Rating: 
Summary: WOW
Review: WOW WOW WOW This movie is soooo cool it is one of the best horror movies i have ever seen if not the best. The ghosts in this movie looked soooooooooo awesome I boght the movie thinking it would be ok but it was more than ok it was one of the best. So buy and/or rent this movie to see what i am talking about.
Rating: 
Summary: Extras Better Than The Movie
Review: The extras on this DVD are better than the movie itself- a bunch of annoying characters- specially the irritating child actor who shall remamin nameless- are trapped in an elaborate haunted house which seems to have been inspired by the "Hellraiser" puzzle box. The ghost and the house are imaginative and the behind the scenes features go into their creation. Watch them if you want to but skip this movie
Rating: 
Summary: Very Poor Movie
Review: This is without a doubt the worst remake/extension of a former very poor movie at best. Please don't waste your money as i did purchasing this movie in any form. It is neither scary or suspenseful. Rent it first if you must but let buyer beware.
Rating: 
Summary: creepy
Review: Thirteen Ghosts is definitely NOT for kids but I thought it was great for adults. (I can just see children having nightmares after watching this, even with the amount of gore in an average movie.) Much of the creepiness is in unexpected places and the "cook/maid" is hysterical. Her role couldn't have been played any better. If you're into horror, this is worth a peek.
Rating:
Summary: This one will steal away precious minutes from your life!!
Review: They call [stuff] like this a movie? This one stole precious minutes away from my life that I will never get back!...DO NOT BUY THIS MOVIE! You will be soooo sorry! The acting in this movie is on par with 'Saved by the bell' remember that show? Well Thirteen Ghosts makes that show look like Casablanca! In fact this one was so bad that my girlfriend who hates scary movies and is afraid to watch them, fell asleep within 15 minutes into the movie! Don't be fooled by the good reviews on this one folks.... Don't say I didn't warn you.
Rating:
Summary: Better than The Haunting remake, but it ain't Haunted Hill.
Review: Okay, Dark Castle's second haunted house thriller wants to be like House on Haunted Hill: big, loud, gory, and lots of fun. Well, it ain't the last one, unfortunately. One of the biggest problems has to be director Steve Beck, who somehow believes camera tricks and hyperkinetic editing will make a movie more exciting. Why couldn't Zemeckis and Silver just re-hire William Malone (who directed HOHH)? Then there's the plot, which piles on one silly plot twist on top of each other until it turns into a convoluted mess at the end that actually rips off Blade and Casper, of all movies! One of HOHH's best aspects was the unpredictability. It was a bit difficult to figure out who would live and who wouldn't. Well, Thir13een Ghosts is obvious from beginning to end. Tony Shalhoub and Matthew Lillard are likeable in their prominent roles, but everybody else is either flat, wasted, or just plain annoying (mainly the kid). There are certainly some redeeming factors, however, that make this watchable enough. The ghosts' appearances are ghastly and creepy, and this is the only haunted house film I can think of where the ghosts kill on first sight, rather than toying around with their victims. The production design is quite impressive, but it's never utilized to its full potential, especially when we learn the house's walls are moving around like a Rubik's cube. Believe me, Cube this movie ain't. There are a few exciting moments, particularly one scene where Lillard is a trapped inside a room with a ghost and he needs someone else to inform him where it is so he can dodge it. But the rest of the movie plainly lacks such inspiration, and more importantly, the sense of sheer, sick fun it wants to achieve. There's a good amount of violence and gore, but almost no suspense. I can only recall two scenes where chills went down my back. There's a lot of potential for a great, big rollercoaster ride of a thriller, but this mostly comes out as wasted material. If you watch the DVD version, do access the Ghostly Files menu, which gives a narrated tale detailing the ghosts and their lives as humans and how they came to be. Great special feature, and really quite creepy and scary.
Rating:
Summary: This house is not a home
Review: This movie has just one thing going for it. It has one of the neatest, coolest, trickiest sets [much of it computer generated to be sure] I've seen in awhile. After doing a little investigating, I think I found out why. It seems first-time director Steve Beck used to be a director of visual effects at George Lucas' Industrial Light and Magic. He is credited with working on 'The Hunt for Red October', 'The Abyss' and 'Indiana Jones and the Lost Crusade'. I can close my eyes and still see the set designs for those movies, so I assume Mr. Beck is a quite talented artist. '13 Ghosts' strongly suggests he should have stayed with visuals. The set I refer to is the house where the characters meet the ghosts. It's actually a huge machine built for the purpose of opening the gates of Hell. It's all steel and glass, pistons and pulleys, and elaborate revolving engines. This effect was enough for me to give the movie two stars instead of one. The plot and the dialog are inane, and the actors look pained, possibly because this kind of movie is where Once Promising Actors go to die. Earlier in their careers, I was impressed by Matthew Lillard, Shannon Elizabeth and Embeth Davidtz, not to mention F. Murray Abraham. From 'Amadeus' to THIS? Hopefully, all the leads will be resurrected soon. The dreadful script and tepid acting, however, are not what make '13 Ghosts' so awful. After all, horror movies are in a cinematic world of their own. You can't fairly apply the standards of most other genres to most of them. [Note: The schlock director and promoter William Castle, who directed the original '13 Ghosts', also produced the remarkable "Rosemary's Baby", a true exception to the rule.] For a modern horror film to work, it needs to be one or more of the following things: It must be scary. It must be full of sick humor. It must successfully parody other horror movies. It must have a character we care about. It must have a memorable monster or fiend. It must have a sexy lead, most usually female, but sometimes male ["Interview With the Vampire"]. It must have a cool soundtrack. '13 Ghosts' is none of these things. Zero. Zilch. Nada. Come to think of it, the actors rarely appear to be actually IN or ON that fabulous set. Maybe it was digitally added later.
Rating:
Summary: Eye Candy is where its at!
Review: For some reason I loved this movie. I never had the pleasure of seeing the first one from way back when, I was really impressed with the ghosties and such. I liked the fact that some of the ghosts would interact with the people trapped in the house and others just popped up and stared. Because of that we were able to focus on the more scary of the ghosts and we werent crunched with details for all of them. The plot itself was sort of on the weak side but the scares made up for that by making you forget that there wasnt much of anything else going on. I was jumping up more times than I can count and even pulled my turtleneck up around my nose once or twice too. To me, that was worth the price since it takes a little bit to make me blink! I love Mathew Lillard, too. :D Yumm!
Rating:
Summary: Boo. Hiss.
Review: As CSN&Y once introduced a song, "this one starts out slow and then fizzles out altogether". Hey, maybe I didn't get the quote right. Well, the movie-makers didn't get this right. Forget the William Castle comparisons - isn't everything a copy of a previous idea these days anyway? Thirteen Ghosts (I refuse to use the stupid spelling, thanks) fails on its own lack of merit. Tony Shaloub (an underrated actor who does the best he can in this mess) leads an uninteresting collection of sidekick characters through a formulaic scare plot. There's the sexy but slightly ditzy daughter, the sassy but hip nanny (Rah Digga, whose presence here defines tokenism), the evil lawyer, the sugar-dosed kid brother who ALWAYS gets away from everyone, and worst, a scenery-chewing idiot (the always-irritating Matthew Lillard) who is supposed to link the story together. I was rooting for the ghosts to kill just about every one; I haven't seen characters this annoying since Shelley Duvall in The Shining. The ghosts themselves are interesting, with decent makeup and masks, but were so over the top as to never generate real fear. When one character referenced the most evil ghost of all, it turned out to be as lame as the rest. The only star of the picture is the amazing house/machine/prison. If the re-writers put half the effort into the story that the set designer did into the house, this might have been mildly entertaining. While the puzzle-box contraption is well thought out and certainly complex (Hellraiser fans raise your hands), the series of narrow hallways in place of spooky rooms made this look more like a lethal game of Pac-Man than a haunted house story. Occasionally funny lines (the retort when someone asks where the lawyer went is priceless) but overall the dialogue is ridiculously sophomoric and unrealistic. Yes, I know this isn't a documentary, but Halloween III is Shakespeare compared to this drivel. I used to think Ghost Story was the most disappointing horror movie I had ever seen (great book, though!), but this one is worse. The sound is good overall, with effects happening in back corners when needed, and the soundtrack is appropriately loud and crude for a slacker-era remake flick. There are decent extras on the DVD, including a "making-of" featurette and some back-story on each of the ghosts. The latter is a great idea; too bad none of the ghosts seemed to have a personality in the movie. If you must check this out, flip the couple of bucks to rent it. The only scary thing about Thirteen Ghosts is (boo!) paying eight bucks to see it in a theatre or (shudder!) twenty bucks to own it!
©2002 Bill Holmes
Rating:
Summary: What a Joke
Review: I am an avid horror movie fan but this movie was a total joke. The only thing it did have going for it were the acting and special effects but other than that it was horrible. It falls into the remake of The Haunting.....TOTAL OVERKILL!!!
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