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.