October 26, 2001 | F. Murray Abraham goes
way over the top with a performance that could be labeled "Honey
Glazed" and sold by the pound. Not to be outdone, Matthew Lillard
whines, rants and bounces off the walls at every opportunity, while
Embeth Davidtz exudes as much take-charge attitude as Sigourney Weaver
in an Alien sequel. And yet, even these dynamic actors are very
nearly chewed up by the scenery in Thir13en Ghosts, a state-of-the-art
haunted-house horror show.
Most
of the action is set inside a humongous glass-and-steel mansion, making
it all the easier for director Steve Beck to recycle an old-dark-house
melodrama - specifically, a 1960 B-movie produced by schlockmeister
William Castle - as a modern-bright-edifice shock-a-thon. Production
designer Sean Hargreaves deserves above-the-title billing, and maybe
even an Oscar nomination, for his Bauhaus-meets-da Vinci handiwork.
At once ancient and futuristic in overall ambiance, the house is a titanic,
mostly transparent puzzle-box, furnished with art nouveau antiquities
and powered by immense, clockwork-style cogs and gears. But wait, there's
more: The ballroom-size foyer is dominated by a series of concentric
circles that realign themselves at frequent intervals, forming a kind
of zodiac table from hell.
And
speaking of hell: Deep in the basement, there are 12 damned souls -
OK, if you want to get picky about it, they're ghosts - trapped behind
glass walls etched with Latin "containment spells." Hargreaves
has a lot of fun with this stuff, too, while the f/x wizards work overtime
to enhance the horribleness of the fearsome wraiths.
The
house belongs to Cyrus Kriticos (Abraham), an autocratic supernaturalist
who employs his very own army of ghostbusters to keep his basement amply
stocked. Screenwriters Neal Marshall Stevens and Richard D'Ovidio wait
until fairly late in the game to reveal the method behind Kriticos'
seeming madness. But they waste little time in bringing their rollercoaster
of a movie up to speed.
In
the opening scenes, Kriticos and his crew stalk a murderous bogeyman
through a fog-shrouded auto junkyard. Rafkin (Lillard), a neurotic psychic
who serves as an ectoplasm-attuned bloodhound, tries to point Kriticos
in the right direction. Bad things happen, followed by some worse things,
and pretty soon Ben Moss (JR Bourne), Kriticos' attorney, is looking
for his client's next of kin.
Arthur Kriticos (Tony Shalhoub) is greatly surprised
when he learns he has inherited the palatial home of his seldom-seen
Uncle Cyrus. But he's in no position to look a gift horse, or a glass
house, in the mouth: After losing his beloved wife in a blaze that left
him broke and homeless, Arthur has been sharing a cramped apartment
with his two children - a teen-age hottie (Shannon Elizabeth of the
American Pie comedies) and a precocious grade-schooler (Alec
Roberts) - and a sassy housekeeper (rapper
Rah Digga).
When
Arthur and his brood arrive at Uncle Cyrus' secluded mansion, they find
Rafkin already on the scene, impatient to deliver bad news: The house
is haunted, the spirits are restless - and there's room for one more
poltergeist in the basement. Meanwhile, while nobody else is looking,
Moss sneaks downstairs, in search of hidden money. He pushes the wrong
lever, and all hell breaks loose.
The
original, more prosaically titled 13 Ghosts was a tongue-in-cheeky
trifle, all about a none-too-bright straight-arrow - think Ward Cleaver,
only totally clueless - who moves into a haunted house with his marginally
brighter wife and children. In razor-sharp contrast, the exuberantly
spooky remake is played relatively straight.
True,
there are some welcome dollops of jet-black humor here and there. (Shortly
after someone is sliced in two by an unpleasant spirit, the character's
unexplained absence is duly noted: "Hey, did he split, or what?")
And it's hard to shake the suspicion that Beck is trafficking in self-parody
during some conspicuously repetitive stretches. (There's a limit to
the number of times you can rattle an audience by having characters
shriek yet another variation of "Omigosh, look at that!" or
"Eeeek! Run for your life!")
By and large, though, Thir13een Ghosts
is a nightmare come true for fans of seriously scary movies. As such,
it may cause bad dreams (or worse headaches) for more genteel souls
- i.e., anyone with a low tolerance for bloody mayhem, grotesque make-up
effects and brutally sustained intensity. Beck, a former visual effects
art director (The Abyss, Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade),
is almost too eager to dazzle us with his debut effort as a feature
filmmaker. Some of his flashier touches - most notably, an early scene
that condenses huge chunks of exposition into a single 360-degree camera
movement -are undeniably impressive, but other scenes border on the
shamelessly show-offy. Still, Beck maintains a satisfyingly high level
of heebie-jeebies throughout Thir13een Ghosts. That does a lot
to keep things exciting after the screenwriters run out of fresh ideas
and resort to a regrettably predictable "surprise twist" to
propel the final third of the movie.
Shalhoub
is the only member of the cast who doesn't try to act at the top of
his lungs, and his understated sincerity allows him to serve as an invaluable
counterbalance to his more flamboyant co-stars. But don't misunderstand:
In this context, flamboyance isn't such a bad thing. Lillard is a hoot,
indicating that whoever hired him to play Shaggy in the upcoming live-action
Scooby-Doo movie has a sharp eye for typecasting. Abraham effectively
overplays with the same wild-eyed relish that fellow Oscar-winner Geoffrey
Rush brought to his own star turn in 1999's House on Haunted Hill,
another updated remake of a William Castle-produced cult-fave. Davidtz
periodically pops up as Kalina, a self-described "spirit reclamation"
expert. She speaks with unimpeachable authority, and an admirably straight
face, when she explains that Uncle Cyrus built his fantabulous mansion
according to blueprints found in The Arcanum, an ancient how-to guide
for supernaturalists. The house, she says, basically is "a machine
designed by the devil and powered by the dead." Damned right.