Such a frustrating disappointment

At first rather annoying in its heavy emphasis on reenactments, this movie ultimately proves fascinating, simply because the complicated, highly dramatic tale it tells still almost defies belief.

A movie that not only functions as a solid scarefest but a razor-sharp satire.

By the time the dramatic fireworks start popping off, each one feels earned.

"Spookies" is a really energetic and comical haunted house horror film. It's a feast of cheesy monster spooks, cheesy 80s clothing (most notably Duke's tight latex outfit straight from a fetish wrestling match) and constant over-the-top acting that makes one suspect they were on various chemicals during the filming. This of course means that the film is by all means more funny than scary, which is hopefully how it was intended.The title should give this fact away already. The word "Spookies" is sort of childish, and it sure is an accurate way to describe this film's monsters. There's a paint-faced goblin dude, zombies, crawling mutant spiders, a witch and then one of the most obscure goddamn things I've ever witnessed... Some sort of diarrhea-tainted swamp lurkers that FART constantly. What the hell? This crazy scene is a reason enough to watch this movie. Be careful not to drink before they pop on the screen. Man...So if you're looking for a scary film, this is not the one. Watch "The Exorcist" instead. But if you're bored and perhaps hammered in the middle of the night, check out "Spookies"!

The best so bad its good movie I've ever seen. It was so funny. I have to admit the creatures were pretty scary looking. The creatures and the spooky atmosphere are the only scary things in this movie. I love this movie. I find the sorcerer repeating the same line more than once though. It is kind of funny. The music I great. I find myself listening too it once in a while. The ending is very confusing and the plot seems like it doesn't know what to do. It isn't gory but it is pretty gross. The sorcerer who lives in the house is trying to kill off teenagers who go into the house to bring his wife back to life. The ending is very weird though. It is a very fun and entertaining movie.

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.

If Spookies feels like the result of two separate unfinished movies badly edited together to create a full length feature, there's a very good reason for that: it is. The film was patched together from an incomplete horror entitled Twisted Souls and some unrelated footage shot at a later date.However, despite this fairly valid reason for being crap, one can't help but feel that, even if Twisted Souls had been completed according to its creator's original vision, it still would have been total garbage: the acting is dire; the basic set-up is highly derivative, being very reminiscent of several much better films such as The Evil Dead and Night of The Living Dead; and the effects are extremely amateurish.Attempting to follow the story amounts to a fairly pointless exercise, since nothing really makes much sense: the muddled plot sees a group of revellers travelling to a creepy old manor house where they inexplicably find themselves battling for survival against zombies, monsters, a lovesick ghoul, his man\cat pet thing, farting muck-men, a possessed woman, a grim reaper with red eyes, a spider/woman, and a couple of ugly kids. Furthermore, what sounds like it might still be a lot of fun, despite the iffy narrative, is actually incredibly dull.For some reason, this film seems to have gathered something of a cult following, and has some surprisingly positive comments here on IMDb. It's a strange old world.