Pointless Twist Ending: Shrooms

Something I'm hoping to make a regular article I write is that of movies with twist endings that really didn't need to happen. I would like to focus on movies that weren't that bad or that really didn't need the twist in the end. I mean, after The Sixth Sense and The Usual Suspects, it seemed like everything needed a twist ending. I'm gonna tell you a couple of things right now: a few movies did that before our modern era (anyone remember Psycho or Friday the 13th?) and your movie doesn't need a twist to be good! A lot of very successful movies don't have twist endings. In fact, most don't! I might actually delve into some pretty bad movies with this eventually, but for now, like I said, I'll try to focus on movies that had some redeeming qualities. And for the record, I'm not going to talk about High Tension because we all know the ending was needlessly convoluted but the rest of the movie was pretty awesome. That's been done to death, I don't need to do that anymore.

As a disclaimer, I'm going to tell you *THERE WILL BE SPOILERS!* I figure that should be somewhat obvious, considering I'm talking about the end of a film, but just so I said it.



So, for the first run of this, I've picked Shrooms, a slasher film from 2007 about teens that go camping during some big bloom of mushrooms and then get wasted from them. Of course, camping in the middle of nowhere while doing drugs and having sex couldn't possibly have any repercussions. It wasn't anything ground breaking or even terribly good, but it was at least fairly enjoyable and had some enjoyable parts to it. But the end just reeked of a tacked on thought by the screenwriter. It's either that or they decided they wanted to be the next M. Night Shyamalan. In any event, let's get to what I am talking about.

Throughout the movie, they talk about an asylum that exists in the woods they are in. As a character tells the story, you discover that there were some monks (I don't recall what the name they were called was and can't seem to find it on a quick perusal of Google) who were given all the bad kids of the town to whip them into shape. Apparently, they routinely beat the kids savagely and even killed some of them. So there was a set of twins that the brothers tortured and killed one of and made the other watch. Afterward, the one left was called "The Lonely Twin". Apparently, this kid made one of the most evil monks drink some poisonous mushroom tea and the monk went batshit fuckcrazy and killed everyone else in the monastery. So the story is that the monk and lonely twin still stalk the area, killing off hapless victims as they see fit.

This makes for some very interesting scenes where you get a hooded figure (the monk) or a little boy with a bag on his head (similar to The Orphanage) running around and scaring the shit out of the campers. The ghouls are unstoppable and seem to pop out of nowhere. The kills are fairly entertaining and the ghosts of these tragic characters really add an otherworldly dread to the film. What do you do when you're being stalked by vengeful fucking ghosts? You get the fuck out of the woods and never return!

Well, in the end, you are down to the main guy who told the story and the main girl who ate a bad shroom and has been having visions of the rest of the kids dying the whole movie. Well, in a pointless twist, you find that she's been killing all the rest of the kids off in a drug induced haze (which she discovers through a series of flashbacks in an ambulance). She figures it out, kills an ambulance driver, runs out the vehicle, and goes back to the woods to presumably find more shrooms for her next psychedelic murder spree.

My big problem was that the movie wasn't that bad. They spent the whole time building up this supernatural aspect and actually bring you to the insane asylum in the end of the movie! The monk and lonely twin are actually creepy and compelling killers, making it that much worse when you find it's some blond twat on a bad trip that's been killing her friends. Plus the shrooms she eats, in addition to being poisonous, allow her to "see the future", so she spends most of the movie having these flashes of her friends dying. But as it turns out, it was just her planning her kills. It makes the whole film feel watered down. Like I said, it's not a particularly awesome movie anyway, but if they had left it a bit more preternatural, it would have been a better movie.

That's the first in this series of articles! Hopefully more to come!