Review of Thir13en Ghosts

Introduction

William Castle was a B-movie director, his long career in low-budget horror spanning four decades, but he`s best known for the marketing gimmicks that accompanied several of his films in the 1950s and 60s. From free medical insurance in the cinema foyer to pay out in the event of being scared to death during showings of 1958`s `Macabre`, to buzzers underneath seats designed to elicit a shock from audience members in 1959`s `The Tingler`, Castle`s films are better remembered for these ambitious and unique, if fairly pointless, attempts at promotion.

`Thir13en Ghosts` is a remake of Castle`s 1960 film of the same... well, similar name, and was the second of such retoolings released by Dark Castle Entertainment - an offshoot of Silver Pictures - following in the footsteps of 1999`s `The House on Haunted Hill`. The story sees Tony Shalhoub and his family (including Shannon Elizabeth) inheriting a house from their recently deceased uncle Cyrus (F. Murray Abraham). The place bears more relation to a giant `Hellraiser` puzzle box than a home, but no matter, a free house is a free house, and it`s not until they move in and psychic loiterer Matthew Lillard starts going nuts that they realise the place plays host to a bunch of vicious, murderous ghosts and that the late uncle Cyrus had ulterior motives behind his generous bequeathment.

Video

Anamorphic 1.85:1, this Blu-ray Disc version of the film looks good. Grain, whilst present, is kept to a minimum for the most part, the transfer is clean and smooth with a nice black level and solid colour. However, `Thir13en Ghosts` seems to have been filmed with a softer lens than most features and has that US daytime soap, or the soft `Baywatch` look about it. Still, the film certainly benefits from the higher resolution, although only busy frames or close ups have that true high definition look; the transfer doesn`t hold its resolution all that well on smaller objects in long shots, which leads to the sparser frames and wide-lens shots looking a little more mundane than other Blu-ray transfers.

* Viewed on a 32" 1366 x 768 panel at 720p

* The screenshots featured here are for illustrative purposes only. They were not taken from the Blu-ray source, and as such, the images are not representative of the quality of the disc.

Audio

Uncompressed PCM 5.1 (that I won`t be reviewing due to current technical constraints) and a Dolby Digital 5.1 track. While the DD 5.1 is certainly louder than your average 5.1, I found the use of the surrounds to be a little over-dramatic and forced, blasting sound from all directions of the soundstage because it can, not because it adds anything to the audio experience. As if all speakers firing when it isn`t necessary wasn`t enough, the film features a fairly horrendous, derivative and garish musical score, that, intention or not, sounds like it could have been lifted from Castle`s 1960 original. It`s dreadful at building tension or immersion, but it is very loud if that`s your bag.

Features

A feature commentary from the director, production designer and a make-up fella from the effects house the film used. Personally, I find the worst commentaries are the ones where the participants see something - be it quality, thematic relevance, satire, whatever - in the film that I don`t. This one fits the bill, with Steve Beck`s opening comments almost fooling me into thinking I`m about to watch a completely different film. Mostly reviewed through spot-checking, the three of them chew the fat pretty well, their various talents lending each of them a different area of expertise to comment upon.

The 13-minute `Ghost Stories` is a video profile for all the ghosts featured in the film, and there`s a perfunctory EPK `making of` featurette that runs for about 20-minutes. All in SD, all subtitled, and all browsable from the pop-up menu.

Conclusion

`Thir13en Ghosts` more or less sank Dark Castle Entertainment`s hopes of concentrating solely on remaking Bill Castle films, in its wake the company hastily altering its raison d`être to encompass using original material. For this we should give thanks, as had DCE continued to churn out films as bad as this, we`d all be within our rights to pay Joel Silver a visit at his very large house and stone him en masse. The only compliment that can be paid to `Thir13en Ghosts` is that, considering Castle`s films all had a similar vibe and that `The House on Haunted Hill` had been remade in a very traditional fashion just two years previous, they decided to go a completely different way with the property at hand. It turned out horribly, but at least they tried. A point for effort.

Nothing makes sense in Steve Beck`s piece of unadulterated garbage; it`s a horror film set in, of all places, a brightly lit, glass-walled house. A nice idea in the hands of someone capable of creating tension in some other way, but no, not here. Not in the hands of a man who appears to be to horror what Ann Frank`s diary is to comedy literature. The protagonists are a dirt poor teacher and his family, yet they somehow manage to afford a housekeeper who joins them in uncle Cyrus` box of terrors. They couldn`t write in a more sensible fodder? The ghosts, despite being disembodied wraiths, either resemble cartoony videogame characters or professional wrestlers and have the corporeal abilities to go along with them. And Shannon Elizabeth doesn`t even take her clothes off. The film is full of smaller illogical inconsistencies, but none of it really matters when it`s so very bad. And not in a Bill Castle, so-good-it`s-bad kind of way. Just plain old bad is bad.

The story is ridiculous. The script is rubbish. The acting - spearheaded by a typically rubber-faced Matthew Lillard - flips between painful and simply dull, but given what they have to work with, the fairly robust cast can be forgiven. The direction is simply awful. Made somewhere between the birth of the new horror golden age and its tailing off, Steve Beck decided to make a horror film that looks like a pre-lunacy Britney Spears music video. Too much slo-mo, too much hammy melodrama, too much haphazardness. I`d like to say Beck fumbles the tension, but there is none to fumble; no build-up, no payoff. It`s actually mind-boggling as to what the film was trying to achieve. I suppose it`s like a straight-laced version of `Ghostbusters`, only with more violence and less... of everything. Everything that makes a good film good.

Seven years after its release, and now complete with spangly new high definition transfer and sound, `Thir13en Ghosts` is still a shoe-in for the worst film of the decade - the same decade that blessed us with the abominable `Catwoman`. I would say make of that what you will, if I hadn`t already made it clear this film is the pits.