The train to hell continues with our review of Spookies.
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| "Somebody kiss me!" |
Sometimes, the real villain of a
horror movie lurks behind the camera; a slasher in a corporate office or edit
suite who takes a film so full of potential and chops it up and leaves it for
dead. Spookies should have been one
of the best monster movies of the 1980s. It almost was, and if you watch it in
the right frame of mind, it still almost is. Few films have ever had so much
potential snatched so cruelly out of reach. The finished movie is still hugely
entertaining Halloween-time viewing, but it should have been so much more… and
the reason why it isn’t is a very sad story indeed.
Spookies began its life as a very different film called Twisted Souls: a love-letter to Old Dark
House atmosphere and practical monster effects, made by a trio of obviously
passionate film lovers. Thomas Doran,
Frank M. Farrel, and Brendan Faulkner wanted to create the sort of wonderfully
insane funhouse of monsters, spirits, and long, dark shadows that horror fans
long to discover. Unfortunately, the film’s financial backers had a different
vision, and while Twisted Souls was in
the midst of post-production, they casually forced Doran, Farrel, and Faulkner
off the project, and took creative control. They brought in a new writer and
director to do massive re-shoots, and when the original cast and crew refused
to participate in this hostile takeover of the film, they made up a completely
unrelated subplot with completely new people. Half of Twisted Souls was left on the cutting room floor, and Spookies was born: a confused
fever-dream that amounts to bits and pieces of two unrelated films awkwardly
shoved together. No one is going to be fooled into thinking that this is one
cohesive movie: the Twisted Souls scenes
look great, with top-notch special effects, while the Spookies scenes look amateurish, with awful effects. The two sets
of characters are obviously never in the same space at the same time, and the
two plot threads stay as separate as oil and water. But here’s the thing… the
awesomeness of Twisted Souls shines
through, and saves the movie even in this compromised form.
The reason why it still works is
that Doran, Farrel, and Faulkner did such a good job of creating that insane
funhouse. They crafted a chaotic world where literally anything can happen, and
our minds stay open to (almost) whatever insanity the film throws at us. Plus,
their scenes are so effective and memorable that the Spookies footage is largely forgotten every time we return to the
surviving pieces of Twisted Souls.
Perhaps it’s a bitterly double-edged compliment to say “their movie is so good
that it can survive being butchered by a bunch of hacks,” but there it is. The
film follows a group of twentysomethings who happen upon a spooky abandoned
mansion at the edge of a graveyard, and unwittingly release a barrage of demons
and ghouls from a Ouija board in the house. Plus there’s something about a
wizard and a cat-boy and a princess and some other nonsense… but that’s all
added by the Spookies footage, so
let’s just pretend it isn’t there. It’s the perfect set-up for a slightly
tongue-in-cheek monster-fest, almost reminiscent of the classic video games Maniac Mansion, Splatterhouse, and Zombies
ate my Neighbors, in which there’s a different weird monster in every room.
Each of those “levels” is fantastic, and every one provides an unexpected,
seriously imaginative surprise.
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| "No way! That's a face only a mother could love! |
The creatures are, without a
doubt, the real stars of the show. Any type of practical creature effects that
you could want are present here: stop-motion, animatronic, rubber-suit
monsters, demonic-possession make-up… they’re all accounted for. Each monster
is extremely different from the last, ranging from Gremlins-style mini-demons to gigantic nightmare beasts; from
sci-fi-looking creatures to ones right out of mythology. It seems as though Twisted Souls was designed partly as a
visual effects artistry calling-card, given the huge variety of style and
technique on display. The effects are, for the most part, uniformly excellent;
better than plenty of the more well-known films from this decade, let alone
this budget bracket. To say any more about what the monsters actually are would
be a spoiler; a huge part of the pleasure of Spookies is seeing what sorts of wild ghouls the film will send
your way next. The added Spookies
footage unfortunately mixes in some truly abysmal effects, but that only
further proves that it just doesn’t belong in this movie.
All this isn’t meant to suggest
that the Twisted Souls footage is
perfect; these sequences have their flaws too, particularly in the character
department. Most of the characters from the Twisted
Souls scenes tend to be rather over-the-top and camp in their portrayals,
and a couple of them are little more than monster fodder. I suspect that this
is because that’s just not where the film’s priorities lie; it’s all about the
creatures and the atmosphere, so the characters can afford to be less than
well-developed. Of course, with half of Twisted
Souls missing it isn’t entirely fair to write the characters off; we may
never know what they should have been like. But at least a couple of them are
just obnoxious, with no further evidence needed. The newly-inserted Spookies characters, meanwhile, are
outright shallow genre clichés, and they have no excuse.
In the end, two things are
equally true about Spookies: it is
deeply flawed and quite a mess after its tragic butchering, and it is
nonetheless hugely entertaining due to the excellent sequences that the Twisted Souls team created. It is for
this latter reason that the film has developed such a passionate – if small –
cult following over the years. There are still big-screen showings of Spookies every now and then (a couple
are coming up in L.A. before Halloween), the film’s rare VHS has become a holy
grail for horror collectors, and there have been at least two fan-edit attempts
to present what’s left of Twisted Souls with
the added scenes removed. This is clearly a movie that has grabbed viewers’
imaginations, and it’s easy to see why. It is also a very difficult film to
give a star rating to: the Twisted Souls
half deserves a higher score, and the Spookies
half inevitably drags it down, yet they are so clearly not the same movie that
it feels unfair to lump them together. Yet lumped together they are, so I must
give the film a strictly middle-of-the-road (though forgiving of the added
footage) rating. But that rating also comes with a recommendation: if you’re a
fan of practical-effects-fueled creature features, or this era of horror in
general, definitely check out Spookies.
It’s one strange journey, but if you’re prepared, it’s a perfect one for
Halloween.
Score
-Christopher S. Jordan
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