3 out of 5

Directed by: Brendan Faulkner, Thomas Doran, Eugenie Joseph

Nice! One of the worst films I have ever seen!

Yeah, that rating is a lie. Spookies is trial by fire. You must deal with 45-50 minutes of some of the most uninspired direction and worst acting you’ve ever seen, with hinky makeup effects and a completely non-sensical script, and then your reward is some farting zombies. No one mentions they’re farting. I’m not sure why they are. But this is the point where I was both ready to turn the thing off – a rarity for me; I finish movies, boyo – and then I’m also, like, intrigued? Because this singular scene would’ve been okay if they weren’t farting?

And then in the next scene, a Boglin shows up. It’s a pretty wonky puppet, and the scene is choreographed horribly, but it’s a sudden ante up in weirdness over the sinfully boring wandering-through-a-haunted-house we’ve been doing up to this point.

And then there’s a snake / lizard demon. And a spider woman. And a grim reaper. And… pretty much every single bit hereafter has a new creature tossed in, and not a lazily designed one. Like, still cheap, and still blocked pretty poorly, but we’re in total WTF territory now, entering pure cult status where you have no idea what the thought process was behind this movie, except horror = cash and also let’s show our appreciation for Evil Dead here and there, and also also since we have no central bad guy let’s just stock the house with different monsters…? Around this point I realized the stock comedy character, who inexplicably has a puppet, was wearing a shirt featuring a photo of himself and his puppet. Instant extra star for that.

Ah, you say, but there is a central bad guy – the old man we keep cutting away to, narrating from some crypt part of the house that seems wholly separated from the rest of the house, perhaps orchestrating all of these scares to somehow resurrect his girlfriend-in-a-coffin, who’s resurrected about halfway through the movie but things continue anyway. Except this character wasn’t in “Twisted Souls,” the pre-Spookies movie directed by Brendan Faulkner and Thomas Doran, and deemed unsuitable by the financial peoples, who then handed it over to director Eugenie Joseph and writer Ann Burgund, who added this completely superfluous material and then could release the movie under its final title. This hodge-podge background doesn’t make the movie better, seeing as how it’s really plotless either way, but it definitely makes one nod in acknowledgment: yes, yes, this is movie is a mess.

Anyhow, I think some characters may’ve straight up disappeared, and it “climaxes” in a hilariously frenetic, 5+ minute run around a field, and then the slowest zombies-chasing-car bit ever, and then one of the best (aka dumbest; worst) sequence of stingers as the concluding shots. I’ve seen a lot of trash in my time. Spookies… is somewhere beyond that, around the curve of so-bad-it’s-good as to be a punishment, and then you come to like the punishment.

A set of teens / one adult in a suit are in search of a party, even though none of them like hanging out together, and decide to stop at an abandoned house and drink beers, as one does. A Ouija board is found, a possession happens, and then a Boglin.