Thir13en Ghosts (2001)

               This movie is kind of special. On the one hand it’s very much of its time, a relatively low-budget horror remake that technically earns its R-rating with swearing and on-screen violence but without much nudity or any truly visceral gore. On the other hand its script could be taught as an example of a screenplay clearly reverse-engineered from producer notes. Here we clearly have the twin requirements of a specific gonzo location that everything has to bend to fit while also including as many nods and details from the 1960 original as possible. On yet a third hand it’s a badly made film from a director of commercials who clearly doesn’t know how to build a long-form narrative. If you want to cram a fourth hand in there it also contains the purest example of something I thought had been parodied into the ground: the sassy Black sidekick who’s only in the movie to make quips to the white characters.

This does accurately capture the tone.

              This was the second movie from Dark Castle Entertainment after ‘House on Haunted Hill’ and also their second William Castle remake in a row. Considering that the film only brought in an inflation-adjusted $122 million from a $75 million budget I can see why they stopped putting out Castle remakes after this. The director is first-timer Steve Beck who’s only directed one other movie, the 2002 flick ‘Ghost Ship,’ which is second to next on my list. This both excites and terrifies me. Before that he worked as a commercial director for clients like GMC and McDonald’s and as an art director at ILM on movies like ‘The Abyss’ and ‘Hunt for Red October.’ I think he’s a case much like Jan de Bont where he’s very talented in one area, the skill set of which doesn’t necessarily transfer over to directing. The screen story is credited to Robb White, writer of the original, while the screenplay is credited to Neal Marshall Stevens and Richard D’Ovidio. Stevens, frequently under the pen name of Benjamin Carr, is a very prolific writer of schlock. He’d previously written such classics as ‘Retro Puppet Master’ and would go on to pen ‘Death Streamer.’ He’s part of Charles Band’s little stable of artists. D’Ovidio, by contrast, only has a handful of credits. Before this movie he wrote ‘Exit Wounds’ starring Steven Seagal and DMX and directly after worked on ‘The Call’ starring Halle Berry. According to the internet James Gunn also took an uncredited pass, and he’s probably as happy as anyone his name’s not attached as this script is terrible.

              Whatever else I have to say about this movie, they were able to round up some decent names for the cast. The barest of bones of the original plot is kept involving a family whose eccentric uncle has left them a house full of ghosts. They change the family name from Zorba to Kriticos and upgrade from Charles Herbert to Tony Shalhoub as the father of the family, Arthur. Shalhoub’s most recent movie was the 1999 classic ‘Galaxy Quest,’ and he was just coming off the cancellation of his sitcom ‘Stark Raving Mad,’ where he played a horror writer getting into wacky hijinks with with his editor, played by Neil Patrick Harris. I was really bummed when they cancelled that show, I was watching. His uncle Cyrus actually appears in this version and is played by F. Murray Abraham. At the time he was pinging back and forth between slop and decent roles like any other working actor of his caliber. Arthur’s daughter Kathy is played by Shannon Elizabeth, who was kind of a big deal at the time. She’d just done ‘American Pie 2’ and ‘Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back,’ and it’s harder to imagine two movies more indicative of this specific period of time. His son Bobby is played by child actor Alec Roberts, who seems to have left the industry after this. The evil lawyer is named Ben Moss this time around and is a much smaller role. He’s played by JR Bourne, who is such a ‘hey it’s that guy’ character actor that I’m going to assume I saw him in “The Mentalist” and move on.

              There isn’t a character directly corresponding to Margaret Hamilton’s Elaine Zacharides in this film. I guess the closest we get is Embeth Davidtz as Kalina Oretzia, a kind of ghost-rights activist who’s in the very beginning of the movie and then absent for a solid forty-five minutes. Davidtz has been in a ton of stuff but to me she’s most recognizable as Sheila, Ash’s medieval love interest in ‘Army of Darkness.’ You’ll also notice that I didn’t mention anyone playing Arthur’s wife Jean, and that’s because she starts the movie dead for plot reasons we’ll get into later. She’s eventually played by Kathryn Anderson, who was mainly a stunt person.

              Then there are two characters who had to be invented for this version. The easiest to explain is Mathew Lillard as Dennis Rafkin, a psychic hired by Cyrus to track down ghosts for him. This was just a year before he played Shaggy in the live-action Scooby Doo movie, and I have to say I formed a long-lasting dislike of him based on his involvement in that alone. I’ve softened on him considerably over the years, especially once casting agents learned he was a pretty good dramatic actor. He’s kind of the second lead of the movie and generally enjoyable, though his character descends into nonsensical by the end along with everything else.

              Then there’s Rah Digga as Maggie Bess. I was previously unfamiliar with Digga, the reason probably being that she’s not really an actress. Instead she’s a musician who acts every once in a while. She’s a member of Flipmode Squad, the rap collective lead by Busta Rhymes. She had previously only appeared in music videos and as Rasheeda in the Beyoncé-starring “Carmen: A Hip Hopera.” Maggie plays the nanny to Arthur’s kids, and if you’re familiar at all with the original movie you’ll instantly note the problem here. A central point of the 1960 version is that the family is flat broke and thus has to move into the spooky house because they literally have nowhere else to go. Here the family is certainly portrayed as financially strained, everyone’s living in a too-tiny apartment as that’s all Arthur can afford as a math teacher. He even initially tries to decline the house as he’s unable to afford to pay any property taxes. But they still manage to set aside money for a nanny. It’s also unclear why a single trip to look at a house requires said nanny to come along when one of the two children is played by an actress who was twenty-seven at the time of filming. I have a lot to say about how this movie treats this character.

              Let’s get the plot out of the way so we can get to the interesting stuff: we open with a military-style operation lead by Cyrus to capture a twelfth ghost. Rafkin is there to track it. It all goes wrong and while the spirit is captured Cyrus supposedly dies. We then cut to Arthur, who is sad that his wife recently died in a fire. They’re told by his uncle’s lawyer that he’s inherited Cyrus’s house. They go to see it and it’s this big plexiglass structure that’s more of a mechanical device than any place to live. Turns out Cyrus built the house as a machine powered by ghosts to open a portal to something called Hell’s Eye, allowing the person running the machine to access all knowledge from the past, present, and future. It’s revealed that Cyrus faked his death and plans to put Arthur’s children in jeopardy to force him to sacrifice himself and become the thirteenth ghost, thus completing the machine. Everyone runs around for a while until they disrupt the evil plan and everyone but the family and their nanny die, the end.

              The description sounds stupid because it accurately reflects the story, but at the same time I can absolutely understand every single decision that led to this script getting churned out. The very basic premise stays roughly the same: rich eccentric collects twelve spirits then dies and leaves the house to his financially imperiled nephew. While in the original the collection is hand-waved away as just a life-long interest of the dead guy, here it’s got to be part of some sinister plan. Cyrus’s end goal is pretty irrelevant for the needs of the movie, it just has to involve thirteen ghosts and be bad, so they decided the ghosts would power a machine to do something that sounds evil. Since the house was such a prominent part of the movie it seems obvious to combine these two things and voila: you have a machine powered by ghosts that doubles as a house.

              It’s clear that the design for the house came early in the production process. I have no doubt that it’s where most of the money went. It’s this structure with two floors and a basement, all assembled out of metal and plexiglass. Since they’re glass most of the walls are transparent, although there are enough metal panels and corners that it can get away with never giving us a clear line-of-sight all of the way through to the other side. Most of the plexiglass panels (it’s supposedly some other substance) have Latin scribbled across them in marker. These are eventually explained as spells used to keep the ghosts at bay. There’s also b-roll footage of gears and wheels located somewhere conveniently offscreen that can get inserted anytime the film needs to shift up the architecture or, in one very obvious instance, fill some time with a montage of nothing.

They thought this guy was scary.

              In the original the house was just a nice house and the family lived there alongside the ghosts for some time before the climax of the movie. Since this diabolical machine pretending to be a residence is such an obviously spooky location and the movie was clearly going for an R rating with gory deaths the film would need to take place over one terrible night. That way the ghosts can be all scary and gory and rush at the camera and stab people until they’re all bloody and dead and stuff. This, coupled with the plot no longer being about the search for Cyrus’s hidden money but instead about foiling his evil plot, means that the lawyer character doesn’t have to stick around once they’re at the house. Thus he’s the first to go at the thirty-five minute mark, bisected sideways by a closing plexiglass panel. The two halves slump to the ground independently. It’s by far the grossest death in the movie.

              Since this time around the ghosts are actively malevolent and trying to kill people, we need someone on hand to exposition dump to the characters and the audience. In the original that was Cyrus’s old partner Elaine, here it’s Rafkin. It’s telegraphed early on that his character is going to die, so they do a balancing act on whether he’s a good or a bad guy for the entire film. When we first see him he’s kind of the voice of reason during the dangerous ghost capture. He’s also clearly tormented by his psychic visions, which seem completely out of his control. This all makes him sympathetic, but then when a couple of other characters confront them about their ghost-capturing activities he makes a snide Greenpeace joke. He gains entrance to the house along with the family by pretending to be an employee of the power company. He’s there to get the money he feels Cyrus owes him, but when he realizes that the ghosts are starting to get released he immediately drops the act and tells Arthur directly that his family is in danger and he needs to leave. He arguably misses his chance to escape because he took time to do so. His character is insulted over the course of the movie for helping to capture all of the ghosts, to which he has the very reasonable response that with his psychic condition he’s not super-employable doing anything else. I was pretty much on his side during this whole debate, but the movie apparently feels he has stuff to atone for. He ends up sacrificing himself to save Arthur and when we later see his ghost he seems pretty content about his fate.

              But we can’t have the movie just be about trying to stop Cyrus, Arthur has to be personally motivated. I personally think that saving his kids from being killed by ghosts is motivation enough, but apparently the producers disagreed because it turns out that the fourth ghost turns out to be Arthur’s wife Jean. It’s info-dumped at a certain point that Cyrus needed twelve specific kinds of ghosts to power the machine. The plans were originally drawn up by a fifteenth century monk named Basileus who was possessed by a demon, so it’s very lucky that six centuries later the exact ghosts as specified in his plans all exist at the same time. While Cyrus directly confirms that he involved Arthur and his family because he knew that as a father he would sacrifice himself for his children, and Rafkin claims that he sought out Jean’s ghost specifically, it’s never made clear if Cyrus set up her death. Which he kind of had to’ve, considering that she died in a manner specifically useful for his ghost machine. Not sure if that line got cut for time or if it just didn’t occur to any of the various screenwriters.

              Some of the other tweaks aren’t story-related, just updates to reflect the fact that it’s been forty years since the original. In the original version there’s a little romance between Arthur’s daughter and the greedy lawyer. Since he’s out of the movie at the end of the first act they need something else for the daughter to do, and for the most part that’s nothing. There’s exactly one scene where she gets to do anything, and the focus is rather effectively pulled away from her by the naked, bloody ghost. This is after the house has been set in motion by their entrance, causing the ghosts to slowly be released one by one. The sixth ghost is a naked lady covered in stab wounds and it’s implied that the nice bathroom was originally hers, as the camera keeps flipping back and forth between Kathy admiring the nice, clean facilities and everything being covered in blood. The dead lady slips into the bathtub and watches with some confusion as Kathy starts filling it with water and splashing the blood up in her face. Then her father comes to tell her they’re leaving and all that imagery goes away. Why cast an ‘it’ girl of the moment and then give her basically nothing to do?

              Once you’ve constructed this sputtering little engine of a script, unfortunately you’re kind of constrained about the sort of ending you can put out. Clearly Cyrus has to secretly be alive because someone has to die in the bloody climax and this isn’t the kind of movie that doesn’t have an inexplicably happy ending. This means that he has to have a secret accomplice, which turns out to be that ghosts-right activist from before. We see a flash of Cyrus earlier in another scene and there he has a bloody throat from his death in the junkyard. When he’s revealed to be alive they never bother to explain why he still has makeup on his throat to make him look dead. Presumably it’s so if anyone spots him they’ll think he’s a ghost. At this point the various parties have split up to look for a way to stop the machinery from opening a portal to hell or whatever is going on and Kalina and Maggie have teamed up. They make it to the center of the house and confront a still-living Cyrus. Kalina promptly bonks Maggie over the head and then turns simpering and lovey-dovey in front of her man. She’d hadn’t been a fun person up to this point, all judgy and shouty and barking orders, but it did at least seem to be a coherent character. This turn comes out of nowhere and is so unjustified that I’m not even mad about it. It’s nothing I could have predicted based on the information given so fine, have her be a traitor, makes as much sense as anything else in the movie.

              This is about the same time that Rafkin spontaneously grows a spine and decides to help Arthur get his kids back. It’s true that Arther promises to pay him what he’s owed if they make it out of the house alive, but I doubt anyone there believed that. He’d also been getting flashforwards to his death, maybe he just made peace with his fate and didn’t bother to tell the audience. I’m focusing on it because it comes at the end of a long stretch of stupid. The two of them decide to detach one of the plexiglass windows covered in writing and walk down the basement hallways with it in front of them as a shield. It’s just as awkward on screen as it sounds. Soon enough both they and the ghosts realize that hallways generally have two directions and just start attacking them from behind. Rafkin decides that Arthur needs to live more than he does and shoves him in a corner with the plexiglass window in front of him. The ghosts do a number on Rafkin and he dies. Before they can start in on a cowering Arthur a recording of the final spell gets blasted throughout the house and the ghosts answer its call. Leaving an overwhelmed Arthur crying by himself.

Cheer up, less than a year until "Monk" starts!

              When I watched this scene I had a sudden vision of a tired, annoyed Tony Shalhoub preparing for his fourth take, crammed into a corner of a nonsense set with a plane of plexiglass propped in front of him, crew members crowded around just out of shot, as he’s commanded to yet again let loose a set of sobs over the death of Matthew Lillard at the hands of spooky ghosts. Sometimes acting is just silly, and I guess you have to make your peace with that.

              So it all looks hopeless at the end. The traitor Kalina has lied to Arthur that sacrificing himself will stop the machine when in reality it’ll add the last little bit of energy needed to open the portal. The kids were kidnapped a good half an hour ago, so when they pop up in the middle of a bunch of spinning blades with the ghosts surrounding them it seems as good a use of them as any. By this point Kalina is dead, betrayed by Cyrus, and there’s this weird moment where everything slows down and Arthur takes a moment to study all twelve ghosts. I guess the effects department insisted that their work get highlighted? He sees Cyrus and realizes his uncle is still alive and we get to see a fight between Tony Shalhoub and F. Murray Abraham. Cyrus has Arthur on the ground and is busy telling him that his death is the only thing that will save his children when suddenly the recording of the spell controlling the ghosts starts having hip-hop scratches in it.

              We need to back up to establish a couple of things: the very sloppy magic system in the film begins and ends with ‘ghosts have to obey spells in Latin.’ This includes both written and spoken words, thus the scribbles on the plexiglass and a trick that was established in the very first scene: blasting spell recordings at ghosts. Maggie, who was knocked out earlier in that very room and more or less forgotten about, has woken up and found the full sound mixing board that of course is necessary to play reel-to-reel tapes one specific time. She starts moving dials back and force and generally ruining things, which since she’s a Black lady means that the chanting gets scratched up, DJ-style.

              We really need to talk briefly about Maggie. She’s ostensibly the family’s nanny, though I will remind you that one of the children is played by an actress of twenty-seven. The other was seven, but Maggie’s almost never with him during the movie. She’s also a very bad role model, openly cursing and criticizing the rest of the family’s decisions. This is clearly meant to be affectionate and endearing, but the camera and the movie as a whole never really treat her as a member of the family. It’s just empty wisecracks and sass-talking. I noticed early on that the camera almost never takes her into account when it’s framing a scene. She never gets a closeup, never gets a cutaway, she’s always crowded off to one side behind everyone else or sometimes even just offscreen during a line read. Unlike the kids she doesn’t get a set piece detailing a ghost encounter, none of the plans take her into effect, she’s clearly an afterthought to the other characters. Someone very dishonest could argue that this is all clever on the part of the script, getting the audience to forget about her and then having her be crucial to foiling the bad guy’s evil scheme. Except no, she just messes with a sound board for no actual reason and when she does it comes out all hip-hoppy because she’s Black, of course it does. She’s the one who actually foils the evil plan and saves everyone, but since it’s by complete accident she’s not given the proper credit by the other characters and ends the film as just another jokey afterthought.

              I’m used to endings for these things descending into nonsense, but this one’s just terrible. Because the spell is interrupted the ghosts turn on Cyrus and throw him into the blades spinning around the kids, essentially disintegrating him. Rafkin’s ghost appears to a bloody, exhausted Arthur and says the following words: “Trust me, Arthur, it’s not over yet. You can finish this. You still have the power in you. It’s just a matter of how you use it. Go to your kids, they need you.” At this Arthur picks himself and smiles, although I’m not sure why because all of that was nonsense. The spell has been broken, Cyrus is dead, the kids are sitting in the middle of a storm of spinning knives, what power is he talking about? Then all Arthur does is jump through a gap in the spinning blades and huddle with his kids while the entire house blows up around them. A house made up of metal and reinforced glass that just shatters in a massive explosion. They would all instantly be dead, but of course when everything subsides they’re shaken up but just fine. So what exactly did Arthur do to ‘finish’ anything? The plan was already disrupted, the house already in the process of tearing itself apart, apparently his power was being a meat shield? Then Maggie, who survived just fine without Arthur, has one last wise crack about quitting this nanny job and we are out.

              This script is a mess in several different directions. I didn’t even mention that they show that if you throw a flare through a ghost it temporarily disrupts it, but they never bother to tell us why. I get picking Arthur because you can threaten his kids, but why specifically include his dead wife among the ghosts when she doesn’t actually do anything for the plot? They establish a big briefcase full of money by having the lawyer grab it from the basement, but after he dies it never comes up again and presumably gets destroyed along with the house.

              The size and complexity of the house makes me think that someone on the pre-production team got a little over-ambitious with this movie. They went all-in early with that design and it warped the rest of the movie around it. This obviously affected the script, but since it also set everything in see-through corridors this also dictated the kinds of lenses being used, the angles they could get, people being on the set making sure nobody thirty feet away on the other side of the house was in the shot, it must have been a nightmare. Couple that with the very badly explained ghost glasses (which seem to let you hear the ghosts as well as see them) and a terrible editing job and for long s

tretches of the movie it’s like everything is operating on dream-logic. I wasn’t a huge fan of the original but I liked it for what it was, and while I still maintain that this is exactly the kind of movie that would be perfect for a remake there were a set of early decisions that more or less demanded that the final movie turn out like this.