Spookies

“What are we even doing here? We’re going to get in trouble if we hang around in a place like this,” says one of the young people who has stumbled into the remote and sinister mansion on a night out. The answer to his question is not entirely clear, but there the group remain – until, predictably enough, they find that they are trapped. They have become pawns in an obscure game of chess played by the sinister Kreon (Felix Ward), the sorcerer who owns the house. Naturally, when a pawn is sacrificed, one member of the group has to die – but there’s a little more purpose to this than just an enjoyment of gore. By killing them within the house, Kreon is harvesting their life energy, gradually using it to bring his beloved wife back from the dead.

If all that sounds peculiar, the story behind the film is still more so. Initially developed as a rather ambitious fan film by Brendan Faulkner and Thomas Doran, it was abandoned after getting into the usual financial difficulties that accompany such ventures and was itself brought back from the dead by Eugenie Joseph of Troma fame, who patched together what he could in Frankenstein fashion, inserting additional pieces of footage as required. The result is the sort of palimpsest that fascinates people with a serious interest in cinema – even though most cineastes would run a mile rather than actually have to watch this.

Some films only ever really work with an audience – in this case, preferably a drunken one. Spookies is a lot of fun in the right environment but that’s about all anyone can say in its favour. There are occasional attempts at artsiness with its chess obsession and its shadowed figures on the stairs, but everything has been done on the cheap. Some of the young people are dressed like extras from Blake’s 7, others in ill-fitting dresses that would have looked just as uncool when the film was made, and it’s unclear where Kreon’s long-dead love got her cheap nylon underwear. What is clear is that the more life she regains, the less keen she is on staying with her husband, and this introduces a more realistic element of nastiness that jars with the film’s general silliness, for all that she does her best to camp it up by swooning against the walls like a budget Madonna.

Throw in a subplot about young Billy, whose 13th birthday party plans turn into a nightmare when something very bad happens to his parents, and it becomes clear that this hybrid creation is at war with itself, uncertain what it wants to be. Once the dead start rising from the grave, more to provide a backdrop than to actually do anything, one has to wonder if the farting noises they make as they move are intentional, but other elements give the impression that the filmmakers desperately wanted to impress and scare. A dramatically OTT soundtrack provides viewers with cues as to what they should be feeling in case they can’t work it out from what they see.

Some B-movies are designed to be playful and entertaining. Some hit on a winning formula by accident. Spookies misses on every level. That in itself, when taken to this extreme, might be considered an achievement, and there’s pleasure to be had here for fans of the very bad. Others are unlikely to consider it worth dragging themselves out of the grave for.