Know Your Mushrooms DVD Review

We learn that toxic mushrooms can literally kill you while some people believe that healing mushrooms (like the Shitake) can even reverse cancer, that people use mushrooms as spiritual hallucinogenics and and also, of course, for food, in Ron Mann’s Know Your Mushrooms, to be released on DVD on December 15th by Sphinx Productions. Who would guess that white oyster mushrooms can assist in cleaning up oil spills and toxic waste? But we in North America have fungusphobia, because we haven’t seen our parents and grandparents picking mushrooms in the woods as they do in Europe and Asia. So why else do we have this fungusphobia?

Director Ron Mann remembers a 1950’s TV program taken from a story by Ray Bradbury where a boy receives a mushroom kit in the mail and then grows aliens in his basement! Mann feels that since mushrooms (in their shape, color and form) look alien to us, we perceive them as alien. While he was making this documentary well-known director Jim Jarmusch, a fungusphile, contacted him and told him about the Telluride Mushroom Festival (the oldest in the world, while Americans seem only to know about the Telluride Film Festival). There Ron Mann found two major characters for this film: Larry Evans (who follows the mushroom to Mexico, Costa Rica and Bolivia and teaches others out in the forests about mushrooms, and Mann has dubbed him “the Indiana Jones of mushrooms”, and Gary Lincoff, a mushroom consultant who tells one story about hallucinating in an apartment where the refrigerator is filled with drugs and there are guns on the walls, and another story (filmed from a lecture he gave in 1974) on how his friends Ralph and Margaret mistook some small brown mushrooms for honey mushrooms because of the early morning dew and became violently ill and could have died within four days! This inspired Lincoff to co-author the book “Toxic And Hallucinogenic Mushroom Poisoning”. Larry and Gary are animated and joyous cerebral hippies who really know their mushrooms! Others from the Telluride Festival also offer insights (notably information and historic interpretation by Art Goodtimes).

I never knew that the longest mushroom is 3.7 acres long and still growing, and that there is a fungal network beneath our entire earth! Pigs hunt for truffles (mushrooms that live under the ground) that are such a specialty item in France and Italy that certain types often sell for a thousand dollars a pound!  Gary reminds us that mushrooms are free food, and he gathers them in the woods and sells them at farmer’s markets himself.

Know Your Mushrooms is fun and informative and interspersed with so many cartoons, animations and bits of archival footage that your attention never wanders while watching it. The Flaming Lips wrote a song especially for this documentary entitled “Anything You Say I Believe”, which is used throughout, as are songs of The Sadies. If you want to have a good time learning about an almost “secret” subject (Gary Lincoff states that textbooks only devote a few pages to mushrooms instead of explaining how they have an interdependency with trees in our ecosystem), watch (and buy) Know Your Mushrooms! You’ll be able to use it as a reference over and over again in the future.

MPAA Rating: Not Rated
Running Time: 73 Minutes
DVD Release Date: December 15, 2009

Grade: A

Director:Ron Mann
Starring: Larry Evans, Gary Lincoff, and Art Goodtimes

DVD Review by Christina of Movie Room Reviews

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