Thirteen Ghosts is a trip to the beach in Summer with an esky full of beer… and four people that you cannot stand the sight of. A decent idea with entirely inappropriate ingredients that leaves you wishing you had chosen to drink alone.
Cyrus (F. Murray Abraham) is a kooky millionaire ghost catcher who sought the assistance of Dennis – a young man with the especially unfortunate ability to sense nearby pain and suffering – to track his prey. In the opening scene his latest ‘deadliest catch’ proves just that, leaving many dead… and I think I saw a car eat a person?
Arthur Critikos (Tony Shalhoub) learns of Uncle Cyrus’ death when the lawyer knocks on the door to inform him he is the sole heir. The news of a large inheritance from crazy old Unky C comes as a surprise, but a welcome one, seeing as Critikos’ family home was recently burned to the ground, taking Arthur’s wife and mum to the two kids with it. The three of them and the nanny / housekeeper accompany the lawyer to tour the spacious and expensive mansion (that they can now call their home) that very night.
Yes that very Night.
Upon arriving they find Dennis lurking outside wearing an electric company uniform, though neither Dennis nor the film try very hard to maintain the ruse that he is in fact anything other than an idiot. The now sixsome wander about the house, finding it one big expensive looking maze, trap, clockwork thing with walls of glass that are soundproof, unbreakable, and covered with strange writings and numbers.
The house either acknowledges their presence – or someone just wound it up – and everything starts moving around them, leading to a Cube style facility full of booby traps, moving parts and… a certain number of ghosts.
But it gets worse. Crazy Dennis can sense pain and evil around him, and in turn his presence will cause you much pain in the viewing. But while Dennis can ‘feel’ the presence of ghosts nearby – ghosts collected by Cyrus over many years – it turns out that some handy ‘ghost goggles’ that can be found lying about in nearly every room can do the same trick. This renders him as pointless as he is painful.
Furthermore, for 97% of the film the miscellaneous macabre and menacing ghosts (each one ghostlier than the last!) only seem to impact those wearing the goggles, which lead me to believe that the best thing to do might well have been leave the goggles alone. Those wanting a drinking game though, should take the opportunity to skoll every time the film shows a close up of the goggles hitting the floor.
And you’ll need a drinking game to get through this. Why the film is so half arsed I’ll never know. There are genuine opportunities and tools to eviscerate dozens of hapless teens, but there is only one teen in the film. Even this is an opportunity to pick off the occasional good guys for at least the ‘oh no they didn’t’ rush. But they even chicken out of that.
Instead the film settles for being just like the massive intricate alleged death trap that it is largely set in, an expensive exercise in pointlessness that does basically fuck all.
Final Rating – 5 / 10. An Event Horizon feel using Evil Dead camerawork and a Cube setting – only with absolutely none of the credibility of any of those films.
