Spookies

Spookies is a film so utterly badass it seems improbable that it took me thirty years to see it. Unless I’m misremembering and saw it before—but, considering how memorable it is, and how utterly repulsively delicious (as if it were a psychologically tainted cheese), that seems unlikely.

It opens with a grand psychological subtext that somehow seems borrowed from one of Clive Barker’s more fantasy-esque tales (such as The Thief of Always). Right away, we see a weird, sort of ancient mansion in front of a tomb that sort of billows from beneath, a boy creeping through a phony cemetery, a man perched in the gloom (the go-between between the boy and an adulthood that is cut short by a creeping, fang-toothed, black-faced weirdo); the boy goes into the old house and sees a birthday party set up at an empty table. Later, his coming-of-age nightmare is confirmed when he, ah, “gets it.” Get it?

A weird, two-a.m. Midnight Horror Host that looks suspiciously Gary Oldman-esque is in a spooky, smokily lit underground crypt place with a woman in a box who is his undead paramour in bridal white that he’s keeping alive via his mage-like powers. His voice has an odd effect that makes it seem as if his dialogue was all recorded live while everyone else’s was dubbed. Okay.

There are candelabra and coffins. Check. There are spooky graveyards and crypts. Check. There is a pseudo-Victorian horror host. Check, check, check.

Two carloads of insufferable 1986 teenagers who are all older than God—some middle-aged, and a few women spilling buxomly out of their tops—arrive in a dream-like fashion, go inside the old manse for unknown reasons, and find a designer Ouija board that informs them they are all going to die. One of them, Carol, gets Evil Dead-possessed and gets a zombie goat-face thing going, and then they all scatter for some reason and go wandering around the underground crypts and the old mansion, spookily lit from underneath, as that is de rigueur for these flicks, encountering bad-costumed monstrous mofojoes who burble and splatter and spew and fart and growl and do all manner of noxious things.

The special effects here are crude, but plentiful; there isn’t logic or reason enough here to blow your nose with, but there are visuals—however cheap they may be—of latex monsters and malevolent menaces dripping weird, green, sloppy stuff that you bought in a little plastic egg as a kid at the local pharmacy and then smooshed under the desk in homeroom.

Freaky, fartin’ aliens of gloop.

The most impressive mutant, monster, chest-burster, 1986-type horror mistress here is the oriental woman who traps someone in a Joe’s Halloween Store spider web and then has her head explode outward Beast Within-style as she sprouts legs and transforms into a giant The Munsters TV rerun human-spider mutant horror hybrid—and then sucks the literal life and seemingly all bodily moisture from her victim.

That’s one of the centerpieces in a film that seems as if it is just a collection of special-effects setups to introduce and display some sometimes shoddy rubber monsters. This was in the old live-effects days, and though it may be a bit threadbare (or a lot threadbare), it still has a certain living, “right there in three dimensions” realism that modern films may sometimes lack with their sleek, overly produced CGI production (soon to be AI productions, all of them).

The end is sort of a rip from Night of the Living Dead or Thriller, with ghoulish walking dead coming up out of the earth with their arms outstretched, busting through the soil like burrowing worms—a patently absurd image, as coffins are sealed in concrete tombs below six feet of earth, and, brother, ain’t nothing—live, dead, or undead—going to get through that.

I’m not sure what Spookies was supposed to be about; it seems like a teenage slasher flick of the era where the slasher was replaced with gory, if tacky, rubber and latex live-effects set pieces. There’s not much plot to hang a story on, and none of the actors seem to know why they’re here.

But as for entertaining, Spookies delivers the spooky goods. Just don’t expect a brain—pulsing, spider-like, or otherwise—to be delivered along with it.

Spookies (1986) OFFICIAL TRAILER [HD 1080p]

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