Good God, Spookies is hard work.
It’s the cinematic equivalent of a Frankenstein monster, stitched together from the remains of two (possibly three) different films—or at least it feels that way—even though we know better. Directed by Genie Joseph, Thomas Doran, and Brendan Faulkner—because, yes, it took three people to do this—Spookies is a baffling mess of disconnected plotlines, nonsensical characters, and effects that would have been charmingly bad if they weren’t so exhaustingly relentless. This isn’t a film you watch for the story, the scares, or even the unintentional laughs. It’s a film you survive.
The “plot,” if you can call it that, centres around a group of people who randomly decide to break into a creepy mansion because, well, why not? What they don’t know—though you’ll figure it out quickly, since the film isn’t shy about dumping random exposition on you—is that the mansion is inhabited by an ancient warlock (Felix Ward) who’s keeping his dead bride alive by summoning a rogue’s gallery of monsters, demons, and what appear to be half-melted puppets. It sounds fun, right? Don’t get your hopes up. The film bounces from one barely coherent scene to another, with the human characters serving only as target practice for an endless parade of creatures that feel like they were dreamed up during a bad fever.
The biggest offender here is the pacing. Spookies feels like it’s trying to cram in every horror trope ever conceived, as if the filmmakers were given 24 hours to make a horror movie and just started flinging everything at the screen in a desperate attempt to hit something scary. There’s a cat-man, spider-women, farting muck monsters (yes, really), and a grim reaper puppet that looks like it wandered off the set of The Muppet Show after a bad day. And yet somehow, despite the onslaught of bizarre creatures, the film drags. Every scene feels disconnected from the next, like someone shuffled the editing timeline and forgot to put the pieces back in order. It’s as if you’re watching the world’s weirdest horror anthology, but without any wraparound story to keep it coherent.
But where Spookies truly excels is in making you question whether there was ever a script—or a plan—at all. Characters show up, say a few lines that may or may not be relevant, and then wander off to be killed by whatever effects team happened to be on set that day. The dialogue? A masterpiece of non-sequitur exchanges, with people reacting to their friends’ deaths with the emotional range of someone who just realised they forgot their umbrella. By the time the warlock’s convoluted scheme is revealed (in the most anticlimactic way possible), you’ll be too exhausted to care.
To give Spookies some credit, the practical effects are where it shines—if you can tolerate their haphazardness. It’s clear that a lot of work went into designing the film’s creatures, even if they have the screen presence of Halloween decorations brought to life. The problem is, they’re so overused and poorly integrated that even the coolest designs lose their impact. You can only watch so many rubber-suited monsters awkwardly shuffle across the screen before you stop caring, and Spookies gleefully pushes you past that point early on.
And yet, for all its faults, Spookies has somehow gained cult status over the years, largely because it’s so strange, so incoherent, and so aggressively bonkers that it’s hard to look away. It’s the cinematic equivalent of a car crash: you know you shouldn’t stare, but morbid curiosity wins out. There’s a certain charm to the chaos, a kind of feverish energy that makes it impossible to dismiss completely, even as you wonder how it ever got made.
Ultimately, Spookies isn’t just hard work—it’s baffling, frustrating, and occasionally fascinating in its sheer commitment to being incomprehensible. If you’re a fan of so-bad-it’s-good horror, it might just be worth the slog, but for everyone else, approach with caution. It may leave you feeling like you’ve been stitched together yourself—part confused, part entertained, but mostly exhausted.
