MonsterHunter

What is it about people, especially those with families and little kids, that once they figure out their brand new mansion that their rich uncle left them is actually haunted by malevolent ghosts, that they don’t move out as soon as the first meat cleaver goes whizzing past their heads? Is it because they couldn’t get a U-Haul rented on such short notice or what? That’s really always been the problem with these haunted house movies -explaining why the people just hang around and suffer the slings and arrows of their otherworldly roomies.

William Castle works overtime explaining why a seemingly regular family with a teenage daughter and a ten year old boy named Buck, would spend an hour inside a house with several ghosts, let alone three days. Castle, of course is the director behind such horror fare as The Tingler, House On Haunted Hill , and The Night Walker and he was primarily known for his liberal use of gimmicks to distract the audience from the grade school level chills his films tried to generate.

You probably recall these gimmicks as always having the letter “o” appended to the end of whatever they were called. Thus were born such long-lasting film and exhibition techniques as Emergo, Percepto, and for this movie, Illusion-o. Most of us who weren’t around for these movies when they were theatrically released won’t ever get to experience these stunts, so much of their supposed charm is lost on the video generation. Columbia’s release of 13 Ghosts tries to remedy that by actually including a “ghost viewer” in the packaging along with two versions of the film, one with Illusion-O and one without.

It is pretty cool to have this little do-dad as a souvenir of your bad film experience and initially at least, Illusion-O is a fun trick that keeps you involved in the movie. Usually, after about twenty minutes, I’ll go lie down in my bedroom and doze while the DVD plays in the living room. Nothing that goes on in the middle forty minutes of a movie is ever important anyway. This time, however, I had to stay in the room, my ghost viewer clutched in my sweaty hands ready for the on-screen cues to use them.

The viewer is set up with a red filter which allows you to see the terrifying ghosts in certain scenes and also has a blue filter right below that, which you could look through if you were really crapping your drawers and didn’t want to see the ghosts. The first few times it was kind of fun in a “well, I paid twenty bucks for this old, boring movie, so I suppose I should at least look through this infernal contraption” way. It rapidly wears thin however once the sequences with the ghosts drag on and your arm gets tired of holding the thing up to your face like some kind of white trash opera glasses.

And just what do you see when you’re using your ghost viewer? Basically it’s just some red figures superimposed over the rest of the action that are almost invisible without them (you can make out the faint outlines of the ghosts without them in several scenes). Castle naturally overuses it and there are moments when you can tell he was just wanting to bust out his stupid gimmick one more time. There’s a scene where little Buck goes into the basement with the family’s ghost goggles (don’t ask) that his dad left laying around and ran into the headless lion tamer and his pet lion. Buck eventually gets out of the basement, but what was the point of all that? And why would there be a ghost of both the guy and the lion? If the lion bit the head off of the guy, wouldn’t there just be a ghost for him? And what’s the problem with the lion’s spirit that it is still earthbound and raising a ruckus?

So how does the Zorba family end up in this haunted house? The father, Cyrus Zorba, is a nice guy who works at a museum so as you can imagine he is completely inept in providing for his family which includes the nagging wife Hilda, the sexpot daughter Medea, and the rambunctious All-American squirt Buck. Kind of makes you wonder what was going on with Cyrus and Hilda that they named one kid Medea and the other kid Buck. (Is there any guy with any schooling that would date a gal named Medea? Lorena Bobbit would have better luck getting a date to the prom.)

One evening Cyrus’ wife interrupts his lecture on the tar pits and dinosaurs to tell him that the repo men are there taking all the furniture again. No one seems terribly concerned about this and later that night in a situation that would certainly emotionally cripple most of us for the rest of our life, Buck is having his birthday dinner with his family on the floor and gets socks and shirts and a book. Then he makes a birthday wish. “I wish for a house with furniture!”

A mysterious wind blows in and extinguishes the candles, then a telegram arrives and it tells Cyrus to meet some lawyer downtown the next day. Now, just what kind of family is this guy putting up with? One of them wonders if the lawyer is working for a collection agency! I haven’t felt this bad for a dude since I watched Charlie in Willy Wonka And The Chocolate Factory gnawing on his grandpa’s foot because he was so hungry. (Maybe there’s a gold ticket inside his shriveled up old leg!)

The next day, Cyrus and Hilda meet up with lawyer Ben Rush, whom the old timers in the crowd will recognize from his roles on the hit TV shows, Route66 and Adam-12. This young, smooth talker tells Cyrus that his uncle croaked last month and left him his haunted house complete with 12 ghosts, super-deluxe ghost goggles and a housekeeper/witch played by the wicked witch herself Margaret Hamilton. Cyrus and Hilda (who was hoping for money instead of ghosts) know a good deal when they hear one and immediately move their family into the rambling mansion.

Strange things start happening like the planchette of a Ouija board (a nice commercial for Parker Brothers, I might add) starts floating and pointing at Medea. That, along with the messages they get from the board lead them to believe that she has been marked for death. Even though the rest of the family is bummed out that it looks like sis is going to get voted out of the haunted house, they don’t let that deter them from enjoying their new digs. (Hot dang! This place even has a couch!)

Cyrus finds a book written in Latin that he has his buddy at the museum translate. It’s his uncle’s journal about all these ghosts he caught around the world and brought back to the house. He caught eleven ghosts, the uncle was the twelfth, and there’s a ghost to be named later.

The uncle also invented those goggles that Cyrus uses to see the ghosts. I wasn’t sure what the uncle was planning on doing with the ghosts (maybe figure a way to send them on their way to the spirit world or something) or why he caught that lion’s ghost, but the most mysterious thing to me was why Cyrus would always put on his reading glasses and look at the book over his buddy’s shoulder whenever he would be translating. After all, it wasn’t like being able to see the Latin more clearly would suddenly make him fluent in it or anything.

The family periodically encounters the ghosts and then Castle switches over to a Scooby-Doo plot about the missing money that the uncle had stashed somewhere in the house. I groaned, fogging up my ghost viewer, as soon as I saw this. I immediately knew that the young, smooth-talking lawyer was obviously the one that killed the uncle and was now after his money. Wasn’t there a lawyer bad guy in The Night Walker? Give it a rest Billy C! Why not try using someone like a filmmaker that has to rely on kiddie-gimmicks to get people to remember his otherwise banal and pedestrian horror films as a villain? I’d go see that!

Ben does the usual things like urging the family to move out of the house ASAP, dressing up like the uncle’s ghost and scaring Medea, and trying to murder Buck with a killer bed. Killer bed? Yeah, it’s one of those canopy deals and its top comes down real slow to squash you. I was never sure how it would ever have enough power to actually crush anyone, but it ended up doing the job to Ben thanks to the uncle’s ghost! The Zorbas end the movie counting the money they found and chuckling over Ben’s fate, while the housekeeper who seemed to have been in on some of the sinister goings on just raises her eyebrows at us, grabs a broom and leaves the room.

This is probably the best possible movie you could have made from an idea you got at the eye doctor while they were asking “Which is better? One or two? How about now? Three or four?” This is supposedly how Castle came up with Illusion-O and then he had a story constructed around it. The result is a movie where the ghosts don’t have much to do with anything except at the very end and then only the ghost of the uncle actually partakes in the plot. I never understood this family either. Sometimes they were really scared and Hilda was demanding to move out and then the next morning she’d be in the kitchen making breakfast and asking Cyrus and if he woke Buck up for his Eggos yet.

No one seemed overly concerned about the various threats made to Medea and Cyrus didn’t even seem put out when he saw some ghosts and ended up with a big “13″ burned into his hand. If the Zorbas aren’t scared enough to try and leave, why should I care that there’s some fiery ghosts running around the parlor? The opportunity to actually see Illusion-O in action on this DVD is the only thing that saves 13 Ghosts from being a total waste.

© 2008 MonsterHunter