13 Ghosts
(1960)
Thir13en Ghosts
(2001)
buy them
today at amazon.com
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13 Ghosts |
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buy them
today at amazon.com |
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| 13 Ghosts
dvd |
Scares/Tension  |
Skin |
Gore/Violence  |
Movie Overall  |
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| Thir13en
Ghosts dvd |
Scares/Tension  |
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Gore/Violence  |
Movie Overall  |
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Thir13en Ghosts Starring: 13 Ghosts Donald Woods .... Cyrus Zorba "13 Times the Thrills! 13 Times the Chills! 13 Times the Fun!" "A ghost for each member of your family! Pick your favorite spook!" These were taglines that went with the original 13 Ghosts released by William Castle in 1960. It's pretty tame by today's standards of course, but I suppose some of the ghosts sequences could have been a bit frightening back in 1960. There is also a bit of comic relief courtesy of a couple characters in the movie. Rosemary DeCamp, who plays Hilda Zorba, the wife of slightly eccentric paleontologist, Cyrus Zorba, has some great facial expressions and plays a pretty cool mom, especially for 1960. I think it is also the most expressive I have ever seen actor Martin Milner, who plays attorney Ben Rush. Milner, for those of you too young to remember, played in the popular Route 66 from 1960 to 1964. His biggest claim to fame however, was playing the role of officer Pete Malloy in the long running (1968-1975) cop drama, Adam 12. This was my favorite TV show for years when I was growing up. It was also my first exposure to the fact that most police work was pretty routine and somewhat boring, not just non-stop car chases and shootouts. Spoiler Alert! I do go over most of the surprise "twists" in both movies, so read at your own peril if you don't want to know how they end! The basic story of 13 Ghosts is simple enough. A family of four headed by the father, Cyrus Zorba, has financial problems. In fact they have had all of their furniture repossessed on the day of their sons birthday. His birthday wish as he blows out the candles on his cake is for them to "live in a house with furniture". Moments after this, a letter is delivered to Cyrus. His rich uncle recently died and is leaving his house and furnishings to him. Cyrus had not had much contact with the uncle and had thought he had died years earlier. So off the family goes to the house. There is a caretaker at the house, Elaine Zacharides, who is played by none other than Margaret Hamilton, The Wicked Witch of the West from The Wizard of Oz. She doesn't have a huge role but it is key. She is actually more than the caretaker. She was the uncle's close friend and a psychic on their ghosts hunts that they went on together. There are twelve ghosts in the house and before long there are supposed to be thirteen. The first night in the house, an ouija is found in a hidden passage and the family plays it. The board tells them that the house is haunted and that one of them will die! The daughter, Medea Zorba, (Jo Morrow) thinks she is the one the board was talking about, so becomes both frightened and depressed. Of course she doesn't become too depressed to start dating attorney Ben Rush. He is now a friend of the family and dating the daughter and all seems hunky dory except for that pesky ghost problem. But all is not as it seems...... Ben Rush turns out to not be such a nice guy after all. Little Buck Zorba (Charles Herbert), finds $200 on the floor. Rush walks in and asks Buck to promise to not tell the rest of the family about the money. He tells him that they are going to go on a treasure hunt that night and find all of the hidden money in the house and then surprise the family with it. Buck agrees, but all day it just kills him to not tell people. That night, the family has a seance conducted by Elaine in the hopes of getting to the bottom of this ghost business. They contact the dead uncle and he posses good old dad and re-iterates the fact that someone in the house will die tonight. Do they get out of the house? No! This is the first example I know of off hand where the family gets a supernatural warning that someone is going to die and they still stay in the house. Of course as it turns out the person in the house who is going to die is Ben Rush, but the family does not know that he has snuck back in the house to get the rest of the cash that the uncle has hidden somewhere. Buck has found the secret hiding place, and when Rush finds him, poor Buck is in for more of a surprise than he bargained for. Rush tosses him on the bed that the uncle died on that has a pushbutton, collapsible canopy on it. Rush is going to suffocate Buck on the bed and take off with the money! This is when the ghost of the uncle shows up and scares Rush so badly that he falls back onto the suffocation bed just as Buck wakes up. Buck slides off the bed just in time to watch the ghost terrify Rush to the point of being too paralyzed to move, and then to have the life squeezed out of him by the bed. Oh the horror. There is a great scene at the end of 13 Ghosts where Margaret Hamilton grabs a broom and looks in the camera and raises her eyebrows. That brief scene alone is worth renting the movie. I did get this dvd from netflix, so I did not have the "Illision-O" glasses that come with the dvd. What this was was William Castle's gimmick for the film. Whenever a ghost would appear you held your Illusion-O glasses up and looked through one of two colored filters and you could see the ghosts on the screen. Without them, no ghosts. This differed from your normal 3-D glasses of the time. The dvd ,released by Columbia/Tri-Star does included the glasses. The disk is two sided and on one side you can use the glasses to view the ghosts, and the other side shows the ghosts without the glasses. Of course this is gimmicky, but hey, that's William Castle! The 1.85:1 anamorphic transfer was very clean and I noticed just the occasional speck on the screen. The sound is Dolby Digital 2.0 mono and I had no issues with it. The extras include an introduction from William Castle on how to use the Illusion-O glasses, a short but entertaining documentary, and trailers for 13 Ghosts, The Tingler and Ghosts Busters. The remake, cutely titled Thir13en Ghosts, has none of the charm or humor of the original. They try to get some laughs out of one character, Maggie Bess (played by actress Rah Digga), but it just comes across as annoying, not funny. The beginning of the film shows the uncle, Cyrus Kriticos, (played by the excellent character actor, F. Murray Abraham), gathering up a real pissed off ghost in a junkyard. He has a high tech team of ghost hunters and a psychic who seems to be on the verge of a breakdown, all trawling through this place while spraying blood out of a truck in an attempt to attract some infamously pissed off ghost. The plan works, a little too well, and in a couple minutes half the people are dead or dying, including uncle Cyrus. The next part of the movie is somewhat similar to the original: Arthur Kriticos (played by another excellent character actor, Tony Shalhoub), and his family have been broke and in turmoil ever since his wife died six months earlier in a tragic fire. One night at dinner, an attorney shows up at their door and tells him that he has inherited his uncle's house and all it's belongings. So the family goes off into the night and enters this bizarre home that has glass walls and very expensive furnishings and decorations throughout. The attorney is well played as a smarmy and creepy guy who is pretty much the same character that Martin Milner portrayed in the original, but in this version he is the first person to be dispatched by the 12 ghosts that are trapped in the prison for ghosts down in the basement. The crazy psychic from the opening scene, Dennis Rafkin (Matthew Lillard), shows up at the door as the family had entered the house. He is pretending to be an electrician sent from the power company because of the electrical storm that is starting to rage around them (but of course!) He quickly makes his way down to the basement and using the special ghost glasses that have been scattered around the house, starts seeing these terrible ghosts that uncle Cyrus has collected. These are no ordinary ghosts either. They are some of the most terrible and feared ghosts anywhere, and have been collected from around the world for some unknown reason. While the attorney is getting Arthur Kriticos to sign some papers, his two kids, Kathy (fashion and swimsuit model Shannon Elizabeth) and Bobby (Alec Roberts), wander around the house with their housekeeper, Maggie (Rah Digga). How they could afford a housekeeper to begin with is quite a mystery, seeing how they were so broke and all, but hey, this is a horror film and you have to suspend belief to some extent..... They have their own close encounters with ghosts that start to get loose from the basement, but don't have the glasses to see them just yet. The attorney makes his way to the basement and picks up a large briefcase full of cash. It is never established if this was pre-arranged with uncle Cyrus, or if he is stealing it, but in either event, he doesn't make it far. WHen he lifted the briefcase from the ground it set some gears in the house in motion. Now when I say gears, I mean this house has some serious mechanics and hardware running all over it. They are some pretty cool effects that were done for this movie. There are sliding glass panels, circular patterns on the floor that move, doors that appear and disappear... It really is cool. So one of the effects of the gears moving, is that the house becomes sealed up. It also starts releasing glass panels with spells on them that were keeping the mean old ghosts prisoner. So one of the ghosts that gets out backs up the newly rich attorney right into where a glass panel slides by and cuts him right in half, front to back. Pretty gory and pretty cool effect. Actually, this movie is full of cool effects. Not annoying CGI either, although there is some, but the ghost makeup is great and the gore that is shown is well done. It's just too bad that the some good actors and good effects can't pull this out into a good movie. Or a scary movie. It is okay, I mean I did give it two stars, but it isn't that good. Or scary. Oh yeah, I already said that. On the scale of annoying remakes, this ranks nowhere near as high as The Haunting. That movie is a good example of how CGI can go so bad. The rest of the story is somewhat convoluted. The ghosts get loose, the kids get held hostage, and uncle Cyrus turns up very much alive. It seems that he just needed his nephew to sacrifice himself so that he would be a ghost made out of love (or something like that). The housekeeper kind of saves the day and papa Kriticos redeems himself. Yawn. It's kind of disappointing because the possibilities are pretty good for this story and the talent that was brought in to make it. The ghosts are very cool though. There is a wicked looking, wild eyed ghost with a head in a cage. There is another girl with some gnarly slashes on her body who carries a knife and seems to have haunted tits. There is another guy with spikes in his body and in one scene he pulls one out which was pretty fun to watch. But besides the ghosts and cool mechanics of the house, the movie falls flat. I was mildly happy for the hero and his kids at the end, but not terribly so. That's about the extent of the feeling I was able to muster up for them. The disk itself is not too bad. The 1.85:1 anamorphic print looked great. and the sound came from all directions in Dolby Digital 5.1. There is a commentary by make up designer, Howard Berger and production designer Sean Hargraves that s interesting from a technical viewpoint. There is also a documentary called "Ghost Files" that profiles the design of each of the ghosts shown in the film. Once again, pretty interesting from technical standpoint. I rented this from netflix and am glad I didn't buy it. At this point I don't really care if I ever see it again, but the original version, that is another story. I will want to see that film now and again, especially with the Illusion-O glasses! |
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04 Mar 03 |
