The Film That Couldn’t Decide What It Wanted to Be
Some horror movies are cursed productions. Spookies isn’t cursed so much as it’s the cinematic equivalent of a family argument at Thanksgiving: everyone brought their own dish, no one coordinated, and someone thought it was funny to slip Ex-Lax into the stuffing. What began as a perfectly serviceable low-budget monster mash titled Twisted Souls ended up being hijacked by financial backers, spliced with unrelated footage, and released to the public like a Frankensteined corpse still twitching on the operating table. The result is not scary, not funny, and not coherent—but it is fascinating in the way a traffic accident is fascinating.
Birthday Parties and Buried Children
The movie opens with a boy named Billy, who runs away because his parents forgot his birthday. Already we’re in trouble: this is not a premise for horror, it’s a premise for therapy. Billy finds a spooky mansion in the woods, discovers a severed head in a gift box (what every boy wants at thirteen), and is promptly chased by a werecat with a hook hand. Yes, a werecat. Not a werewolf, not a vampire, not even a proper monster—just a man in patchy makeup who looks like he’s auditioning for a low-rent Broadway revival of Cats. Billy is then buried alive, which is both the highlight of the film and an apt metaphor for the audience experience.
Party Crashers at the Mansion
Meanwhile, a gaggle of adults—too old to be called teenagers, too young to be called retirees—show up at the same mansion to party. “Party” here means wandering around, arguing, and splitting up so the monsters can pick them off one by one. Their dialogue sounds like it was written during a power outage with crayons: “Let’s split up!” “No, don’t go in there!” “I think I saw something!” It’s a script that thinks exposition is a luxury item.
These “characters” have the depth of wet cardboard. There’s the loudmouth, the shrill girlfriend, the generic pretty girl, the guy who smokes too much, and a few others who exist solely to die in imaginative but nonsensical ways. If you’ve ever wanted to see a movie where the cast members feel like they’re actively rooting against themselves, Spookies is your chance.
The Warlock and His Bored Bride
At the center of this chaos is Kreon, a warlock who looks less like an evil sorcerer and more like a high school drama teacher trapped in his own dress rehearsal. He wants to feed souls to his long-dead bride Isabelle to keep her preserved. Isabelle, played with all the enthusiasm of someone stuck in traffic, spends most of her screen time lying in a coffin with a facial expression that says, “Why didn’t I hold out for a soap opera gig?”
Kreon sends wave after wave of monsters to kill the intruders. There’s no logic to it; he simply presses the “release monster” button whenever the movie threatens to get boring. Which is constantly.
Monsterpalooza: When Quantity Beats Quality
If Spookies has one selling point, it’s the sheer number of monsters. It’s as if the filmmakers were terrified of picking just one idea, so they threw in all of them. Muck men who fart audibly, spider women, lizard demons, grim reapers, electric-tentacled octopi, zombies, skeletal witches—you name it, it’s here. This is the Baskin-Robbins of horror movies, except all 31 flavors are freezer-burned and taste like cheap latex.
The “muck men” deserve special mention. Their big scene is undercut by sound effects that make them fart every time they move. It’s the kind of choice that must have been made at 3 a.m. by someone who had long stopped caring. The effect is neither scary nor funny—it’s just sad. Imagine The Creature from the Black Lagoon reimagined as a flatulence PSA, and you’ll understand the vibe.
Editing by Chainsaw
Why does the movie feel so schizophrenic? Because it is. The original directors, Brendan Faulkner and Thomas Doran, made one film (Twisted Souls). The producer wasn’t happy, so he hired Eugenie Joseph to shoot a second film and jam it into the first one. The editing process was less “creative assembly” and more “kidnap and ransom.” Scenes crash into each other without rhythm. Characters vanish without explanation. At one point, you could swear two different movies are happening on opposite sides of the house, and neither of them wants to acknowledge the other.
It’s the only horror film where you feel like the monsters are as confused as the humans. “Wait, are we killing the birthday kid? No, the partygoers? Both? Okay, I’ll just lunge at the camera and hope it makes the final cut.”
The Bride Who Said “No Thanks”
In the end, Isabelle—the warlock’s supposedly loyal bride—decides she’s had enough and kills him. She flees the mansion, gets rescued by a man in a car, only for the man to reveal himself as… the werecat. Kreon regenerates in a tomb, laughing like he just heard a dad joke. The movie ends not with resolution but with the cinematic equivalent of shrugging.
It’s not a climax so much as an admission: the filmmakers didn’t know what they were making, and by this point they didn’t care.
Cult Film or Collective Delusion?
Today, Spookies has a cult following. It’s been celebrated for its abundance of practical effects, its “anything goes” approach, and its availability on late-night cable. But cult doesn’t always mean good. Sometimes cult just means there were enough insomniacs with nothing better to do. Watching Spookies is like attending a party where everyone insists you’ll have fun, but the beer is warm, the music skips, and the host won’t stop showing you his taxidermy collection.
Yes, there’s ambition here. The makeup effects, while uneven, show creativity. But creativity without coherence is just noise, and Spookies is ninety minutes of monsters banging pots and pans together.
The Real Spook: Wasted Potential
There’s a sad irony at work. Twisted Souls might have been a fun, straightforward monster flick. Instead, meddling and legal squabbles birthed this monstrosity. It’s like seeing a promising student expelled for drawing dicks on the blackboard. You want to scold it for wasting its potential, but it’s too late—it’s already outside smoking with the werecat.
Final Detention
So what is Spookies? It’s the cinematic junk drawer, the movie equivalent of “just throw it in there, someone will sort it out later.” It is not frightening. It is not funny. It is not even unintentionally campy in a way that redeems it. It is, however, a document of what happens when too many cooks, all bad at cooking, fight over the same rancid stew.
Watching Spookies is like being locked in a haunted house where every room was designed by a different contractor who hated the others. There’s a spider in one corner, a farting swamp monster in the other, and in the middle, an unpaid actor wondering if this will ruin his résumé. Spoiler: it did.
In short, Spookies is less a horror movie than a cautionary tale about film production. The only thing truly scary here is that someone paid money—real, actual money—to stitch this disaster together.
