Kreon (Felix Ward) sits in a graveyard outside a mansion house by a coffin in the dead of night and tells its inhabitant she will soon be resurrected and back with him. Meanwhile, a group of eight in two cars are driving around the country roads because the driver of the car in front, Duke (Nick Gionta) thinks he knows where he is going, in spite of appearances to the contrary. And while that is happening, young Billy (Alec Nemser) is celebrating his thirteenth birthday by wandering the forest alone, heading in the general direction of the house, except Kreon’s catman servant (Dan Scott) has spotted him and is up to no good, as is possibly the man in denim who confronts Billy from out of the trees…
Once upon a time there was a little horror movie called Twisted Souls that was never quite finished thanks to various behind the scenes disputes. The producer decided he still wanted to use the footage he had, so hired a woman to concoct some new scenes and edit them in, then he would release the end result in the hope it would turn a profit, all this against the wishes of the original cast and crew. Which is why when you watched Spookies, for this was it, it seemed so disjointed and reluctant to explain precisely what was supposed to be happening – because it wasn’t interested in making sense, it was only interested in fleecing the punters with something that lasted enough time to be termed a feature.
Nevertheless, there’s always going to be a market for something this off the wall and with this troubled production history, so once it had somehow escaped into a few cinemas, it took up its more rightful home lurking on the shelves of the video stores of the late nineteen-eighties to surprise the unwary seeking some unpretentious horror fare to while away an evening. There were a handful of reasons this stuck in the mind, possibly the most blatant one being that once you had reached the end a whole bunch of characters we were presumably supposed to have been invested in had disappeared, their eventual fate a mystery, though we did get to follow the tale of one of the minor characters to what looked like a conclusion but really wasn’t.
If you could put up with a non-ending, then did Spookies have anything to recommend it? One other element that everyone who watched it recalled was the scene where Duke and his longsuffering girlfriend Linda (Joan Ellen Delaney) were down in the mansion’s basement and suddenly the dirt floor erupted with muddy zombies who pawed at them and… farted long and loud. The flatulent effects were patently added later, surely for comedy reasons, but the question of why the producer thought they were necessary in the first place remains a mystery to this day, since they were far from in keeping with the rest of the film; well, the Twisted Souls material, anyway, which at least had a semblance of professionalism.
That was all the business with the eight travellers who end up at the mansion and are subjected to harassment of the supernatural kind when they’re confronted with a Ouija board that they feel compelled to use. It predicts they will meet their doom in this place, and the makeup jobs and various rubber puppetry was, for a production of these means, not bad at all, another reason why Spookies garnered a small following. What was less happy were the added scenes with that gold lamé waistcoat-clad catman, and the hapless Billy who seems like a potential hero of the piece until he met with an unfortunate fate that made more sense when you knew how slapdash and makeshift these latterly-shot sequences were. It was possible to view this without knowing its background and regard it as a wacky eighties, what were they thinking? sort of movie, which in its way it was, and you might even enjoy it, yet if you did know how it was butchered in post-production you could only wistfully wonder what might have been. Music by James Calabrese and Kenneth Higgins.
The story behind the making of this film sounds eerily similar to what happened with my own disastrous first attempt at co-directing a horror film with friends. I'm relieved ours was never released.
Posted by:
Graeme Clark
Date:
7 Feb 2016
I'd like to think it doesn't happen that often. I'd LIKE to think that...
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