Spookies – 1986

Submitted by: Trey Collins

spookies-posterart

A Terrible Contest for Terrible People Entry. Read, then CLICK HERE to VOTE for your favorites!

So I chose to review a movie called Spookies (1986) that I saw when I was a kid. It was directed by Eugenie “Genie” Joseph. The reason I mention the director is her name is misspelled on the back of the DVD.I just knew this boded well, they spent all their money on the movie right?

I was wrong.

So the movie opens with a normal 1980’s bloody graphic complete with a grinning skull and all the funky sound effects a 1980’s Casio keyboard can make. Wanna know why they put all the annoying sound effect buttons you can make your keyboard sound like? So movies like Spookies can have a soundtrack. Anyway as the movie opens we see a pulsating grave slab made out of a blanket with chains and a lock on it. We are introduced to our antagonist necromancer Kreon talking to his dead love. At this time we don’t see his face (a blessing?) just his back and a chair and his dead loves coffin. It’s then that we discover that the movie takes place at a scary mansion surrounded by headstones purchased at K-mart in a handy variety pack.

I have now opened my first beer.

Now we meet our first character Billy, the dumbest 13 year old EVER, and I mean in cinema or real life.

Billy

Billy is walking alone through the woods, at night, on his birthday, with no flashlight. Could we at least get a red shirt on Billy? Seriously? So Billy is walking along and OH NO is being watched by Kreon’s faithful minion, the hook handed cat/monkey/ man in his snappy yellow vest. Turns out Billy has run away from home because he just turned 13 and his parents forgot his birthday. So he stops in the woods on his runaway tour to eat his birthday snowballs and a random drifter, also in the woods at night with no flashlight, asks him for a light which of course Billy has. They have some of the most meaningful dialogue of the whole movie now as the drifter tells Billy to go home to his parents and he shouldn’t run away. Billy tells him he has “Big Plans” and leaves, and as soon as Billy’s back is turned our sage like drifter is killed by the cat/monkey man which scampers off after Billy.

Time for more beer. My wife is starting to look at me funny as we watch this movie.

Now we get a good look at Kreon the necromancer in a bad facemask , like really bad, you could tell it wasn’t glued down everywhere. Kreon opens the coffin containing his love and we see a fairly attractive woman in a wedding dress. Kreon tosses out some dialogue about how many people he has sacrificed so she could live, how the last few are coming and she will revive and how he is a slave to her beauty, yadda yadda yadda.

As predicted here come the last victims, a group of 25-35+ year teenagers. They are all old as hell, one guy looks like he is in his early 40’s yet all fit the teenager stereotypes. You have the 4 couples:

Duke and Linda (Douchy wannabe mafia tough guy and his air-headed subservient girlfriend)

Peter and Meegan (Responsible couple who feel out of place at the haunted mansion in a graveyard. Her name really is Mee-gan)

Dave and Adrienne (Stuffy bitchy chain smoking British girl and her effeminate boyfriend)

Lewis and Carol (He is the quiet sensitive to his girlfriend type and she is the dark gothy type in normal clothes)

And then you have the single guy Richard and his hand puppet. Yes you heard me hand puppet named Mook. As if this movie could be saved by puppet engendered comic relief. They are on the lookout for a party as Duke being the douche he is started a fight and got them thrown out of the last one. They are just randomly driving when the cat/monkey guy tosses a branch across the road stopping the cars. Why, do you ask? Because he is the fucking cat/monkey man, hell I don’t know. So after they move the branch off the road they continue on their way to the scary mansion in the graveyard, a fun place to party.

During this Billy our special 13 year old has stumbled upon the mansion and just walks in, drops his backpack and starts exploring. Unknown to Billy there is another minion (a kid with Dollar General green Halloween makeup, vampire teeth, and a hooded robe) following him and steals Billie’s icepick out of his backpack and scampers off with it. Why does Billy have an icepick? Good question. So Billy enters a room all decorated for a birthday party with balloons, a cake, and presents addressed to Billy. Our special little idiot believes that his parents have remembered his birthday and planned a surprise party for him on his runaway route. True Story. So Billy talking to his phantom parents cuts the cake and starts examining his presents. Besides blatant stupidity, here’s one of the reasons I believe Billy should probably wear a helmet, he smells his birthday presents. WTF? Anyway Billy opens the biggest present and surprise its Kreon’s head wishing him Happy Birthday and laughing at him. Billy books it out of the house and runs for his life. As well he should because the cat/monkey man starts chasing him. After a short chase Billy trips and the cat/monkey man proceeds to claw Billy and kick him into a grave and buries him alive. So ends poor idiot Billy.

My wife wants to throw the TV out the window. She is wondering if I am trying to tell her something. More beer.

Back at the mansion the group of wannabe teens breaks into the mansion and starts to party like its 1989. Now because I am not cruel I am going to make this as short and painless as possible. During the partying Duke finds an antique pointer that Carol obsesses over. Duke then breaks into a locked room and we find a corpse holding a Ouija board. Duke convinces everyone the corpse is a fake and Carol goes super spooky talking about the dead and they all start using the Ouija board. Unknown to them they are actually talking to Kreon and his cat/monkey man. They are at a chess board and Kreon is answering the Ouija questions. Carol asks if they will make it out alive and he says no Kreon picks up a pawn and changes it from white to black. This changes Carol into a demonic witch ready to kill her friends. Everyone runs outside where Larry gets sucked down a sinkhole to his death and zombies start to claw their way out of the ground. Having nowhere else to go they decide to explore the house and see if they can find another way out.

I have opened my second beer.

Of course they decide to split up which means of course more mayhem. Duke and Linda head out to explore the first floor, Peter, Meegan and Richard go upstairs and Dave and Adrienne stay right in the foyer. Along the way Duke falls down a flight of stairs to the basement, which somehow makes him horny, WTF? Linda is having none of it. It’s at that moment that zombies come bursting out of the floor on the attack. Farting zombies, I mean flatulence the likes of which has never been heard before.

My wife is dumbstruck at the farting zombies. She just kinda sits there mouth open twitching and watching. I may have broken her.

So Duke fights a farting zombie and knocks it into a puddle of wine, at that point it starts to melt. Seriously farting zombies melt when they come into contact with wine. Anyways my will to live is leaving at this point so to sum up Peter and Meegan get separated from Richard who finds his way into a passage where a Asian woman changes into a spider demon and sucks him dry like a juice box with her prehensile tongue. Dave and Adrienne get into a fight and he goes to sleep. Kreon summons small Ghoulies like baby krakens with braces who eat Dave’s neck and face and attack Adrienne. Yes you read that right, braces. Adrienne like the British badass she is kills one and escapes only to meet up with its larger Dad? who uses a prehensile something, seriously I have no clue what it was just something, if I had to guess it looked like a thorny penis. Anyway she is strangled and then electrocuted until her face dissolves.

At this point my wife thinks I want a divorce or she has cancer and I am waiting until the movie is over to tell her so she will still be happy that the movie is over. I just want to hang myself and end the pain.

Peter and Meegan find a hanging corpse with a suicide note saying that says she took poison and hanged herself to not be with you anymore. Meet the corpse of Kreon’s bride Isabelle. Peter and Meegan then meet up with Duke and Linda which because they are macho causes the guys to get into a fight. Of course Kreon at this point summons Death to take care of these last four people. Death kills Duke and wounds Linda and Peter decides that the best way to open a door is to jump right through it so they can escape. Death chases them onto the roof where Peter throws him off and he explodes in a massive explosion.

My brain can’t take much more of this. Third beer.

Peter, Meegan, and Linda find themselves in the room with Carol the demon witch who starts to glow and spew white light from her mouth, and wait her head splits open and more white light comes out. All three of our idiots are writhing in pain but Peter manages to get to the corpse and tear its arm off which he tries to bludgeon Carol. She spews out some more white light and all of them die.

Now you might think that’s the end but no. See while the idiots are exploring the house, Isabelle, Kreon’s bride wakes up and is terrified that she is still with him, even after killing herself to get away. But wait they have a son, and look it’s the creepy kid in the bad green Halloween makeup. She runs screaming and gets lost in the house and gets knocked unconscious by a screaming ghost witch. When she wakes up she pleads with Kreon to let her go and he says no and then she talks sweetly to him long enough to get him close to her and stabs him in the forehead with the ice pick. He screams and she runs. She makes it out of the house but is surrounded by all the zombies and more digging themselves up every minute. Oh and the zombies call her mommy.

I really hate this movie, this contest and my life now. My wife has retreated to Facebook to save her sanity.

Next we have 10 minutes, yes 10 fucking minutes of the zombies groping Isabelle and tearing her dress off until she is in a shift and silk pajama top. She runs, zombies chase, more running, more chasing until she finds a car and a guy who starts driving her away but wait he turns out to be the cat/monkey man and then Kreon bursts out of the blanket gravestone laughing and that’s it.

Kreon

I need a shower. My head hurts. My wife says I owe her an hour and a half of her life back and a hell of a lot of brain cells back. God this movie just fucking sucked so bad.

Showing 13 comments
  • Anonymous

    You need to go online and read the back story to this movie. It's two movies, actually. Do your homework. Signed, Peter Iasillo, Jr., aka, RICH, the guy in the spider web. http://www.imdb.me/peteriasillojr

  • Nigel Daniel

    Hi there, its me, Nigel. The "Contest" set of reviews were written by our readers, and as such, vary in quality. Personally, I think this review is one of the better ones submitted to the contest, and I'm sorry you don't agree. I'd love to ask you some questions about this movie and your part in it. If you're interested, shoot me an email at nigeldaniel@terriblemoviesforterriblepeople.com

  • Unknown

    I actually did know about the two set of movies being rolled into one, however I reviewed the finished product and not the intent of the separate pictures. Sorry you didn't really care for the review but I stand behind it. Thanks for taking the time to read it and visit Nigel's site. Trey Collins

  • Jason

    Ok, so is the fact that it was a partial film who's financing fell apart, and then was completed years later with a completely different cast supposed to be some kind of defense for the final released film? That works as a defense for the actors, in that this wasn't the script they agreed to, and they had no control over the finished product. But for the film as a whole that doesn't really apply. And since the main criticism of the review is directed at the overall story as opposed to the acting, I agree with Mr Collins. The only thing that can be reviewed is the finished product. The backstory is a reason that it ended up the way it did, but not a defense for it.

    And that is the key, because the producers should have known better. Name a movie that was shot with one set of actors, and then completed years later with a different cast, that became a quality product. (Crickets chirp.) From the Godfrey Ho ninja movies (around the same time) to Blood of Ghastly Horror with John Carradine, (made decades earlier and he wasn't even in the original film), it never works well. The examples were there, yet this was still released and sold in it's current form. And I can't imagine anyone looking at a film put together that way and saying "You know, this is really good. I feel like it would be worth the price and time for the average person." I'm sure the discussion was more like "We've gotta recoup on the 50 min of footage we already shot, it's gonna suck but at least we won't eat the cost." -Jason Adams

  • ThatGuyInTK

    Bahahahahaha!!!!!!!!! "Do your homework" bahahahaha.

  • Nigel Daniel

    I like you.

  • Anonymous

    There are three directors in total, two from the original film and the footage by Genie Josephs. All three are credited.

  • Anonymous

    the film, Twisted Souls was shot in 1984 – was in the editing stage when creative and legal issues stopped the editing and other post work. In May of 1985 – 4 months after post work stopped on TS, Josephs came in to shoot new footage to replace footage in the (finished shooting and partly edited) film. It was released, I think, in 1987.

  • Tom

    "farting zombies melt when they come into contact with wine"… Important safety tip, thanks Egon.

  • isabelle kreon

    I am not gonna lie, I loved this movie. It just keeps turning corners and around each corner is some hideous delight. You want to say "you've got to be kidding" but secretly you are glad they're not.

  • isabelle kreon

    But having said that…I also really liked this review! Go figure me.

  • Anonymous

    this review is a fucking joke. your a terrible writer and nobody cares about your stupid fucking wifes opinion of anything. fuck you jackass! 🙂 SPOOKIES FUCKING RULES

  • Anonymous

    awesome! The worst and best movie at the same time. EVERYONE DIES. no one survives, not even that moron Billy. and thats best part, every character is so unlikeable, you are happy they get killed

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