Triskaidekaphilia: 'Thirteen Ghosts' (2001)

On the 13th of each month, I write about a movie whose title contains the number 13.

The 2001 remake of William Castle's 1960 schlock-horror classic 13 Ghosts (which I wrote about a year ago) was part of a short-lived initiative to revive Castle properties as modern horror B-movies (it followed a 1999 remake of House on Haunted Hill), but it takes only the barest elements from the original movie, changing a hokey family ghost story into a loud, R-rated killing spree. Plot-wise, there's still a down-on-their-luck family inheriting a creepy house from their deceased uncle, and the house is still filled with the titular ghosts (only 12, as the 13th is slated to be one of the family members), but the approach is completely different.

While the ghosts in the original turned out to be sort of harmless, here they are bloodthirsty and deadly, and once the family members end up inside the house, they're almost immediately hunted by the murderous apparitions. The house itself is the movie's most impressive element; it's a marvel of production design, a shifting puzzle box of glass and metal gears that one character reveals is "a machine designed by the devil and powered by the dead." Nearly the entire movie takes place in this one location, over the course of a single night, and director Steve Beck (a special-effects veteran making his directorial debut) creates a claustrophobic atmosphere as the characters run back and forth between corridors and locked rooms.

The characters themselves, however, are pretty one-dimensional, and the plot is full of so much mystical mumbo jumbo that it ends up being total nonsense. The ghosts, although certainly gorier than those in the original, aren't very scary, and the incoherent plotting takes away much of the potential suspense. The cast is a mix of talented actors slumming for a paycheck (Tony Shalhoub, F. Murray Abraham, Embeth Davidtz) and C-level performers you'd expect to see in a movie like this (Matthew Lillard, Shannon Elizabeth, rapper Rah Digga), but everyone ends up on the same mediocre level.

They're really just pieces to move around the elaborate set and react to the less impressive special effects. The filmmakers recycle one of Castle's gimmicks by updating the idea of special glasses being used to see the ghosts, but since the movie wasn't ever shown in 3D, the point is kind of lost. As schlocky as Castle's work was, at least it had a personal touch; this version is merely a product trading on vague name recognition.

Triskaidekaphilia: 'Lucky 13' (2005)

On the 13th of each month, I write about a movie whose title contains the number 13.
 

Shot somewhere around 1999 but not released until 2005, Lucky 13 probably only found distribution after such a long time thanks to co-star Lauren Graham's Gilmore Girls fame. It certainly doesn't deserve attention for anything else -- not its lame, half-assed story, weak dialogue, annoying characters or unfunny jokes. And certainly not for charisma-free leading man Brad Hunt, whose performance is so smarmy that I initially assumed he must be the writer and director as well, putting together a vanity project about how attractive and charming he is.

But no, Hunt is just the crappy actor hired by actual director Chris Hall to play 20-something loser Zach, who's spent his entire life pining away for his neighbor Abbey (Graham). When Abbey announces she is moving to New York City to become an artist, Zach finally asks her out on a date, and he has just a few days to make himself the perfect boyfriend material for Abbey. Thus he decides to revisit all 12 of his past girlfriends to learn why he could never hold onto a relationship.

This is a pretty standard contrived rom-com setup, but Hall and his co-writers completely screw it up with terrible pacing, lame jokes and barely sketched characters, including all of Zach's exes, many of whom barely even get any lines. Only a couple of his exes actually serve their ostensible plot purpose and give him some advice; otherwise they just show up for bad jokes or as background filler. I'm not entirely sure there are even 12 of them.

In addition to Graham, Lucky 13 is full of soon-to-be-famous faces, including Kaley Cuoco, Jenna Fischer, Taryn Manning, Ever Carradine, Pamela Adlon and Sasha Alexander (also a producer on this mess). There's also Harland Williams in a surprisingly subdued performance as Zach's goofy best friend, plus X's John Doe and That '70s Show's Debra Jo Rupp as his parents. The movie isn't worthy of any of their talents.

Bette Davis Month Bonus: 'The Golden Arrow' (1936)

Alfred E. Green directed Bette Davis in a number of her early films, including the 1932 hidden gem The Rich Are Always With Us. Green's The Golden Arrow isn't as entertaining as The Rich Are Always With Us, but it has a similar cheeky tone and playful attitude toward the quirks of the idle rich. Davis stars as what at first appears to be the heiress to a cosmetics fortune, a spoiled young woman who spends all her time lounging about on her yacht off the coast of Florida and entertaining various suitors. But Davis' Daisy is actually an actress hired to pretend to be a cosmetics heiress, in order to drum up publicity for the company.

This particular bit of information doesn't come to light until about halfway through the movie, after which Daisy has already proposed marriage to humble newspaper reporter Johnny Jones (perpetual Davis co-star George Brent), as a mutual business arrangement so he has leisure time to write his novel and she can fend off the advances of her persistent suitors. Except he still thinks she's a real heiress, and her bosses at the cosmetics company don't want her getting married at all. Got that? It's a convoluted setup that gets even more ridiculous as the movie goes on, but Green plays it all as light farce, and Davis has loads of fun as the street-smart dame who's infiltrated high society.

The ending involves a set piece built around some uncomfortable domestic violence humor, and the story kind of runs out of steam by that point anyway. But Davis and Brent have decent chemistry (although Brent is, as always, sort of bland by comparison), and the bits of sly commentary about the indulgences of the rich are entertaining and sharply delivered. It's rare to find a gem among these generic programmers that Davis made early in her career, so even though The Golden Arrow has its flaws, it still qualifies as a pleasant surprise.

White Elephant Blogathon: 'The Beast of Yucca Flats' (1961)

Sadly, last year I missed out on the White Elephant Blogathon, in which bloggers submit movie suggestions to a pool and then write about a randomly chosen selection from another blogger, but I'm back on board this year. The first year I participated, I got something boring (Dr. Dolittle: Million Dollar Mutts), and the second year, I got something terrible (Scorpion Thunderbolt), and this year I got a movie that's both boring and terrible, Coleman Francis' The Beast of Yucca Flats.

Although Beast is probably best known for its appearance in an episode of Mystery Science Theater 3000, I did not cheat -- I watched the original film without any comedic commentary, although I did check out some MST3K clips online. And boy is this a movie that needs comedic commentary to liven things up. It's only 54 minutes long, but it feels like a lifetime, with maybe 10 minutes of plot crammed into endless scenes of cars driving and parking (seems Francis must have been a big influence on Birdemic's James Nguyen), all narrated semi-coherently by Francis himself, since there was no sound recorded during production.

That means that either Francis is narrating in his rambling, ponderous style (sometimes filling in plot and character details, sometimes waxing poetic about nuclear armageddon), or he's throwing in awkwardly dubbed dialogue that can only be delivered when characters are offscreen or have their faces obscured in some way (since none of the words match up to the movement of the actors' mouths). It's possible to achieve a sort of otherworldly effect this way, and the movie's opening scene (which seems to have no connection to the rest of the story), in which a nearly naked woman is strangled by an unseen brute as a clock ticks loudly, is actually pretty creepy.

But the rest of the movie is just moronic, with a Soviet scientist played by Ed Wood favorite Tor Johnson getting caught up in a nuclear blast and transformed into the beast of the title. Mostly that means he lumbers around the sparse landscape, occasionally listlessly choking some anonymous passerby. Francis fails at creating suspense or even shocks; Johnson looks less like a beast and more like a guy with a bad sunburn. He clumsily stalks incompetent cops and an annoying family on vacation, but none of the performances have enough energy to make the threat seem urgent or even particularly dangerous. When the beast is defeated, it's the final anticlimax in a movie that's just one long disappointment.

Kenji Fujishima wrote a fascinating post on my pick, Cannibal Women in the Avocado Jungle of Death, which I definitely need to revisit.

Triskaidekaphilia: 'Last Stop on 13th Street' (1978)

On the 13th of each month, I write about a movie whose title contains the number 13.

Like 13teen, Last Stop on 13th Street is a cheapo B-movie slapped with a new title featuring the number 13 to make it sound more ominous. To be fair, it was originally released as Alien Zone, which is a far more nonsensical title, since there are no aliens anywhere in the movie (it's also known in some releases as The House of the Dead, which is by far the most accurate title), and there is at least a street (never indicated as 13th Street, though), at which one of the movie's main characters makes a last stop. But the title really has nothing to do with the plot, which features a philandering salesman making a wrong turn and ending up taken in by a charmingly sinister mortician (Ivor Francis, giving the movie's most effective performance).

The movie then turns into a sort of second-rate Twilight Zone or Tales From the Crypt, as the mortician takes the salesman through his parlor, opening a series of four coffins and telling stories about the inhabitants of each. The stories are pretty half-baked: A shrill teacher is murdered by some sort of child-monsters; a creepy guy films himself seducing/murdering women (featuring the least convincing onscreen strangulation I've ever seen), then gets caught; two master detectives entertain a deadly rivalry; and a callous businessman is tortured by unseen forces.

The detective story at least has a pair of fun performances and a satisfying (if painfully predictable) ending, and I could see it actually being a lesser episode of one of the shows the movie is copying. The rest of the stories are poorly paced and completely ineffective at creating suspense, and the framing sequence ends with the obvious twist that the adulterer is now the mortician's latest victim. The version of the movie I saw via Amazon Instant (obviously ripped from an old VHS tape, complete with tracking problems and murky, degraded image) is only 77 minutes long, and IMDb claims that there's a 100-minute cut out there somewhere, which might alleviate some of the choppiness, but is unlikely to improve the tedious plotting, lackluster acting and ugly visuals.

'Out There'

Virtually no one watched last year's underrated (if uneven) FX animated series Unsupervised, so people probably won't notice how much it has in common with the new IFC animated series Out There. Although both shows have the familiar structure of dumb, vulgar animated comedies, both shows soon reveal themselves as something more thoughtful and true, more interested in the painful peculiarities of being a teen outcast than in crafting lame gross-out jokes.

Like Unsupervised, Out There focuses on a pair of teen misfits who team up against the world, two best friends who bond together almost out of desperation. Out There's Chad and Chris are more typical sullen teenage outcasts (as opposed to the relentlessly positive protagonists of Unsupervised), with crushes on girls and dreams of running away and frustrating parents who don't understand them. The actual plotting of the show isn't particularly groundbreaking, but creator Ryan Quincy has a distinctive personal perspective (much of the show is autobiographical) that shines through, especially in his narration and voicing of main character Chad.

Also like Unsupervised, Out There isn't actually all that funny, but while it does have jokes, it's also built around a sense of melancholy that pervades even the silliest moments. Quincy's narration has a literary quality that feels almost like a reading of a decent short story or personal essay, and there's a real sadness to the characters' efforts to look cool or escape their boring small town or impress a pretty girl. Visually, the characters look like sort of animal/human hybrids (Chad and his brother and father resemble relatives of Cousin Itt), but their behavior is completely grounded and realistic. Out There isn't brilliant -- it has plenty of clumsy moments and jokes that fall flat -- but it has a unique voice that deserves to find more of an audience than Unsupervised did.

Premieres tonight at 10:30 on IFC.

'Upload With Shaquille O'Neal'

I don't follow sports at all, but I find Shaquille O'Neal kind of fascinating because he's clearly so desperate to be an entertainer. While he was in the NBA, he took time out to star in terrible movies (Steel, Kazaam), record terrible albums (Shaq Diesel, Shaq Fu) and host terrible reality shows (Shaq's Big Challenge, Shaq Vs.). Now that he's retired from basketball, he's able to devote all of his time to pursuing his misguided goal of becoming America's most beloved seven-foot-tall TV personality.

The latest chapter in this ongoing effort is Upload With Shaquille O'Neal, a Tru TV show that's basically Shaq hosting America's Funniest Home Videos. Although the format is similar to Tosh.0 or MTV's Ridiculousness in that it features videos culled from the internet, the videos themselves are the exact same kind of thing you'd see on AFV, primarily focused on people falling down and/or hurting themselves comedically. It's no surprise, since AFV executive producer Vin di Bona is also behind Upload, and the format, with its family-friendly humor, "clip of the week" and slick announcer (I swear it's the same guy), is basically a copy of AFV.

As for Shaq himself, he's propped up by comedians Godfrey and Gary Owen as co-hosts, so he mostly sits there and laughs at the clips, and occasionally reads some corny jokes. He also stars in some lame sketches in between videos, which are about as clever as, well, Bob Saget's voiceovers on AFV. This is the kind of show you could watch with your entire family without worrying that anyone will be offended (or more than mildly entertained), and like AFV, it could run for years without anyone noticing. Wearing a sweater vest and delivering puns, Shaq has successfully transformed himself into Bob Saget circa 1992, and you get the impression he couldn't be happier about it.

Premieres tonight at 10:30 on Tru TV.