Horror/Thriller. Lindsey Haun, Jack Huston, Max Kasch, Alice Greczyn, Rob Hoffman, Maya Hazen, Sean McGinley

Abandoning the quirky black comedies which have become his trademark, Irish director Paddy Breathnach tries his hand at a modern day horror with a strong anti-drugs message.

In between hallucinations of a talking cow and a rather messy bout of sex through a car window, screenwriter Pearse Elliott despatches his two-dimensional characters with glee, resisting the urge to drown the Emerald Isle in gallons of blood and gore. The hills are alive with the sound of screaming, but the modest budget rules out elaborate make-up or computer generated special effects. Instead, Breathnach attempts to conjure a mood of foreboding with a mosaic of nightmare sequences that blur the boundary between reality and fantasy.

Self-confessed mushroom expert and hedonist Jake (Huston) invites five of his American college buddies to Ireland to sample some of the most potent fungi known to man. En route, the tourists arouse the interest of two inbred yokels, slavering at the prospect of fresh road kill.

Jake promises the gang 'the trip of a lifetime' with Liberty Caps magic mushrooms - and warns against picking the Deathshead fungi, which, according to ancient druids, give the ability to commune with the dead, uncontrollable ferocity and finally premonition.

When one ingests the wrong mushroom, the friends turn on one another - while something nasty lurks in the forest... Shrooms is starved of originality, hawking ideas from The Evil Dead, Friday The 13th, The Blair Witch Project, The Ring and yesteryear's Severance. Characters are thinly sketched and deeply unlikeable.

TWO AND A HALF STARS