John’s Horror Corner: Spookies (1986), the cheap but really fun B-movie with a variety of different monsters.

MY CALL: This is one of those B-movies with a lot of low budget yet ambitiously diverse special effects and monsters. The writing may be awful, the acting may be worse, but this remains a really fun B-movie with a lot of fun creatures and gooey silly gore. MORE MOVIES LIKE Spookies: The Vineyard (1989) and Cthulhu Mansion (1992) comes to mind.

A 13-year old runaway, some lost adult couples and a group of twentysomethings looking for a party happen to converge on an old mansion inhabited by a weird occult practitioner and his oddly young nearly dead wife. To fully resurrect his wife, the sorcerous occultist must sacrifice the unlucky houseguests.

Using a Ouija board, the occultist creates a pig-faced Night of the Demons (1988) deadite, raises gooey slimy zombies, summons farting septic zombies, the sorcerer’s apparently undead ghoulish sons, baby merman-gremlins, an Xtro (1983) xenomorph creature that melts someone’s face, a zany latex goblin-witch thing, an animated grim reaper statue, and an awesome spider-woman (with a cool transformation scene) that vac-drains her victim.

The special effects are ambitiously diverse, even if weak in execution. But the only true disappointment among the effects was the big zombie finale—which was boring at best. But most of the effects and gags of the movie were entertaining.

The mer-goblins and the spider-woman were the true highlights of the movie. I wish everything revolved around them as the monsters (i.e., more like Spider Labyrinth) and we could have minimized the four different versions of zombies we encountered. And what even was that goblin witch? And why, WHY were those zombies farting?

This is a fun cheesy horror that should be prioritized highly in that category. I strongly recommend it to fans of such ilk.