Football is a game of two halves. SPOOKIES is a film of two halves, literally. A group of two friends enter a spooky house. They are usual rag tag bunch. Well except one likes to talk via a hand puppet, another is a business type and yet another is an angry youth hood. But that is not how the film starts, nor is it all of where it will go. You see this was the first version of the film and the script. FrightFest’s Paul McEvoy and filmmaker Sean Hogan commentary, detail all of this. That film was called Twisted Souls. It was directed and produced but not liked.  Their commentary also details the second act or half of the picture. Where a director Eugenie Joseph is hired to reshoot the film. He inserts another plot. A young lost, birthday boy. Wandering around in the forests by an old mansion at night. He stumbles onto a graveyard, which the house is build on top of. A man is killed, another is chased and a child finds the zombified creature plops him in a grave and buries him. Weirdly odd that by now, you are 30 minutes in and could not tell where you are indeed.  The whole makes about as much sense as a nightmare. Cant go wrong with that I guess . Disc one done then. That is to say the film and the extras specifically on it.

Disc two. This is best addressed by the artful and fun, Twisted Tale – The Unmaking of Spookies. Which shows those who disliked it versus those who just had to go with it! best feature is VIPCO: The Untold Story. I first saw SPOOKIEs on a vipco release and remember it as a headache of a film. But the label were known for their releases being artful and annoyingly special in a way that made them highly in demand. Fulci, Argento, American sleaze and video nasties galore. Some comic and dull, others exceptional and brilliant. The documentary explodes (literally at one point) with its excitement in how Vipco was so potent. Also why now it it so pertinent. If you like foolish, terrible, bad is good films, then SPOOKIES is that. If you like to know how and why genre cinema is as it is today, then VIPCO: The Untold Story might go a small way to this.

Special Features

• New audio commentary with FrightFest’s Paul McEvoy and filmmaker Sean Hogan
• Limited edition booklet: Includes A Twisted History: Vipco, VHS and Spookies by Scott Harrison and Your Future Belongs to Us: Reaganite Terrors in Spookies by Liam Hathaway
• Twisted Tale – The Unmaking of Spookies – a feature-length making-of documentary, including a commentary track with documentary co-directors Michael Gingold & Glen Baisley and extensive deleted scenes
• VIPCO: The Untold Story, a brand new, extended version of the feature length documentary on much-loved UK film distributor VIPCO
• 2015 Alamo Drafthouse screening introductions with Spookies director Thomas Doran and co-writer/producer Frank M. Farel
• Archival locations featurette with actor Peter Iasillo
• Outtakes and bloopers
• Behind the scenes still gallery
• Theatrical trailer