The 1986 film Spookies is not exactly the easiest film to describe.
A 13 year-old boy named Billy (Alec Nemser) runs away from home after his parents forget his birthday. After a conversation with a random drifter, Billy ends up entering a spooky and apparently abandoned mansion. The inside of the house is decorated for a birthday party. “They didn’t forget!” Billy says, assuming the party is for him even though neither he nor his parents live at the house. Needless to say, the party is not for Billy, who soon ends up getting buried alive by a werecat (Dan Scott).
The werecat is the pet of Kreon (Felix Ward), an elderly warlock who lives in the abandoned house and spends his time playing chess and trying to convince his wife, Isabelle (Maria Pechukas), to fall in love with him. He’s been trying to convince Isabelle for 70 years. Kreon is very old but Isabelle is still very young because Kreon has been sacrificing people to keep her young. Isabelle is not particularly happy about that.
Meanwhile, a group of four couples and one friend come across the house on the same night of Billy. Having gotten kicked out of a previous party, they decide to have a new party in the house. The main thing that most viewers will notice about the nine friends is that none of them seem to have much in common. Duke (Pat Wesley Bryan) and Linda (Joan Ellen Delaney) are apparently supposed to be rebellious teenagers, despite appearing to be in their 30s. Adrienne (Charlotte Alexandra) appears to be wealthy and spoiled and is married to wimpy Dave (Anthony Valbrio). Peter (Peter Dain) and Meegan (Kim Merril) both appear to be in their 40s and seem to be way too straight-laced and intelligent to be hanging out with Duke. Rich (Peter Iasillo, Jr.) is the practical joker of the group and carries a puppet around with him. Finally, Carol (Lisa Friede) and Lewis (Al Magliochetti) don’t get much character development as it only takes a few minutes for Carol to get possessed by a demon and for Lewis to die while trying to flee the mansion.
It turns out that the entire mansion is crawling with demons. There’s zombies in both the wine cellar and the nearby cemetery. There’s a spiderwoman who has spun quite an impressive web. There are little green lizard things that chew off people’s faces. There’s a hooded figure who can shoot out electrified tendrils. While the monsters track down and kill the party-goers one-by-one, the Werecat watches from a distance and purrs. Occasionally, he goes and visits with Kreon, who says that everything is going as he planned it. Personally, I think Kreon is just saying that because it’s obvious that next to no planning went into any of this.
To say that Spookies is a bit disjointed would be an understatement. The fact that there are three credited directors provides a clue as to how that came to be. The footage with the partygoers and all the house monsters was filmed first and directed by Brendan Faulkner and Thomas Doran. Creative differences between the film’s producers and financial backers led to the film being temporarily abandoned during the editing process. A year later, Eugene Joseph was hired to shoot the scenes of Billy, Kreon, the Werecat, and Isabelle and those scenes were rather clumsily inserted into the original footage. The end result was Spookies.
But, oddly enough, as confusing and disjointed and nonsensical as it all is, it kind of works. The old mansion is creepy. (Interestingly enough, the mansion is actually the Jay Estate, the home of founding father John Jay.) Some of the monster makeup is effectively grotesque. The story’s incoherence and even the all-around bad acting on the part of the actors playing the victims all come together to create a nightmarish atmosphere. (And, in defense of the scenes that were shot by Eugenie Joseph, the performances of Felix Ward, Dan Scott, and Maria Pechukas are all actually quite good.) The film’s frenzied ending actually works surprisingly well.
At its worst, Spookies is an Evil Dead rip-off that lacks the enthusiasm that Sam Raimi and Bruce Campbell brought to that film. At its best, Spookies feels like a filmed nightmare.
Through the Shattered Lens 