Triskaidekaphilia: '13 Days in France' (1968)

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

A disclaimer at the beginning of the impressionistic sports documentary 13 Days in France declares that it's not the official film of the 1968 Winter Olympics in Grenoble, France, and it's not hard to see why this movie would be the wrong choice as a sanctioned record of the Olympic games. Produced and co-directed by French New Wave icon Claude Lelouch (along with more than a dozen credited collaborators), 13 Days is an abstract snapshot of the games that's almost entirely devoid of context, with virtually no dialogue and very little diegetic sound. It more closely resembles something like Aquarela or Samsara, documentaries made up of a series of images around a central theme, rather than what you'd expect from a movie about the biggest sporting event in the world.

Considering that I have no interest in sports or the Olympics, this approach generally works for me, although at nearly two hours, the movie does get repetitive and tedious at times. Having at least some sports knowledge would probably help, since there's no explanation of the various events or competitors, and while I eventually spotted a couple of famous athletes via context clues (Jean-Claude Killy and Peggy Fleming, both of whom have songs sung about them on the soundtrack), most of the time I had no idea what was happening in the competitions, or even what many of them were (there's a weird skiing one where you shoot a gun in the middle of it?). Lelouch and his collaborators are just as interested in local color and behind-the-scenes details (including parties and musical performances), though, and the movie is really a feat of editing, as various athletic accomplishments are juxtaposed with mundane activities.

Even when portraying the athletes, the filmmakers focus on the less obvious aspects of the competition. There's a montage of hockey players spitting, and one rapid-fire sequence of a starting pistol indicating the beginning of multiple races that we never see. There are scenes of spectators frolicking in the snow, and one shot of a baby's diaper being changed by the side of a ski slope. Lelouch matches the shots of the Olympic flame being lit with shots of a cameraman's long, dangling cigarette ash. It's playful and also clearly meant to sort of deflate the self-importance of the games, especially in brief shots of newspaper headlines about Vietnam inserted between marching bands and cheering crowds. The point of view is a bit muddled, but the movie is distinctive enough to make it worth watching as cinema, and not just as a recording of sports history.

Triskaidekaphilia: 'Blood 13' (2018)

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

It's good to know that even in other countries, there are generic crime thrillers that feel like extended episodes of police procedural TV series. The Chinese movie Blood 13 is a dull, rote cop drama about the search for a serial killer who targets prostitutes, aiming for some sort of David Fincher-style darkness but ending up a lot closer to Criminal Minds, or something from the '90s starring Ashley Judd. There's no mystery here, really, since the identity of the killer is revealed halfway through the movie and never called into question, so the theoretical entertainment value is just in watching the two main detectives slowly realize that this guy they have repeatedly been questioning is in fact the killer, then racing to apprehend him.

The only mild tension comes from the main detective's prejudice against prostitutes, which is explained in a heavy-handed flashback to her father leaving her mother (presumably because of his habit of visiting prostitutes). But it doesn't have much of an effect on her dedication to the case, and other than a single scene in which she gets lectured about giving sex workers basic respect, it's not a major theme of the movie. That detective, Xing Min (Lu Huang), is a cop-movie stereotype, a reckless lone wolf (note her leather jacket) who never listens to anyone's advice. The movie just uses that as an excuse to place her as a damsel in distress for the last half-hour, though, when she offers herself as bait for the killer and ends up being abducted.

The other detective on the case is veteran Lao Zhou (Gang Xie), who's been obsessed with this killer since failing to catch him 15 years ago. I think he's meant to be a tragic figure looking for redemption, but his habit of carrying around the first victim's skull in a wooden box wherever he goes mostly just makes him seem creepy. The characterization of both detectives is pretty minimal, and the killer is the one who gets the most development, in a long monologue toward the end as he explains his evolution as a murderer. None of it is particularly interesting, and the movie especially drags once the audience knows who the killer is and we have to wait for the detectives to figure it out. It's not surprising that director Candy Li has worked on productions in both the U.S. and China, since she seems to have learned all about making bland, forgettable low-budget cop movies directly from the original source.

Triskaidekaphilia: '13th Child' (2002)

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

Although it looks like it was shot for a budget of around $100 wherever the filmmakers could grab locations, horror movie 13th Child boasts a cast that includes Robert Guillaume, Lesley-Anne Down, Christopher Atkins and Cliff Robertson, whose co-writing credit may explain this inept indie production's ability to attract so many recognizable actors. None of them are doing their best work here, and Down's role, at least, is little more than a cameo. But Robertson throws himself into the part of a strange, wealthy recluse living in rural New Jersey, delivering his lines with the kind of devilish menace that he probably imagined in his head while he was writing the terrible dialogue. If nothing else, 13th Child gives a veteran character actor a chance to realize some sort of bizarre personal vision (Robertson's only other writing credits are a 1962 episode of TV Western Outlaws and the 1971 cowboy movie J W Coop, both of which he directed), in one of his final onscreen roles.

Robertson aside, 13th Child is your basic no-budget horror movie, with a story based around the urban legend of the Jersey Devil, a creature that haunts the Pine Barrens, the vast forest area of southern New Jersey. The movie gives the Jersey Devil a back story as the 13th child of a Native American tribe who clashed with early English settlers, although the Wikipedia entry doesn't mention anything about Native Americans. Also, for some reason Robertson's Mr. Shroud calls the monster "Bruno," which does seem like a very New Jersey name for an evil entity. Mr. Shroud turns out to be the English priest who initially ordered the Native American man put to death, or at least I think that's what the movie's ending implies. He's definitely not quite human, and he has a supernatural bond of some kind with the Jersey Devil.

That all sounds a lot more exciting than the movie actually is, since the bulk of the story is about Kathryn (Michelle Maryk), a somewhat snarky investigator for the New Jersey attorney general's office, who's looking into the case of an escaped convict who's been mutilated by some kind of creature deep in the woods. It's not clear why the regular police aren't part of the investigation, and Kathryn teams up with a forest ranger (Atkins) and an officer "on loan" from the NYPD to look into the attack. The trio mostly stand around making awkward jokes and blatantly violating the chain of evidence, at one point leaving a bag of body parts in their car overnight before taking it to a coroner. This is the kind of movie that has the coroner's assistant perform some sort of magical, instantaneous analysis on a strange claw found at the murder scene that can identify it as a combination of multiple types of animal DNA, as well as date its existence back 200 years.

The other main plot strand involves Guillaume as a mental patient obsessed with the Jersey Devil, and the movie's confusing timeline indicates that his ravings about the creature while locked up in the world's dingiest, most poorly staffed mental institution come after the main events of the story. Most of Guillaume's dialogue is delivered in what sounds like voiceover while director Steven Stockage shoots him from a curiously distant angle, like they just got some random footage of Guillaume stumbling around his cell and then added whatever audio they needed later.

Really, though, these scenes are no more disjointed or clumsy than the rest of the movie, which includes things like one character struggling to put on a jacket in the foreground of the shot while two other characters have a conversation next to him. The monster barely ever appears onscreen, and the killings are mostly just quick splashes of blood before Stockage cuts away. A disclaimer at the end of the credits states that all of the dead deer seen in the movie (the preferred bait for the Jersey Devil, apparently) were repurposed roadkill, which is just the kind of thrifty yet distasteful technique that exemplifies this odd mess of a movie.

Triskaidekaphilia: 'Investigation 13' (2019)

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

A group of college-student ghost hunters lock themselves into a seemingly abandoned, allegedly haunted old insane asylum for the night, determined to record conclusive evidence of the afterlife. The weird old lady who owns the property promises to return for them the next morning. Do you really need any more info to guess what happens next in the rote direct-to-VOD horror movie Investigation 13? It's definitely not that everything goes well and all of the characters leave the asylum the next morning in perfect health, satisfied with the important data they've collected.

Just because the plot of Investigation 13 (the title refers to 12 previous paranormal investigations that have all been inconclusive) has been seen dozens of times before doesn't mean it couldn't be effectively executed. But director and co-writer Krisstian de Lara does an abysmal job of generating scares or constructing a cohesive plot, and the movie fails to make use of even its exceedingly meager resources. A few splashes of very fake-looking blood are about as gruesome or scary as anything gets in Investigation 13, and De Lara relies on crude animatics for the extensive flashbacks to the asylum's history, suggesting, as one Letterboxd commenter pointed out, that the production ran out of money and was forced to use its own storyboards in the finished movie.

Whether those animated sequences were a deliberate artistic choice or a financial necessity, they're still incredibly ugly and amateurish, sketchy drawings that almost never actually move, layered with stilted voiceover. The acting from the onscreen performers isn't much better, and even genre legend Meg Foster (They Live, The Lords of Salem, Masters of the Universe) doesn't add much to the movie in her brief appearance as the creepy caretaker. Star Stephanie Hernandez spends the entire movie in a distracting, ill-fitting wig, and the male actors mostly just petulantly snipe at each other. In the grand tradition of micro-budget direct-to-video thrillers, the majority of the action involves slowly skulking around poorly lit corridors.

The boogeyman of the asylum is a former inmate named Leonard Craven (Peter Aratari), who is also nicknamed the Mole Man for reasons that I could never quite figure out. It's not clear if Leonard is meant to be a ghost or just a deranged murderer, but he's pretty corporeal for a ghost, and he'd have to be close to 80 years old (according to the movie's timeline) if he had just been hanging out in the abandoned building all this time. Either way, with his tight black clothing, stringy black hair and steampunk-style goggles, the Mole Man looks more like the singer of an industrial metal band than a possibly immortal psychopath. He's about as unimpressive as horror-movie villains get, which makes the promise in the movie's IMDb summary (presumably written by the filmmakers themselves) of a whole Mole Man franchise about as laughable as everything else in this worthless movie.

Triskaidekaphilia: 'The 13th Friday' (2017)

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

It's been a little while since I ran out of movies from the Friday the 13th franchise to feature in this series, but the concept of Friday the 13th is such a potent source for horror that there are still plenty of other movies that riff on that idea (and may get a little boost from the opportunistic association with a well-known property). Justin Price's straight-to-VOD crapfest The 13th Friday definitely falls into this category, with a title designed to catch the eye of Jason Voorhees fans even though the movie itself bears no resemblance to the adventures of the hockey mask-wearing killer. A Friday the 13th rip-off probably would have been more watchable than this completely incoherent mess, which makes absolutely no sense and contains nothing resembling scares or suspense.

I'm not even sure I can recount the basic plot, since the movie jumps around abruptly from scene to scene and character to character in such a haphazard manner that I was almost never sure what was happening or how the people onscreen were connected to each other. The movie opens with both expository title cards and expository narration, both of which begin with "It is said ..." and offer no useful information for what is about to happen. There's a prologue that is apparently set in the early 1900s featuring a woman setting her young daughter on fire, and as one Letterboxd user pointed out, the girl in this supposed period setting is wearing braces on her teeth.

That kind of sloppy inattention to basic detail is a hallmark of Price's work, which I've actually encountered before via his equally dreadful Christmas-themed horror movies The Elf and Elves. After the prologue, Friday introduces a bunch of people hanging out at the world's most listless party, holding obviously empty red Solo cups as they stand outside this supposedly haunted house (which is also a church, maybe?). The actors all deliver their lines so completely devoid of emotion that you could almost imagine this movie as some sort of experimental performance-art project commenting on terrible no-budget horror movies. But no, it's just a cheap, rushed production that follows these interchangeable people as they all die in various ways after they're cursed by this evil house (where they voluntarily have a party, for some reason).

The curse involves an object that looks kind of like the puzzle box from Hellraiser, but apparently is some sort of calendar that requires the group to sacrifice someone each month for 13 months (hence the title, I guess, although there is more than one Friday in a month). Price awkwardly fast-forwards through most of this, killing and introducing characters so clumsily that I had no idea who was who, even when he sort of settles on Lisa May's Allison as the protagonist. Some of the victims get sacrificed in a cave, although I could never figure out where the cave was or how they got there. There are some crappy-looking monsters that are obviously people in flimsy masks, but then there are also characters who are supposed to be wearing flimsy masks to make themselves look like monsters, I guess?

Anyway, it all relates to the young girl from the prologue being possessed by Satan, I think, and also to the erasure of the cursed 13th month of the year from the ancient calendar (also a plot point in the similarly awful bargain-basement horror movie 13/13/13). It doesn't matter, because the climax just involves the remaining characters wandering around the haunted house before the movie ends abruptly without resolving anything. May, who's worked with Price on multiple projects, delivers all of her lines in a sort of halting whisper, and the rest of the cast sound like they're being fed their lines one word at a time. The special effects are so rinky-dink that you can practically see the strings holding up the ghostly sheets, and even basic things like spiders and butterflies are created with horribly unconvincing CGI. Somehow Price keeps getting funding and distribution for these abominations (I watched this one on Hulu), but he's clearly not doing anything to improve his craft as a filmmaker.

Triskaidekaphilia: '13 Hours by Air' (1936)

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

It's pretty amazing how much air travel has changed in the last 80-plus years, as is plain to see in the otherwise forgettable 1936 B-movie 13 Hours by Air. Directed by journeyman Mitchell Leisen and starring affable but bland Fred MacMurray as pilot Jack Gordon, 13 Hours strolls leisurely through its brief 74-minute running time, only generating mild suspense toward the end. The title refers to the time it takes for a United Airlines flight to get from New York to San Francisco, making numerous stops along the way. Jack is first a passenger before taking over as pilot on the second half of the journey, but his fellow passengers mostly remain the same, including socialite Felice Rollins (Joan Bennett), with whom he shares a low-key flirtation.

MacMurray and Bennett have some appealing chemistry, but their romance, like everything in this sedate movie, is pretty underwhelming. There are only a handful of passengers on the flight, including an annoying spoiled brat named Waldemar (Bennie Bartlett) and his exasperated nanny (Zasu Pitts); a pair of suspicious men (Brian Donlevy and Alan Baxter) who turn out to be a bank robber and the FBI agent tracking him; and a haughty aristocrat (Fred Keating) trying to stop Felice from getting to San Francisco for reasons that are not very interesting once they're revealed. There's only slight intrigue in seeing these various plot threads develop, and the movie mostly proceeds at the same unhurried pace as its titular flight.

Eventually, there's a bit of danger, as the plane is forced into an emergency landing by inclement weather, and the bank robber decides to finally reveal himself and threaten his fellow passengers. Even with all the gunplay (of course in 1936, anyone could bring a gun on board an airplane without any interference), nobody seems like they're in much danger, and loudmouthed Waldemar ends up saving the day somehow. Even dedicated MacMurray or Bennett fans could easily skip this one, as both actors coast through the undemanding roles. The best reason to see the movie is really to witness the early incarnation of commercial air travel, when passengers could just wander into the cockpit or open the outside door mid-flight. That stuff is far more attention-grabbing than anything in the sleepy plot.

Triskaidekaphilia: '3:13' (2015)

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

One of the great things about Amazon Prime is that it's so open, allowing indie filmmakers to post their small-scale, micro-budget productions without many barriers, so that they can be discovered by viewers around the world. Of course, most small-scale, micro-budget productions are terrible, so Amazon Prime is also full of obscure trash, making it very hard to discern what's worth seeing in this avalanche of anonymous content. I watched David Jaure's 3:13 because its title fits this project, but I can't imagine anyone other than the friends and family of the people involved in making this movie stumbling across it online and actually sitting through the entire thing.

I suppose Jaure has good intentions in creating this drama about the life of a homeless man following the 2008 financial crisis. The movie opens with an epigram about homelessness that is full of tortured syntax, but the bottom line is that Jaure is attempting to engender empathy for the forgotten and ignored people who live on the streets. Unfortunately he fails in pretty much every respect, and even the efforts to make main character Peter Grecco (Paul Alexandro) sympathetic as he struggles to survive often achieve the opposite effect. Peter speaks in stilted voiceover about his plight, making laughable pseudo-philosophical pronouncements like "What does 'human being' mean? Is it being human?"

The acting is terrible, the story is clumsy and heavy-handed, and Peter himself comes off like a selfish idiot who's largely responsible for his own situation. Flashbacks show Peter eagerly signing up for an unsustainable interest-only home loan, and Jaure seems so determined to demonstrate how corrupt the loan practices were leading up to the financial crisis that he has the loan officer plainly tell Peter that they are committing fraud. And yet Peter doesn't hesitate to go for it! His wife leaves him for reasons that are unclear, and then he refuses to come visit their young daughter, even after she begs him. He packs up and leaves his house seemingly hours after losing his job, not bothering to fight to keep it, just like he doesn't bother to fight for his family.

It's hard to say whether that's a character flaw or just poor filmmaking from Jaure. There are a lot of weird inconsistencies in this movie that may or may nor be intentional. At one point Peter is stalked and shot multiple times by some teenage thrill-seekers, and the bullet holes in his back have just disappeared by a few scenes later, without any medical attention. Those thrill-seekers show up again at the end of the movie, which shifts abruptly from its empathetic tone to a doom-and-gloom screed about human nature, as Peter winds up killed (at 3:13 in the morning, hence the title) by being set on fire by some faceless assailants while he's sleeping on a bench.

It's inspired by real-life attacks on homeless people, but it's so jarring and poorly depicted (with fake-looking CGI fire) that it's mostly just laughable. After a Bible quote (from a passage also reference by the title), the credits roll adjacent to interviews with some real homeless people, which are far more genuine and affecting than anything in the preceding movie. Maybe Jaure should have just made a documentary instead.

Triskaidekaphilia: '13 Style Strike' (1979)

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

I've written about numerous martial arts movies over the course of this project, and they've almost all been terrible: cheap-looking, poorly written, incomprehensibly plotted, broadly acted and completely lacking in suspense or excitement. Probably that's a byproduct of the kinds of movies that end up being retitled for home video with the number 13 in them; most of the horror movies I've written about suffer from the same problems. But since I have a general aversion to martial arts movies, I probably have less patience for these shoddy examples than I do for the many, many terrible horror movies I've seen over the years. I tend to tune out during even the most elegantly staged fight scenes, which I find inherently repetitive and dull. That's not to say that I've never enjoyed a martial arts movie, but it's often other elements (plot, character, set and costume design, cinematography) that draw me in.

All of which is to say that 1979's 13 Style Strike (also known as Eighth Wonder of Kung Fu) is very bad, and not just because it's a cheap martial arts movie. The plot is more or less incomprehensible, the characters are difficult to tell apart, the editing is choppy, and the fight scenes are sloppily staged, with punches and kicks that often land only vaguely near their targets. Some of the flaws can be blamed on the English-language version available to watch on Amazon Prime, which in addition to its laughable dubbing may have been edited for the American market (it runs just 76 minutes) and had its sound effects added or changed (the entire soundtrack, not just the dialogue, sounds like it was overdubbed). Amazon's video was clearly copied directly from VHS (including multiple tracking problems, which are always hilarious to see on streaming video), and no one's bothered to restore this poorly made obscurity.

I've thus far avoided recounting the plot, because I'm not quite sure I know what it is. There's a kung-fu school in what characters keep referring to as Shanghai, even though the movie is from Taiwan. A couple of white American businessmen have imported an American martial-arts champion to fight against Chinese kung-fu masters for some reason. There are references to the combination between Western and Eastern styles (maybe 13 of them?), and in an early scene, one of the kung-fu champions fights an American boxer, complete with boxing gloves. I'm tempted to credit this movie with inventing mixed martial arts, but that would imply that I understood what was happening.

There's also a rivalry between local kung-fu masters, one of whom is also a crime lord, maybe. There's a kung-fu champion taking the fall for an accidental killing by his brother (or student?), getting sent to jail, breaking out of jail, becoming a kung-fu clown (?), and then triumphantly returning to take on the American challenger. I guess this guy is the hero of the movie, although he doesn't really seem any more important than any of the other characters, whose relationships to each other are always unclear, until the movie gets close to its climax. There are a handful of cool moments in a late-film fight sequence at a construction site, but otherwise the action is listless, and since it's hard to figure out what the characters are fighting for and why, there's very little rooting interest in these anonymous ciphers. This certainly isn't a kung-fu movie for anyone but the most dedicated schlock fans.

Triskaidekaphilia: 'Scooby-Doo and the Curse of the 13th Ghost' (2019)

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

Over the decades, cartoon dog Scooby-Doo and his human friends have starred in many, many different series, some of which lasted for numerous seasons, some of which were cut short after just a short run. The 1985 series The 13 Ghosts of Scooby-Doo lasted for just 13 episodes, and it's mostly just a footnote in the long franchise history. But the proliferation of online fandom means that nothing in pop culture gets lost anymore, and thus the latest straight-to-video Scooby-Doo original movie is an exercise in integrating this obscure series into some kind of overarching continuity.

That makes Scooby-Doo and the Curse of the 13th Ghost an extremely niche product, and yet it plays out mostly like a typical kid-friendly Scooby-Doo production, albeit with more self-awareness. Anyone who (like me) has never seen the original 13 Ghosts series can easily follow the movie, and it wouldn't be hard to believe that all the silly back story imported from the old show was just made up for this new movie. That includes the character of Vincent Van Ghoul, who is modeled after and was originally voiced by Vincent Price, and here gets an impressive soundalike vocal performance from veteran voice actor Maurice LaMarche.

Vincent summons the Scooby gang to help him capture the 13th ghost who escaped from an ancient chest of demons ("demon" and "ghost" are used pretty much interchangeably throughout) when it was accidentally opened by Scooby and Shaggy in the first episode of 13 Ghosts. The show only lasted long enough for the gang (also including Daphne, but minus regulars Fred and Velma) to capture 12 of the ghosts before it was canceled, and so the 13th ghoul has just been hanging out in continuity limbo. The gang travels first to Vincent's spooky castle home and then to a remote village in the Himalayas in order to track down and capture that final ghost.

Curse is full of familiar Scooby-Doo elements, including groan-worthy puns and ineffectual, ultimately harmless bad guys. But it's also surprisingly clever, at least for someone who hasn't kept up with the various incarnations of the show for the past 30 years. After an opening prologue establishing Vincent's origin story, the movie introduces the Scooby gang as they seem to thwart one of their typical nemeses (a creepy farmer sabotaging the development of a new mall). But it turns out that this isn't a masked criminal, and they've in fact caught an innocent man. A local cop tells them to stop trying to solve mysteries, or he'll have to haul them in.

When Vincent reaches out for help, Daphne has to clue Fred and Velma in on who he is, because they weren't part of that incarnation of the show. She also takes over as leader, changing into a stylish version of her very '80s jumpsuit from the 13 Ghosts series, prompting an existential crisis from Fred as to what his role is within the group if Daphne is leader. Sure, it's all fan service, but there's an element of intelligent deconstruction that keeps it from just coming across as pandering.

The plot drags in the second half (this probably did not need to be a feature-length story), and the villain is underwhelming, but overall Curse is lively and entertaining, with strong voice work from a mix of veterans (Frank Welker has been voicing Fred since 1969!) and relative newcomers (Matthew Lillard has taken his live-action role as Shaggy into the animation realm, and Kate Micucci is an inspired choice as Velma). The animation is colorful and appealing, and there's enough here to engage both the primary Scooby-Doo kid audience and the nerdy adults who care about the continuity minutiae of cartoons.

Triskaidekaphilia: 'Nightmare on the 13th Floor' (1990)

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

It's not actually a pilot for a TV series, but the 1990 made-for-USA movie Nightmare on the 13th Floor could very well have been the extended first episode of a forgettable procedural about a travel writer who solves crimes on her various trips. Michele Greene is actually pretty charming as Elaine Kalisher, who's assigned to write an article about the historic Wessex Hotel in Los Angeles and ends up stumbling on a Satanic murder cult. The plot is totally idiotic and takes way too long to get to its predictable reveals (even though the movie only runs 85 minutes), but there's a kind of comforting familiarity to the tone and style, which matches the kind of reruns USA was probably airing before and after showing this movie.

The opening even features Elaine at home in Florida before her trip, bantering with her sassy kid neighbor, as if establishing a supporting cast for a series that will never come. Once in LA, she checks in to the fancy Wessex, but while exploring the hotel for her article, she gets stuck between floors in the service elevator, accidentally witnessing the murder of a man on the hidden 13th floor. All the employees insist that there is no 13th floor and that she must have been hallucinating (after taking a bump on the head when the elevator jolted to a stop), and a seemingly kind local doctor (played by James Brolin) assures her that it's all in her imagination.

Of course, all these people are part of the conspiracy, and there's a nice touch as Elaine describes the old-timey 13th floor and its gaslights while being told that her own observations aren't to be trusted. Writers J.D. Feigelson and Dan DiStefano don't really do anything else with the idea of a woman's trauma being minimized and disbelieved, but it's still a smart reference for a movie that's mostly just interested in grinding through plot mechanics. Elaine is actually very determined and resourceful and never really doubts herself, pushing forward until she discovers the (obvious) sinister truth.

There's not a lot of suspense in that discovery, and since this movie was made for basic cable in the '90s, almost all of the violence takes place offscreen, with virtually no blood. Director Walter Grauman tries to lend some style to that necessary constraint, showing the shadow of the killer's axe descending on each victim right before a scream and a cut to the next scene, but it's more cheesy than evocative. That applies to the movie as a whole, which might have been a little bold for USA in 1990, but now just seems clunky and quaint.

Triskaidekaphilia: '13 Fighting Men' (1960)

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

I'm not certain exactly how many fighting men are in the 1960 Civil War drama 13 Fighting Men, or how they're meant to be counted, but either way I'm pretty sure there aren't 13 of them. There are fighting men on both sides of the North/South divide in this movie, which takes place just as the Civil War has ended and the two armies are no longer meant to be at odds (or at least not violently). Conveniently, the main characters find out about this development via a newspaper headline that reads "Civil War Over." That's indicative of the kind of bland, straightforward storytelling on display here, despite occasionally lively moments of interpersonal conflict.

A regiment of Union soldiers led by the upstanding Capt. John Forrest (Grant Williams) is escorting a U.S. Treasury agent and his literal box full of gold coins back to safe territory when the slimy Maj. Simon Boyd (Brad Dexter), leader of a rogue Confederate unit, finds out about the gold and decides he and his men should take it for themselves. The Union troops take shelter in a farmhouse, and most of the movie involves the Confederates laying siege to the house, determined to get the gold by any means necessary. The frontier siege and the conflict over a cache of gold make Fighting Men more like a Western than a war movie, and indeed the war is used mostly as background for a stodgy morality play.

Boyd and his men aren't the only greedy ones, and Forrest faces betrayal and potential violence from some of his own men, as well as the residents of the farm, who find themselves caught in the middle of the battle. Screenwriters Robert Hammer and Jack W. Thomas find some nuance in the various motives of the characters, who aren't all just either selfish thieves or honorable patriots. The Treasury agent guarding the gold is a cold bureaucrat, more concerned about government property than about the lives of the soldiers, and the lady of the house, Mrs. Prescott (Carole Mathews) is a pragmatic schemer whose life has been destroyed by a war she had no part in. Boyd is a pretty one-dimensional villain, but his soldiers aren't just minions who fall in line.

Mathews is good as the devious Mrs. Prescott, but the otherwise all-male cast is pretty stolid, and there isn't a lot of suspense or excitement in the lengthy stand-off. The movie runs only 69 minutes, but director Harry W. Gerstad still takes his time getting all the major players together, and the meatier drama doesn't really start until the second half. Even then, the threats never seem particularly dire, and the violence is all bloodless and brief. The moral issues of the war itself are never raised, and the characters' various positions on right and wrong play out in largely expected ways. Like the movie itself, they're just going through the motions.

Triskaidekaphilia: 'Flight 313: The Conspiracy' (2015)

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

I wouldn't have expected a serious drama about airline safety regulations to join the ranks of movies that get retitled for home video release with the number 13 in order to make them sound more ominous, but that's exactly what happened to the British social-issue drama A Dark Reflection, released on VOD in the U.S. as Flight 313: The Conspiracy. Really, both of the movie's titles promise more intrigue than is actually on display in what is essentially a dramatized position paper about the phenomenon known as "aerotoxic syndrome."

That's the idea, still mostly unsubstantiated, that the air in commercial airliner cabins is contaminated by chemicals from jet engines, causing illness in both passengers and crew members. Flight 313 director, co-writer, producer and editor Tristan Loraine is a former British Airways pilot, and the movie was financed entirely by airline crew unions and other advocacy groups. So it's mostly concerned with sending a message, which makes the narrative and character development secondary to the political and social cause. That's fine for a documentary, but it means that Flight 313 is clumsy, ineffective drama that frequently pauses to deliver dry statistics and explanations of the mechanics of jet engines.

Loraine clearly wants to emulate crusading-journalist dramas like The Insider, The China Syndrome and All the President's Men (even explicitly referencing Woodward and Bernstein at one point), but there's very little suspense in the story of newspaper reporter Helen Eastman (Georgina Sutcliffe) and her efforts to expose a cover-up of toxic cabin air at fictional airline JaspAir. Helen and her colleague Natasha Stevens (Rita Ramnani) very slowly connect the dots from the "near-miss" landing of the titular flight to JaspAir's policy of ignoring and hiding evidence of contamination in its cabins.

The drama here is mostly inert, though, and the characters are one-dimensional ciphers representing various points of view on the issue, even as Loraine attempts to flesh out a bit of Helen's back story (via an opening sequence set in the Middle East, where she witnesses a co-worker get killed). None of the flimsy character beats are relevant to the story, and the dialogue is always clunky and awkward, whether it's expressing outrage over toxic air or attempting to convey personal feelings. Plus, half the time it's muddled and difficult to make out. From a technical standpoint, Flight 313 comes across as a movie made by someone with more passion than skill, and while it's hard to fault Loraine for wanting to call attention to what he believes is an important issue, framing that issue as a dull movie-of-the-week-style drama isn't going to win him very many supporters.

Triskaidekaphilia: 'The 13th Unit' (2014)

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

Yet another example of a direct-to-video movie retitled with the number 13 to make it sound more menacing (or maybe just more memorable), The 13th Unit originally had the much more evocative title of The Darkness, the Rage and the Fury. Maybe it's better that it ended up with a blander title, because there's no way this cheap-looking, repetitive, poorly acted and incoherently plotted movie could ever live up to something as grandiose as The Darkness, the Rage and the Fury. Clearly inspired by the filmmakers' access to a single location (a labyrinthine self-storage facility), Unit introduces some nonsensical mythology as an excuse to slowly kill off a variety of annoying characters wandering around this vast complex (yet rarely ever encountering each other).

Opening title cards explain that this site was previously a warehouse where a group of criminals gathered following a museum heist, only to be mysteriously slaughtered, with the artifacts they stole never recovered. After that, there's a prologue featuring various irritating characters at the storage facility, being targeted by an entity of some kind (indicated by sinister POV shots, mostly). Then there's an opening-credits sequence of a shadowy figure engaged in some sort of demonic ritual. And then there's yet another set-up scene of our three main characters explaining the exact same background that was detailed in the opening title cards (complete with terrible fake-looking vintage newspaper articles).

Finally, the movie begins, although there's really not much to distinguish the main action from what happens in the prologue, other than that we get to spend more time with these particular annoying characters and hear them whine about their back story. Maybe the demon that killed the criminals back in the 1930s is back? Maybe it was summoned by the ritual during the opening credits? Maybe it's unleashed when the three dumb protagonists open the box that those criminals stole decades ago (which they find in like 10 minutes after apparently no one could locate it for years)? Maybe it's not a demon at all, but a kind of infectious ooze that causes people to go crazy and turn on their friends?

The answer to all of those questions is an indifferent shrug, and writer-director Theophilus Lacey haphazardly posits various half-formed explanations for what's happening. Some of the characters clearly do end up possessed by some black goo and turn violent, but other characters are clearly killed by some sort of monster that never fully appears onscreen. Both the demonic summoning and the discovery of the artifacts occur around the time of the attacks, but some attacks seem to start before either of those things happen. Ultimately, it doesn't matter, since these grating characters, who spend almost all of their screen time yelling at each other about either their personal squabbles or their deadly predicament, totally deserve whatever gruesome fate they encounter, by whatever means.

Plenty of low-budget horror movies have made great use of a single available location, and the storage facility has lots of potential (anyone who's been in one of those places late at night can attest to its inherent creepiness). But Lacey doesn't capitalize on any of that potential, just having his characters literally cover the same ground over and over again. Onscreen titles meant to convey where each character is only add to the confusing inconsistency (levels are variously referred to as "lower level X," "sub-level X" or just "X levels below"), and there's nothing narratively unique about the setting. It's the ultimate squandered opportunity in a movie that drops the ball at pretty much every possible chance.