REEL REVIEWS COLUMN: '13 Ghosts' is dead cold
By Nick Tintori and Micah Riordan
Good horror films are still dead. Nothing out there seems to scare the audience anymore. It is now all about the effects and not enough about the scare.
"13 Ghosts" is a story of a guy (F. Murray Abraham) who captures souls or ghosts so to speak. Then something happens to him, his nephew (played by the cab driver from the TV show "Wings") gets his uncle’s house and all hell breaks loose. Well, not so much hell as a crappy plot.
The house is made of glass so basically you can see everything that goes on. The nephew has two kids (Nadia from "American Pie" and some little unknown kid) who don’t listen to their dad’s wishes and go all over in the house like little brats do in these movies.
The annoying kids and the father have a little help along the way from Matthew Lillard (SLC PUNK star). Matthew plays a psychic.
Little do they know that there are ghosts locked up in the house and someone has set off a reaction in the house that is releasing the ghosts one by one.
The entire movie wasn’t too bad and wasn’t very predictable. It lacked a good story, but the special effects made up for it – and usually that means a movie isn’t that good. The only thing that creeped me out were the ghosts; they were scary. If you are one who frightens easily and has bad dreams, don’t go see this movie because the ghosts will give you a better scare after the movie rather than during it.
The movie lacks all the basic horror movie elements and tries to replace them with wicked special effects. It lacks all the pointless violence and the killing off of most of the cast. Instead, "13 Ghosts goes for plot twists and freaky looking bad guys.
The main thing this movie was missing was the good vs. bad guy routine of horror movies and the grotesque over abundant killing by the bad guy.
The acting was good and the special effects were awesome but that does not always make for a good movie especially in the horror field. The directors of horror movies need to go back and watch the good movies of the 80’s, a time when horror was horror.- Micah
Final Rating C-
On a side note, see "Monster’s Inc." Do not go for the movie itself but for the greatest preview in the world, the "Star Wars Episode II" trailer. The trailer is only 30 seconds but it will be the best 30 seconds of your life.