okay, but first let’s have this same conversation five more times!” AHHHHHHHHH!

What’s that? We’re in a horror movie, we’re forty minutes in and there aren’t any horror elements yet? That is completely asinine. Let’s fix that right away! So I guess the ghost of Kenneth the comatose tattletale janitor can possess peoples’ bodies for a few minutes now and make them kill other people, all because of Cat’s experimental drugs. He does this to the night security guard aaaaand one of the girls gets the axe:

Back up a minute though – he can jump into peoples’ bodies because Cat gave him a weird combination of drugs? What the hell? It’s very, very stupid and even worse because it’s so damn poorly explained! Is he some kind of supernatural voodoo person already? Or are the drugs supernatural? MAKE MORE SENSE YA DAMN MOVIE. Gosh. My whole week is just ruined because this movie doesn’t have a logical sequence of events!

So the one guy who has been a total jackass and the ringleader of the “protect our reputations by covering up the dead guy” club the whole movie…continues to be a total jackass! Surprised?! This whole character, and every other character like this in every other movie like this, is a plot-hole. I’m really supposed to believe that this guy, this heartless, petty whiner, is going to be a doctor someday? A doctor? Whose main priority is caring for patients and saving lives? I’ve met rocks with more affection for the human race!

Luckily for him, he gets killed off during a kinky sex scene in the janitor’s closet! Well, to be fair, that's how I'd want to go.

He thought he was just getting kinky bondage sex, but he got kinky bondage having-whisky-poured-down-his-throat...you gotta take what you can get, I guess.

What’s next, another scene of them standing around talking about how they have to keep the secret and blah blah blabbity blah? SKIP IT! We then get a Paddy Breathnach trademark from Shrooms in a death scene shown off screen, something not done as much here as in Shrooms, but annoying all the same, because it looks pretty damn gruesome and intriguing:

Uh, yeah, sorry to interrupt your candlelit slit wrists seance, but...you're kinda dead.

It’s the Paddy Breathnach way; just skip over anything that may have been interesting to watch and use the ‘what you don’t see is scarier!’ excuse. Because that’s good filmmaking, right?! Why are you running the other direction?!?

OK, so then we get some black-out where Cat wakes up in her underwear in a sleeping bag in the woods…? What…why…oh, screw it; if you expected this thing to start making sense now, you’re probably of the same descent as the director. We never get a real explanation for this scene, and even when she finds her clothes strewn around in the trees and her phone, with a convenient video on it to show her what happened…well, vaguely anyway. We don’t get to see much of it except that, apparently, SHE was possessed by Kenneth the tattletale janitor ghost guy! Which…mostly means nothing.

"I didn't get enough Likes on Facebook! Sob!"

We then see that Kenneth the tattletale janitor ghost is a pervert as he makes this other girl strip down to her underwear and cut herself with broken mirror shards! I wonder what Keifer Sutherland has to say about that!

She tried so hard but they just wouldn't pick her to be the extra in Marilyn Manson's new video...

Then Cat gets arrested for the murder of her kinda-sorta-boyfriend whatever guy, and the cop doesn’t seem to see anything weird about the fact that this girl and everyone she knows have been killing each other off lately…I guess he graduated from the Barney Fife school of police work. She splashes hot coffee on him and then runs away.

She ends up going to the hospital to kill Kenneth by turning on strobe lights to activate his epilepsy – which somehow still works even though he’s comatose… - and also strangling him and unhooking him from his life support. Uh, bit of an overkill there, girl – you coulda just unhooked him from the life support you know! Would have been easier and you wouldn’t have wasted so much energy. I mean sheesh. From the way this chick is going on, you’d think she was actually just a figment of Emily Browning’s imagination the whole time.

And ironically enough, this movie ends with Arielle Kebbel back where she belongs in a mental hospital, just like in The Uninvited! And because she was in that movie that I hated so damn much, I HATE THIS ONE TOO! Grrrrrr, hatred! There were maybe one or two scenes that worked in this thing, but most of it was just boring, and seriously confusing as to what the hell its premise was supposed to be about. None of the characters are likable and at no point do you really feel much empathy for them, so it just falls flat. All in all, would have been better with a talking cow in it; that’s my final verdict.

All images are copyright of their original owners and I do not own any of them. Also, all talking cows are copyright of their original owners, especially ones that are hallucinations brought on from bad 'shroom trips.

Review: Shrooms (2007)

Director: Paddy Breathnach

Starring: The talking cow mostly.

IMDB Page: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0492486/

"No. Dead fucked."

-The Cow

Okay, a bunch of kids go into the woods intending to eat intoxicating mushrooms and have sex…that won’t end badly, now will it? This is Shrooms!

So we see our main character Tara, a blonde haired Catholic schoolgirl going out for her first time doing drugs with a bunch of sex maniacs. Although she denies it, she’s really going to see her kinda-sorta-boyfriend Jake, who she is too embarrassed to really get with. They drive up into a secluded spot of the woods, talking about sex and steroids and all sorts of the usual topics, and then they run over a dog with their car…don’t all good movies start like that?

Then they get to the clearing where they’ll be staying, and Jake makes them give up their cell phones before they do anything embarrassing with them while tripping. He hands the keys of the car to Bluto, a steroid freak and the only one who was reluctant to give up his phone because “it’s like handing away his freedom.” Pfft.

Well, there’s rule number one of what not to do when you’re out in the woods tripping with your friends.

#1: Never hand the keys to your car to the guy who will die first.

So Jake takes them all out to look for mushrooms, informing them not to take the Death’s Head shroom, which is rumored to have been used in the middle ages. He says that it inflicted horrible pain, boils and other unpleasant shit onto people, but if they survived, they could travel to other dimensions, talk to the dead and see the future. We cut to Tara, who is looking at Bluto and Lisa from behind a tree when she trips and falls right in front of one of those Death’s Head mushrooms, and eats it. She is then promptly saved by Jake, who uses CPR and cures her instantly, no apparent real danger at all. Only, ooh, she could see him saving her seconds before it happened!

Wait a minute, what? You just got done saying that it was the most extreme and painful trip out there, and all it takes to save somebody on it is a little CPR for a few seconds? Talk about exaggerations.

And another thing. The only thing Tara can do under the influence of this shroom is foresee the future. No talking to the dead and definitely no traveling to other dimensions, two things which might have made this movie cooler. I guess they didn’t have the budget for that stuff. Oh well. More wasted potential, surprised?

So we fast forward to nighttime, where Jake is telling a ghost story about a Catholic school in the area where a sadistic teacher abused the kids there and did terrible things to them. Until one night when a kid was pushed too far and slipped a bunch of Death’s Head mushrooms into his soup, causing him to go on a rampage and kill almost everyone at the school. And apparently now he comes out at shroom season to kill people and do other ghostly things…and the other kid is still there too…it’s a really vague story, but I guess since they’re all stoned, it’s an excuse. And…really? Telling a horror story? Yeah, that’s the kind of thing that people need to have in their heads when they’re already tripping on drugs and stranded in the woods with no cell phones! Truly this kid was an honor student in school. Somebody give him a fucking medal, man.

Then later, Holly and Troy are having shroom-sex when they see someone outside their tent moving around. So Troy goes out and gets into a fight with Bluto, and then Holly and Lisa shout insults at each other. Charming.

Then we get to see our first real mindfuck as Bluto the ‘roid-head wanders into the forest chasing  a hallucination of a beautiful woman, and stumbles upon a talking cow…yes, a talking cow, with a really deep, gravelly voice, too.

It tells him that he’s fucked, to which he replies “I know.” Then it says, “No. Dead-fucked.” He asks it which way the woman went, and the cow directs him thusly. It would be kind of cool if there were other instances of weird shit like this happening, but nope, this is the only time. But still, I have to give them credit for standing up against PETA’s iron fist and putting it in the movie against all odds. The time to stop worrying about the rights of trash-talking cows in movies is now! Rise up with me and protest the censorship of talking cows in movies! We will bring PETA down! Down, I tell you!

Ahem. He follows the hallucination of this hot naked girl to a car where she orally pleases him, but then…isn’t really there…and something else happens. It turns into some evil looking black shape, and eats his dick, I think? Then it gets out of the car and he, uh, dies, I guess…it’s really unclear, with terrible unfocused directing, and all we get are flashes that are supposed to be from Tara’s foresight or whatever.

And here is the second rule of what not to do when you’re out in the woods tripping with your friends.

#2: If you’re going to drag your friends out into the woods to start tripping, what’s the logic of doing it alone where all you are is afraid?

I mean…we never really see them doing any of that stuff they said they were going to do. It doesn’t seem like much fun if you’re just going to let people wander off into the woods without anyone else to help them! This movie so far is just a bunch of wandering alone with bad things happening, and frankly, it isn’t that exciting.

Yergh, so then we switch to a bright, happy morning where everyone is eating mushrooms by the lake and fishing. Apparently when Bluto disappeared, he cut off part of Lisa’s hair, which really makes her mad. But it doesn’t take long before they all split up again and get into trouble. They find Bluto’s body eventually, after Lisa and Holly call each other names and push each other some more…seriously, what is this, second grade? But then they see the scary black-hooded reaper in the woods, ooh! Except…he’s as scary as Count Chocula. Seriously, I don’t think I’ve seen a lamer movie killer in a long time. He just stumbles around like some kind of terrible 90s CGI abomination. That’s not scary. It’s just weak.

We have Holly looking for help from these two redneck hillbillies. And Lisa and Tara wander around in the woods and stumble upon her dead body as she was, again, killed off screen. Ugh, will you STOP DOING THAT? How are we supposed to be scared of this if nobody is ever killed on screen? Sure, they show you bits and pieces of it in Tara’s weird little foresight things, but that doesn’t count. And we don’t get any tits, either; what kind of a slasher movie is this? It’s like a slasher movie made by the PC squad; it’s as harmless as a rubber knife tip. Show us some gore, you goddamned pussies! If you’re not going to give us the psychological scares of a bad drug trip in the woods, at least show us some blood and gore and skin. That’s why we watch these movies!

But maybe they’ll fix that problem with the next one. Maybe they’ll show us a really good kill in the next one. I’ll just lay out what happens:

Tara tells Lisa that she (Tara) is the next to die, so Lisa runs away through the knee-high water like any good friend would, fearing death herself. Then in the very next scene, Tara has another brief two-second flash of Lisa being pulled under the water by something we can’t see, and she screams. Then, we go to the next scene, and nothing else of Lisa’s death is ever elaborated upon.

…you know what? Fuck it. Just fuck it. I’m going to speed through the end of this, and just get it over with, with no more deliberation or agonizing.

The rest of the movie is just Tara, Jake and Troy wandering around isolated, and jumping at everything that moves. They wander around in a hospital where Troy is killed with little fanfare, and then they end up outside again, where Jake is killed. Then we get the ending twist where it’s revealed that Tara killed them all and was really going crazy the entire time! Even though that makes so little sense that it’s absolutely insane, but I guess we’ll just go with it, since the movie needed an Edgy Twist at the end. Heinous.

So that’s Shrooms, and what can I even say about it? It’s just frustrating. It actually sounds pretty damn cool when you read the back cover summary, but really it never delivers. The kills are never shown, the characters get annoying fast and the plot is half-assed. I don’t hate this movie, but it’s really, really damn frustrating, and I can’t really recommend it. Skippable as hell.