Good image quality, good sound, an interesting house, a few useful extras, and no movie.
As a high schooler in 1960 I remember thinking the original "13 Ghosts" was pretty juvenile. Like most of director William Castle's productions ("Macabre," "The House on Haunted Hill," "The Tingler"), it was gimmicky and silly, the audience issued special "Ghost Glasses" to view the spirits. Lately, there seems to be a trend to remake all of Castle's old movies, whether they deserve to be remade or not. This latest 2001 retread, "Thir13en Ghosts," follows Warner Brothers' remake of "The House on Haunted Hill" by a couple of years, again substituting gaudy special effects for Castle's cheap tricks. The result is worse than ever. I doubt even Castle himself would have liked it. At least his old films could be viewed as pure, innocent camp. "Thir13en Ghosts" can hardly be viewed at all.
Our first clue to the movie's being all flash and no substance is the title, wherein we find the number "13" buried amongst the letters. I suppose I could be generous and give the scriptwriters credit for trying to be being clever, for wanting their new product to appear different from the original film, and for adding a touch of symbolism to the proceedings. After all, there are thirteen ghosts buried somewhere in the story. I could be generous, but I won't. The title, like the movie, is just a shoddy angle to catch one's attention. And so it goes.
The opening scene is indicative of the remainder of the film. The setting is an auto junkyard, of all places, where a crew of ghost hunters led by a rich eccentric named Cyrus (F. Murray Abraham) and his psychic assistant, a young man named Dennis (Matthew Lillard), are busily at work looking for a dead murderer. As bait, they're using a truckload (yes, a literal truckload) of blood that they're spraying around the place. Evidently, the dead are keen on blood. Things don't exactly work out, however, as the cars (at the behest of the ghost, I would imagine) begin killing and eating the ghost-hunting party, including Cyrus. Mind you, this is done straight-faced, with no apparent tongue-in-cheek.
Cut to a down-on-its-luck family, whose house burned to the ground two years earlier, killing the wife. The family is now living in a dumpy apartment, the math teacher father, Arthur (Tony Shalhoub), having let his insurance run out, or something. Living with him are his young, beautiful, twenty-something daughter, Kathy (Shannon Elizabeth); his young, mystery-obsessed son, Bobby (Alec Roberts); and Bobby's young, lovably cantankerous nanny, Maggie (Rah Digga). The movie is aimed at young people, you think? But none of these characters are ever developed in any way, and if we don't care about them, we don't care about what happens to them, either. Not even the ploy of putting a child in danger can get us involved because we likewise don't care about the kid. It makes the acting easy, though; the performers are never called upon to do much more than run and yell. Enter a lawyer, Ben Moss (J.R. Bourne), who announces that the family has just inherited good old Uncle Cyrus's house and fortune. What the lawyer doesn't mention is anything about the house itself, which, when we see it, is not so much a house as it is a gigantic, clockwork puzzle box.
The house, in fact, is the real star of the show, upstaging the actors at every turn. But for how long can one remain fascinated by a building? The science-fiction/fantasy writer Ray Bradbury once wrote a short story called "There Will Come Soft Rains" about a house slowly falling apart after a nuclear holocaust. The story contained no people, just a house, and it maintained the reader's attention throughout. Maybe the producers of "Thir13en Ghosts" should have hired Bradbury to do their screenplay, because the house in this movie, for all its fancy design, is good for only a cursory glance. Once the novelty wears off, there's not much left. Anyway, it's filled with glass and brass and gears and pulleys and levers and dials, with cryptic writing covering its maze of crystalline walls.
Seems it's the place Cyrus imprisoned the demon spirits he collected over the years, twelve of them to be exact, only the houseguests can't see them without using special ghost goggles, a leftover from Castle's movie where 3-D glasses were issued each moviegoer at the door. No audience glasses are needed this time, so the device has lost its charm. As expected, the house and the demons turn on the family as soon as they enter, the building closing itself up and trapping them inside. It helps, of course, that in true haunted-house tradition, the family members have split up and gone their own way just as soon as they arrived. From then on, the plot follows nothing more than a long, elaborate chase, with lots of screaming and shouting and a load of mumbo-jumbo leading to the ridiculous.
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[release]10038[/release]