Review #268: Thir13en Ghosts (2001)

This review was originally written in October 2023.

Gabe's Horror Movie October Review #22 - Thir13en Ghosts (2001)

Thirthirteenen Ghosts is a film about Arthur, a down-on-his luck widower, who finds out that his weird uncle Cyrus has died and left his state-of-the-art mansion to him and his children (and his live-in nanny I guess). But when they move in, it turns out that the house isn't just a house- it's an infernal machine with twelve ghosts trapped inside with a mechanism that's going to open a portal to hell or something, and the only way to stop it is for Arthur to sacrifice himself (and become the thirteenth ghost). But there may be more at play than just a dead uncle's plot...

First things first, while I think there's a lot that's really cool about this movie, I do need to say right at the top that it's a bad movie. The writing has its moments but is ultimately a bunch of nonsense, the acting is over-the-top from every single person on screen, there's plot twists that serve no purpose, and the best parts of the story were only available on the DVD extras, not in the film itself. So I'm not going to rate this movie super high, even if I did enjoy it a lot.

This is a remake of a film from 1960, where the gimmick was that audience members would be given a pair of colored glasses and the ghosts were only visible on-screen if you were wearing the glasses. Which, I should say, I think is a fantastic gimmick! The movie I watched doesn't have that gimmick of course, but it's still incorporated into the story, with the characters needing special glasses to see the ghosts- so some scenes has them unaware of a spooky figure lurking behind them, sometimes one character with the glasses will have to shout orders to another without them, and there's a little (stupid) twist at the end where a character realizes a ghost isn't actually a ghost because the "ghost" can still be seen without the glasses. So the movie definitely gets an A for effort in that regard, taking something that was purely just to trick people into watching the movie out of novelty and turning it into a plot point.

I also want to say, I find the setting for this movie to be awesome. It's a bit silly that it takes two thirds of the film for any of the characters to realize the house isn't really a house ("Well duh, it doesn't look remotely like a house" I shouted at the screen) because of how nothing about the house remotely resembles a house, but the premise of someone being gifted a house that turns out to be a mechanical maze that shifts and twists and requires outside-of-the-box thinking to get where you need to go while the clock ticks down to a ton of ghosts opening a portal to hell is REALLY cool. I would love to play a video game in this setting, or a tabletop RPG, or even just watch another movie that uses this same kind of premise.

A couple final things I want to say (spoilers for the ending here): the last five minutes of the film just don't really make sense. For most of the film Cyrus is presumed dead, until Arthur makes the leap of logic that since the plan was for there to be twelve ghosts, that means Cyrus must not actually be a ghost (which he confirms by taking off his glasses). But, why is Cyrus there? And why is he posing as a ghost (complete with fake blood and neck prosthetic)? The only people who see him in the house are either in on the plan (Kalina), don't know how he died or likely even know who he is (the son and the nanny) or immediately figure out it's a trick (Arthur). Also, he was with a literal psychic when he died, and the psychic apparently couldn't tell he wasn't actually dead. It 100% feels like it's meant to trick the audience, not anyone in the actual world of the film.

And finally, there's a climactic moment where Arthur realizes he needs to leap into the machine to save his children who are tied up in the center of it, so he times a precarious jump and manages to get to them right before everything blows up. The problem is, him jumping to them does absolutely nothing to save them (they were tied up in the safest spot in the house) and that's a good thing because I don't know what his plan was (untie them and then all three have to leap back through the spinning blades I guess?) and anything they did would have gotten all three of them killed. He would have been much better off leaving the kids there, and running to hide until the machine blew up. But the movie needed a big climax I guess (and Cyrus getting thrown into the spinning blades by the ghosts apparently wasn't climactic enough) so this is what we got.

Anyway, this is a fun film with a lot of VERY interesting character design and worldbuilding (most of which is, as I said, only available on the DVD extras) so if you can overlook some cheesy writing and bad acting, you'll have a great time. Also, it's highly recommended you watch the DVD featurettes on YouTube, which will show off the interesting characters the ghosts embodied!

Overall Rating: 6.5/10 Bathrooms With Glass Walls

The Biggest Stretch on IMDB: According to the IMDB trivia, "The Angry Princess, played by Shawna Loyer, causes attorney Benjamin Moss to be sawed in half by the glass door. She has thus 'shorn a lawyer'."