Spookies

Sure, when viewing clunkers like this, you certainly should know what to expect. But seriously, it wasn't even on the level of it's so dreadful you can have a few laughs. It was mentioned that two seperate films were combines together to make one hell of a crummy film. Film year old children could write better dialogue (notice the writer's/filmmaker's have never reappeared!!!) and the acting level is that of a pre-schoolers Xmas pagent, where the children are far better!!! These actors a dull, lifeless, without any spirit in them whatsoever!!! The character Duke is played by Nick Gionta and I remember he was in a teen magazine back in the late 80's and he was a supposed rising star, but what the hell happened to Mr. Gionta? He disappeared like the rest involved in this tripe!!!

Best summary of this movie I've ever heard, "There's no plot to get in the way of the story." Saw "Spookies" on 'The Last Drive-In' and I'm glad I did because the show explained why this mess of a disaster exists and knowing what went on behind the scenes of this movie makes it easier to enjoy. (kind of) The original movie was fraught with problems due to an overbearing executive getting in the way. After most of the scenes were shot, the director quit. A different director eventually came in and shot entirely new scenes with different actors and a different story in mind. Then the new and old scenes were cut together in an attempt to create a single 'coherent' movie. Did they succeed? I guess that's up to the individual to decide. While the movie itself is a mess, there's no mistaking the talent behind the special effects. Solid, well done practical effects are the only consistent thing about the movie. This was fun to watch as an offering from a hosted horror show but I wouldn't have watched this movie otherwise. Two stars and they both go to the effects artists.

Someone recently added a trivia comment which says, "Actually comprised of two separate, unfinished films and edited together." This is completely untrue. I wish people would actually read the message board notes before bothering to make such comments. Spookies is comprised of the original Twisted Souls (finished save for some post production work), and new footage added months later (which was NOT from an unfinished, separate film at all, but was footage shot to add into Twisted Souls). I know some of the people who made this film and visited the set many, many times so I know what I am talking about. Where do people come up with these things? I know it has a confusing history, but read the comments from myself and others, it will help clarify matters.

come on people, I see these user ratings and I can't understand what people are looking for, If you want a cornball computer animated horror flick then you should probably stick to cheesy movies made from 95/04. I introduced this movie to my wife whom is 28 yrs and she loved this movie. All she could say was "Man, I wish movies would go back to this" The movie was awesome and scary as well as funny, it has it all. Stop comparing movies cause thats not what B movies are about, they are about fun and Imagination. My children saw this flick and freaked out cause of all the monsters, I felt that it was pretty cool to add all these different monsters in the mansion, it makes for a very spooky adventure. Each one of the Ill fated party goers dies in a totally different way, but totally different monsters. very awesome indeed. I give this movie a 10

Two-line summary : a group of people spends the night in this mansion near an old cemetery and encounter all sorts of strange, horrific beings. There are zombies resurrecting outside, demons arise from an ouija-board and all these creatures are ruled and controlled by an old Frankenstein-like fella in the attic. Other than these we have an authentic red-eyed Grim Reaper, mummies, giant spiders, little gremlins and huge monsters. Don't be fooled, however, because this 'Spookies' is a lot less silly than it actually seems. It contains several very efficient shock-effects and the make-up achievements easily outshine 90% of all the other low-budget 80's horror movies. I'd even go further and claim that this is a very underrated little flick and it deserves more praising (and a DVD-release!!). "Spookies" received the Delirium-award for best Special Effects at the international SF and Fantasy films festival, so you see I'm not the only one who likes it. If it only had a little more plot, it would enjoy the same status as films like 'The Evil Dead', 'Demons' or 'Re-Animator'. No plot, no depth, no logic nothing but tremendous fun! That's the best way to describe this film. Check it out, horror fans, and unleash your most monstrous appetite!!

Okay, so what the movie had some bad acting at times? It is definitely fun to watch though. One of the best parts of this movie is the end. It is great to see a bunch of zombies molesting a struggling girl. The make-up and costumes are decent and some of the scenes can be eerie. One scene that stands out occurs when Kreon is petting his servant like a dog while talking to him. It is really strange. Some Phantasm-like traits are there also. Kreon appears to be very similar to the tall-man in Phantasm. The dwarf like characters are also seen in this movie. Anywayz, if you want to see something different, I would recomend giving this one a shot.

Well where can I start when there is so much bad stuff in this movie, there is the farting zombies, the dodgy spider woman, the unconvincing evil muppets, duke the horny ghost. I'm just getting carried away with specifics here. Suffice to say honestly the worst movie I've ever seen apart from the scene in the wine basement filled with farting zombies who's only apparent weakness is they can be killed by wine. Good place to hide fellas. From the start it is unapparent why the characters go into this "spooky house" and when they go in what their motivation is to keep hanging around I mean it isn't even their house, why are they surprised when bad things happen when they break into a spooky looking mansion that is built on a graveyard. Well all I can say is that it is no shock that most of them have ever worked in that industry again.

This is more a warning than a review. I'm sure that, like me, there are a lot of horror fans out there who think there's nothing like 80s. While they're right, they need to be remembered that even in the 80s, you can find a lot of horror movies that suck. The kind of movies you can't take seriously, the kind of movies that are, at best, laughably. Well, this is one of those. It's lousy. Many reviewers defend this film because you have a good time while watching it (I mean laughs and brainless plot). That would be alright if it was filmmakers' aim. But if you see this movie, it's evidently not. They want to scare the hell out of you... and they fail in a way you almost feel pity for them. Of course it's better a funny bad movie than a boring bad movie. But in both cases, they keep being bad movies and that shouldn't affect their rating. The editing is terrible, the FX are below average, the acting is amateurish, and the plot is so contrived it looks like it's gonna tear apart every minute. Oh, and I almost forgot to say this is the movie with the highest "stupid character choices per minute" rate. In general, every relevant aspect of the movie finds itself below 4, most of them around 2. I won't go into a most specific review because, trust me, it's not worth it. So if you don't mind laughing at a movie instead of laughing with a movie, go on, this is as fun as it gets. Although I like some B-movies and even some Z-movies, I appreciate some effort. This one is so lazy... RATING: 2.2

A fun, but not scary horror movie. While the plot may not be all that great (basically some college kids looking to party find an old haunted house filled with evil monsters.) While the "haunted house" idea has been done to death, this movie seems a little different. The thing that really makes this movie stand out in my mind is the fact that 75% of the movie is basically a special effects showcase. There's more different creatures living in the house than real actors in the movie! We get zombies, carnivorous lizard mutants, mudmen, mangled corpses that pop out of closets, a spider woman, a killer with a hook-hand, a cyborg thug with drain-snakes for hands, and even a glow-in-the-dark grim reaper! Many people on this board said that the film was amateurish with bad special effects. Come on now, it was the mid-80's when this movie came out! Spielburg didn't write this movie! For WHEN it was written, and WHO wrote/directed/did the makeup effects it's pretty freakin' good! Bad special effects don't bother me, only the lack of them. This movie, while definitely not being a candidate for the Hair and Makeup department Grammy, is FILLED with all different kinds of effects. Makeup, monsters, costumes, stop-motion, transformations, and transparency effects are just a few different types you'll find here. The only movie I can compare to this one in terms of the sheer variety of bizarre effects is maybe Beetlejuice or Street Trash. The effects on "The Spookies" may not be as good as, say, Poltergeist or Indiana Jones, but the overabundance of them really makes me think, "Man, those FX artists must have put a LOT of time into that!!" Think of this movie as a form of art, and it's pretty good and lots of fun.

B-movies are great. Some are genuinely fine examples of how talent can shine through a low budget. Some are so bad they are, in fact, classics in their own right. And some are just complete crap. Like this one. It's actually a film that was abandoned with some other stuff rather badly tacked on to try and make it more coherent. The first film was called Beyond Terror, or Terror Evil, or some sort of crap and by the looks of things was trying to be a showcase for special effects, while trying slightly to rip off the Evil Dead. Sadly the original film Terror Beyond or whatever looks as if it was a pile of crap anyway, but it's the tacked on bits that drag this film into the field commonly known as the chronic film. The plot of the original film goes kind of like this: Two groups of as*holes - an older mature couple, a bitchy quasi-English woman and her hen-pecked husband, Duke (who is straight out of the Wanderers and says 'this is stupid' all the time) and his be-jugged girlfriend, and some tw*t who is meant to be zany and has a hand puppet (in case we don't know he's zany, he has a t-shirt with his face on it) - are lost after being chucked out of a party and end up in a spooky mansion. Some chick that I didn't mention find a ouijja board and turns into a demon, everyone splits up and are killed by various monsters before the boring finale, which we don't see the end of due to: plot number 2: Some old wrinkly who is a warlock sits in his spooky mansion, mumbling about his comatose bride and how he's going to get blood for her to live again. He sends this cat boy with a hook to do his dirtywork, which involves lamely trying to tie this plot onto the other one (which means holding doors closed while the actors from the original film try to get out of various rooms in the mansion. This is even worse than it sounds). To integrate the two films: The party goers are being killed for the old tw*t's bride. This doesn't make any sense though, because there's frequent references to awaking various demons so they can live in place of the victims. Bitchy English chick gets to fight a demon straight out of Ghoulies, but the editing is so bad I thought she was fighting two demons. Ends up getting her face melted off of some thing. Duke and his missus fight some farting zombies and melt them with wine, and everyone gets to fight the Grim Reaper, who for some reason explodes. The survivors try and fight the possessed women and inexplicably begin to age, but we don't know what happens because from this point on in the movie the bride escapes from the old tw*t and gets chased around by zombies for what seems an eternity before the twist ending. By this point I was painfully aware of how much time I had wasted when I could have been finishing off the kitchen I have been building for weeks, and did indeed put a screw through my index finger shortly after as a result of watching this rubbish. Loads of monsters. Zombies. A guy getting sucked dry by a spider woman. This all sounds good, but it's crap. The only bit to note is the youngster on the run at the beginning, who enters the mansion first, gets attacked, slashed up, and buried alive. Other than that you can just feel the minutes ticking off your life as your presented by sub-par eighties effects with awful editing to integrate the movies (a lot of the running time is devoted to that cat boy sneaking after folks, but never meeting them). The most offensive piece of the film is the zombie attack, which lasts forever and is completely pointless. I don't even want this one in my house - it can go to oxfam.