Someone has evidently been dropping some Klonopin in Isabelle’s soda pop as she has been out for the count for the best part of a century and is showing no signs of coming to any time soon. I’m not altogether sure he’d approve of the current tenant an ancient warlock named Kreon (Felix Ward) who resides in this mansion with his sleeping bride Isabelle (Maria Pechukas) and faithful werecat assistant. Granted, he’s been dead for over 300 years now but that’s still quite something. Here’s an interesting tidbit for you – Spookies takes place within the colonial estate of one of America’s founding fathers, John Jay. That said, this one has “told you so” written all over it. Let it be known that I begrudge wishing failure on anyone. What truly pains me is that this could have been something special, had the original directors been allowed to carry on with their business uninterrupted. If I’m sounding harsh then let me make this abundantly clear – there is far worse eighties genre fodder out there than Spookies. The amalgamation of both was reasonably hideous and the whole thing seemed cobbled together higgledy-piggledy leaving precious little narrative sense to cling onto. Predictably, the footage shot by Faulkner and Doran floated to the top of this bizarre broth, while Joseph’s filler stood out like a Hare Krishna in a whorehouse. To be fair, the horde of headlining nasties were very much present and correct, albeit resigned to shuffle-on cameos for the most part. However, once I scuttled off home like hemophiliac with a blood bag and slid the cassette excitedly into my top-loader, the deception became painfully clear. It appeared a shoe-in cult classic in the making and the superb creature effects were plastered all over the back of the sleeve as an additional sweetener. You see, Twisted Souls promised much whereby Spookies paid out precious little. But now they’d managed to piss off a whole lot of other folk too. I wasn’t alone and $3m in worldwide video rentals likely make the pill a tad easier for the studio to swallow. I mean, how on Earth can any pre-teen boy be expected not to jizz a little in his denims when he walks into the video store and sees this little beauty staring back at him.
It’s a good job he did as they may not have secured this twelve-year-old’s rental for one had the visual seduction not been so all-encompassing.
Desperate to rescue the situation, well-regarded underground comic artist Richard Corben was commissioned to design the cover art for its upcoming VHS release. Did their audacious plan come off? Well, the film secured a limited theatrical release in the United States so that would suggest a resounding yes right? Īlas, even the cozy economic climate of 1986, twenty grand didn’t stretch that far and I’d imagine Faulkner and Doran chuckled hard as Spookies vaporized faster than one of the Muck Men’s fart clouds. Some of the footage was recycled, while Joseph shot a whole heap more unrelated stuff, and the result was a bizarre hybrid that was essentially two entirely different movies rolled into one. The project was then placed on the back-burner until two years later when the studio hired Eugenie Joseph to deliver it to completion under the new title Spookies. Two such fall guys are lifetime friends and budding horror aficionados Brendan Faulkner and Thomas Doran, whose 1984 film Twisted Souls was already in post-production when the financial backers decided they weren’t satisfied with their efforts and cut both them and co-producer/screenwriter Frank Farel loose on the spot. But it’s one thing requesting the odd tweak here and there and entirely another firing the directors just as things are about to wrap. Given that they have likely been responsible for financing the whole project, you can understand why they’d wish to be a little “hands on” I suppose. That said, it’s one thing working on an indie flick where the entire cast and crew are working together as was the case for me, and entirely another when studio executives are breathing down your shirt collar every step of the way. Take it from me, I spent seven weeks on a film set back in 2014 and every day of shooting presents a fresh set of challenges to overcome. Anyone who believes making movies to be easy really couldn’t be farther from the truth.
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