Spookies (1986): First Impressions

 This is the weirdest mess of a film I've ever seen. And I've seen Satan's Children (1975), The Manitou (1978), and Troll 2 (1990), so that is saying something. Tuesday was quite an evening. I started the afternoon with Spookies (1986), shown on Joe Bob Briggs' Last Drive-In and recently added to Shudder. If there ever was a film perfect for a Joe Bob Briggs show or a USA Up All Night, it is Spookies. All these creatures in different rooms of this house occupied by a warlock awaiting folks looking to party someplace, taking their lives so a young woman who killed herself would be revived (killing herself because she didn't want to be with the warlock in the first place) come and go, footage from two sets of directors (friends from school and a former porn actress later hired) co-mingling in this incoherent assemblage is an experience. I've seen nothing like it. The goof with the puppet making these little jokes that no one laughs at caught in the web of a woman who transforms into a grotesque spider shooting out a mouth appendage that drains him into a human prune, a peculiar spirit board (called Ouija Board, though it doesn't look like one in the typical sense) that is found in the possession of a petrified corpse found in a closet used as a device by the warlock to communicate his plans for the "trespassers", a Grim Reaper with a scythe pursuing survivors until it falls off a balcony and explodes upon impact with the ground, these labeled "muck men" who just emerge from the mud of a basement with flatulence (!!!) and dissolve when impacting wine (?!), little lizard monsters (puppets right out of the John Carl Buechler line, very Charles Band-esque) going for the jugular of a blond British Charlotte Seeley who tries to fight them off with fireplace pokers and bookcases, black magic that causes folks to age, a horde of zombies who rise from their graves outside the warlock's estate when his resurrected wife stabs him in the forehead with a knife (right out of the Fulci school of zombies), a "were-cat" always prowling and responsible for the face slashing and burial of a kid runaway on his birthday (a birthday party set up by the warlock who scares him with a head in the gift box gag), and a vampire kid in a monk robe/hood who is a protege to his warlock father. This film throws a lot at us. These are just the first impressions. It's inevitable I'll watch this again quite soon and go more in depth on the kooky characters that comprise the film. I couldn't help but recognize the Friday Midnight Movie feel of Spookies that deserves a special time slot other than a lazy Tuesday afternoon.