Hi this is Erica Doering with IHN: Independent Horror News. The movie that I review this month is Fungicide. Available on a DVD collection of independent horror movies called Drenched in Blood it’s definitely worth seeing.
It starts a little slow like a lot these do. At first we meet the mad scientist character who lives in his parents basement. There’s a little interaction between his parents that’s sort of useless. We see the mad scientist guy like stirring his magic potion but then he stirs the magic potion for, like you know, a good five minutes of stirring. A lot of stirring takes place for the first part of the movie, but don’t worry, be patient, it pays off later. He is going mad so I guess he decides to take a little mini vacation.
He ends up at this bed and breakfast run by this girl out of her apartment (which I think is a pretty good, you know, entrepreneurial idea for this Lady to be running a bed and breakfast out of her place). So he ends up there, and while he’s going to go in there and like knock on the door he drops his little experimental poison and then it goes underneath the porch. So we don’t know really what he was planning on doing before that with the poison, but I’m sure he was up to no good. So he goes inside and decides he wants to get a room there.
She seems a little crazy and start having premonition like flashes about the garden, and then by the way she has other premonitions for about the first like her first maybe 5 minutes and then never has them again. Never explains “wow I’m having wierd premonitions”, doesn’t really get mentioned but that’s okay.
She has other people that end up staying there while while this is all happening like this real estate guy comes over. He wants to stay there and he rents room from her. He tells her how he wants her to sell the house, and she doesn’t want to sell the house, and then he let her know that he’s been trying to get someone to sell this house like since her parents are around and then before that when her grandparents were around… but the guys only like 40 years old, so I’m not really sure if he was doing this when he was like 1 or what exactly and it doesn’t seem to matter anyways cuz that part of the story goes no where.
We have another character shows up that’s a reality TV character. His name is Major Wang. He’s outside being filmed by like one guy for the reality TV show in the garden and he’s like fighting to get out of the garden and ends up at uh at that bed and breakfast. Let’s see, who’s our next person…
Oh this wrestler guy shows up. He’s a wrestler just want to take a break from it all at the bed and breakfast and he also happens to have a medical problem: spontaneous combustion. So that his medical problem is kinda funny, he also really loves himself. He like, set up in his room like pictures of himself wrestling… So I like that character. He’s pretty cool.
Then the mushrooms start to fully like reproduce (cause you know they reproduce with their own spores or something and that’s kinda exciting) and the mushrooms are starting to get bigger and bigger. Then there’s this one scene, probably one of my favorite scenes, is when one of the mushrooms, like the mushrooms start killing people. And they’re cute, and they’re kinda sock puppets, and they have teeth, and everything and that’s pretty awesome. They start killing people, and one of the mushrooms comes in and the mad scientist guys is like overjoyed to see his like baby mushroom like, you know, coming to life. He spends some quality time with one of his mushroom babies in the kitchen. They sit down, they play like video games together, and have a little chat. Have a little dinner. It’s really sweet. Then the mushrooms are starting to get bigger, and now they’re no longer sock puppet size. So now it’s just sheets with Chinese mushroom shape hats, but with gray sheets over them. That’s kinda cool. At some point the mushrooms get turned into, well, they use alot of computer graphics and the graphics are pretty terrible so…
They need to do something to retaliate, and it just so happens that Major Wang happens to have a suitcase full of guns. So he let everybody have some guns, and we see some pretty kick ass action sequences happen in the backyard between this gang of five people, (or not actually not the mad scientist guy he’s all for keeping the mushrooms alive, so he gets tied up in chair in the kitchen) while we see the other four go and try to you know do a little mush mushroom ass kicking basically what happened. Then the guy who has the spontaneous combustion problem that he’s been taking medication for decides to… well basically he acts like a martyr and decides that he’s gonna like allow himself to combust on behalf of the cause of killing the mushrooms. So he doesn’t take medication and he combusts. So it not’s like spontaneous combustion, it’s more like a real planned and calculated human combustion. That’s pretty awesome. That was definitely a good scene.
On a scale of 1-10 I would give Fungicide probably 7.5
this is Erica Doering for IHN