Thirteen Ghosts (2001) Review

 "Goats?"
-Arthur Kriticos



When his uncle dies, Arthur Kriticos (Tony Shalhoub) is left his vast and strange mansion.  As he and his family go check the place out, they find themselves trapped inside with both the living...and the dead.


What Works:

The production design of Thirteen Ghosts is pretty spectacular.  It pretty much entirely takes place in a haunted mansion.  Immediately, you imagine a pretty classic idea of what that might look like.  You couldn't be more wrong.  All of the walls of the house are made of glass and have writing on them.  The house is incredibly unique and I have to give major props to production for putting this thing together and giving us a truly unique setting, no matter how poorly the movie uses it.

The designs of the titular ghosts are all pretty cool.  I only wish we saw more of them.  Only about three or four get extended screen time.  The designs of both the Hammer (Herbert Duncanson) and the Jackal (Shayne Wyler) are especially cool and are extremely memorable.

Finally, the movie has a few awesome kills.  Watching people get bent the wrong way is always fun in a horror movie and the character getting cut in half is nothing short of spectacular.


What Sucks:

As I said above, the movie doesn't use its awesome setting well enough.  Most of the movie is just the characters walking around the same hallways looking for missing characters that they split up from earlier.  It's very visually repetitive.  It's not enough to just have a unique setting.  You have to do something interesting with it as well.

The Thirteen Ghosts themselves are also underused.  We don't get any backstory on almost any of them over the course of the movie (though there is a featurette on the DVD that delves into the backstories), which is too bad.  Getting into the specific histories of the ghosts would have been a much more interesting story direction for this movie to take than what it ultimately goes with.

The characters aren't very interesting either.  Arthur and Dennis (Matthew Lillard) are the only ones with any development and it isn't a whole lot.  None of the characters are very likable either.  Also, Kalina (Embeth Davidtz) is very strangely written and is a bit all over the place.

The editing is absolute trash in this film.  It jumps all over the place and cuts between visually repetitive scenes with alarming frequency.  Just let the scene play out!  It's in your face with strobe effects that could give someone a seizure.

Finally, the movie gives us multiple exposition dumps that are both repetitive and uninteresting.  Nobody wants to spend a large chunk of a haunted house movie going over the same overly-complicated exposition.  Let's explore the house and get spooky! 


Verdict:

The awesome designs of the house and the ghosts as well as the cool kills can't save this movie from its terrible script.  The characters are dull, the scenes and writing are repetitive, the editing is awful, and the movie as a whole just doesn't do enough with the stuff it has going for it.  It feels like a real missed opportunity.

 3/10: Really Bad 


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