After watching a bunch of So-Bad-It's-Good movies over the last two weeks, I'd been meaning to watch Spookies specifically for a hot minute.
For the first big chunk of the film, I thought it was successfully so-bad-it's-good. It's a hokey 80s horror flick where a bunch of one-note nobodies who only serve to get taken out by a variety of monsters. Maybe a quarter-way through the film (right after Duke and Lydia beat the Farty Mud Monsters) I realized that the point of the film might have been "Put a bunch of Tropes in an enclosed area, make 'em fight waves of monsters, and see how far they can make it". If it stuck to that premise, I could see this being pretty good. Heck, when the character Duke was introduced my brother and I thought you could replace the random variety of characters with a bunch of 50s tropes (Greaser, Cheerleader, Prep, Jock, Nerd, etc.), then the film could develop an identity of its own in a way. Heck, the practical effects were shockingly good at times. The way the main Tomb moved around at the start of the film was pretty solid, and at least a few of the Spookies were actually pretty scary looking. The big thing that held back the films is that it's not one movie... it's a movie and-a-half that's bound together with duct tape and a dream.
So... this film is made up of two parts that are stitched together: a Base film of a bunch of "Teenagers" who leave a party and try to find some other place to waste the night; and a secondary film about an evil wizard/warlock/magician named Kreon who needs to fulfill his plan to resurrect his dead wife of 70 years. This auxiliary film is intercut throughout the base film, and primarily serves to pad out time and ruin any positive aspects from the rest of the film. The scenes from this side-film have significantly worse special effects, make less sense than the rest of the film, force the other parts of the film to ALSO make no sense in retrospect, and not much else. There's this werewolf guy who just shows up to hold doors closed, and only strikes at the start and end of the film. Early on Kreon successfully resurrects his wife. This took maybe 1 death to make happen, and it turns out his wife actually hates him. So right out the gate, pretty much any motivation that the villain has is out the window, because it stops making sense so early in the film. Then they keep cutting in with this dude summoning his more impressive henchmen because they need to remind you that this film has a central villain. And at the end of the film his wife tries to run away from him and is stopped by a legion of zombies that tear apart her dress and start grabbing her all over. This scene is four minutes and fifteen seconds long; and is straight-up feels like it went on for ten minutes. This is followed by the werecat showing up in disguise and repeating one of Kreon's lines to her before Kreon breaks out of a grave and then credits roll. This sequence, this 5+ minute sequence, dragged on for so long that I started to forget all the good parts of the film. I was just so distracted by a film that was so scared of a 60-70 minute run-time that it actively made itself worse to reach that 90-minute mark.
It was a fun time throughout most of it, but a large portion of the film feels like legitimate self-sabotage. It had some fun moments here-and-there, but boy have I seen better bad films. -3/10. It could have been a -5 without the last five minutes, and even a -8 if we just removed Kreon's whole schtick; but that is not the world we live in. -3/10.