Spookies (1986)
A group of people wander into an old mansion and start getting picked off by an astonishing collection of monsters. Normally I would describe the characters a little more carefully, but this is one of the strangest collections of supposed friends I have seen in a horror movie, and that is saying something. We get a couple who seem to have wandered in from a 1960s greaser movie, a buttoned-down yuppie, some idiot with a puppet, an Englishwoman for reasons I never quite understood, and a woman saddled with the unfortunate name Meegan. Not Megan. Meegan. The credits and closed captioning confirm it. There is a sorcerer, his dead wife, a kid who makes me long for the intellectual discourse we got from Gamera's Kenny, and a weird-ass spider woman who is inexplicably the best actress of the lot.
The acting is terrible, and the story barely holds together. Characters appear, disappear, and occasionally seem to be participating in entirely different movies.
Turns out they are.
Spookies began as a movie called Twisted Souls, written by Frank Farel, Brendan Faulkner, and Thomas Doran and directed by Faulkner and Doran. They shot it in 1984, primarily at the Jay Estate in Rye, New York. After a falling out with financial backer Michael Lee, the original filmmakers lost control of the production. Lee subsequently brought in Eugenie "Genie" Joseph, who shot a substantial amount of completely new material with different actors and storylines. The filmmakers then edited the footage from the two productions into Spookies.
Suddenly the movie makes perfect sense.
Well, no. Not really. It still makes absolutely no sense.
But at least now I understand why it makes no sense.
The partygoers wandering around the mansion and encountering monster after monster are largely from the original Twisted Souls. The sorcerer Kreon, his imprisoned bride Isabelle, the kid wandering around, the werecat, and several other pieces came from the later material. Genie Joseph herself described being hired to rescue what she saw as an unsellable rough cut and rewrite, reshoot, and re-edit it into something releasable.
The seams are not merely visible. They are basically load-bearing walls.
What saves Spookies, at least somewhat and why I didn't turn it off the moment the idiots from Twisted Souls opened their mouths, are the monster effects. There are muck creatures, zombies, a spider woman, demons, a Grim Reaper, and all sorts of other rubbery horrors. The original filmmakers were clearly more interested in creating monsters than coherent characters, and honestly, I can respect that. The creature work involved effects artists like Gabe Bartalos and others who went on to work in practical effects.
There are several moments where I found myself thinking, "That is actually a pretty good monster." And a lot of them were good as far as the effects go. The Muck Men, the makeup, especially that Spider Woman.
Then someone starts talking again and reminded me that yes, as bad as this movie is, the original Twisted Souls was likely a lot worse. I know. That is a bold statement given how bad this one actually is.
Still, there is something almost endearing about a movie willing to throw this many creatures at the screen. If Spookies had a coherent story, halfway competent acting, and characters who seemed like they had actually met one another before arriving at the mansion, it might have been a fun little monster movie. Maybe.
Instead, it is cinematic taxidermy. Two dead movies stitched together and propped up in the hope nobody notices the seams.
Everybody notices the seams.
The Maria Pechukas Rabbit Hole
Then Spookies sent me somewhere completely unexpected.
Maria Pechukas plays Isabelle, Kreon's imprisoned wife, and naturally I looked her up afterward. Pechukas apparently had a very small filmography after Spookies, but that led me into an extremely obscure corner of shot-on-video horror.
She later worked repeatedly with filmmaker Jay Lind, whom she was also married to for several years. It immediately made me think of the relationship between Lina Romay and Jesús Franco (and not Rob Zombie and Sherri Moon Zombie). Her credits include Blood Dreams (also known as Sangre Songes), Valerie, Do You Like Women?, Night of the Cat, and finally Carmilla in 1998.
I initially thought I had stumbled onto a whole series of no-budget Carmilla knockoffs. It is not quite that neat, but it is close enough to be fascinating.
Blood Dreams was a 40-minute lesbian vampire film made in 1991 with Pechukas, Debbie Rochon, and Amy Lynn Baxter, reportedly intended to attract financing for a feature-length version. Valerie again paired Pechukas and Rochon in another lesbian vampire story. Do You Like Women? veered sideways into an erotic horror-comedy about a society of female cannibals, while Night of the Cat involved a woman transforming into a murderous cat creature. Then Lind finally made an actual adaptation of Sheridan Le Fanu's Carmilla in 1998, with Pechukas herself playing Carmilla in modern-day Long Island.
This is exactly the sort of obscurity that makes me lose an hour on the Internet and not get to bed until very late.
Unfortunately, finding information about these movies is much easier than finding the movies themselves. Most appear to have had tiny VHS releases and essentially no modern distribution. I found one DVD listing for over $130, which is more than I am willing to spend to satisfy my curiosity about an obscure lesbian vampire movie shot on video thirty-five years ago. Not to mention I am not even sure it is the right one.
SIDE NOTE: Actress Lili Reinhart has been all over social media (well, at least mine) talking about how she wants to do "Carmilla" as a movie and Hollywood is too afraid to do it. Seriously? I found one, maybe two, new versions of this tale that I have never seen before, and I have covered this tale a LOT here. Message to Lili Reinhart: Read my blog; you can learn what has worked and what hasn't for Carmilla.
So, somewhere out there, though, is an entire little ecosystem of early-1990s microbudget horror starring Maria Pechukas, Debbie Rochon, Amy Lynn Baxter, and others. And now I know it exists.
This is how these things start.
You watch Spookies. Then you look up one actress. Three hours later you are trying to locate a 40-minute lesbian vampire movie from 1991 that may only exist on somebody's deteriorating VHS tape.
The October Horror Movie Challenge is working exactly as intended. This is why I haven't gotten out of the 70s and 80s for horror, too many side quests!
Jackson Connection
Oh. Shit. Yeah, I am supposed to talk about what I can use from this movie for my settings...Uh. I got nuthin'.
Well. That's not 100% true, but the ideas I do have have been better executed in other movies. So let tonight's movie be a cautionary tale about researching movies late at night, and about how all my Peach Tea Monster Energy drinks (my current drink of choice these days) are down in my office, not here next to me when I needed them most.
October Horror Movie Challenge 2026
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