Thir13en Ghosts

Year, director and cast

2001, directed by Steve Beck, with F. Murray Abraham, Tony Shalhoub and Matthew Lillard.

Also known as

13 Ghosts

Review

Sometimes the reason you watch a certain movie is quite strange. Someone I know, said to me that this was quite a good movie and I should watch it, being a horror lover. I really wasn't looking forward to this so we got to an agreement : he would watch Zombie 2 and I was obliged to watch this one. So, after a week, I finally got the courage to enter it into my DVD player and experience this "big budget" scary story, which is actually a remake of a movie with the same name from 1960.

Arthur Kriticos has lost his wife in a fire. Since then, he lives with his family and a nanny. But then, he hears that his uncle Cyrus has died and has inherited a big house. Not an ordinary house, but one entirely build out of glass and with strange words written on. When he moves in, he learns that the house contains 12 ghosts, locked in special cages, and is actually an ingenious machine, that should open the gates of hell.

There are some positive and negative things to say about 13 Ghosts. Let's start with the positive ones. First of all, the house is nice to look at and is technically impressively made. Also, the gore, while sparse, is quite excellent, rarely seen in a big budget horror movie (check out the lawyer's death!). And F. Murray Abraham puts a nice bad guy on the screen.

Sadly enough, the negative points are far more present. Most importantly, the acting is horrid. I really couldn't care about what was happening with the 'poor' family that was trapped inside the house. Especially the little son and the nanny (a typically cliche black 'sista') were annoying enough to wish them horrible deaths. Also, the so-called funny one-liners are far from funny and increase the annoyance-meter again. If this wasn't enough, the movie really isn't scary or interesting. It's a typically Hollywood-movie with MTV-style images that relies to much on special effects and the whole movie just doesn't glue together. After 30 minutes, it's simply "people are hunted down by the ghosts, but avoid being killed by them" with totally no tension. And it is no surprise to learn that our dear children survive the onslaught of the ghosts. And to top it off : you should NOT show the monsters too much in the movie to keep the mystery until the end, but here, after 25 minutes, all possibility of any surprises is destroyed when you've seen almost all the ghosts (who, to be honest, are designed quite well on their own). So when we add all things together, you really can't say that this movie is a winner.

How should it be done then?? Well, look at Session 9. That's quite a tense movie. Sadly enough, Steve Beck, the director of 13 Ghosts, makes the same mistakes that many others have done before him (I think of Stephen Sommers again, or James Isaac, the director of the horrible Jason X). This movie is one of the better horror movies when you compare it with others of its kind (Jason X, I Still Know...), but that's really not a difficult thing to accomplish. It's barely good enough to watch once, but you should check Session 9 instead.

Conclusion

STORY : 

GORE : ½

ATMOSPHERE : ½

HUMOR : ½

ACTING : 

TOTAL :  

BORING, SOMETIMES GORY "HAUNTED HOUSE"-STYLE FLICK.