Rah Digga and Tony Shalhoub in "13 Ghosts."

MOVIE INFORMATION

With 10 as a must-see, we give this film a: Stars: F. Murray Abraham, Tony Shalhoub and Shannon Elizabeth Director: Steve Beck Rated: R, with violence and gore Length: 88 minutes

ROCHESTERCRITIQUE

Having seen this film, how would you rate it? 10 5 9 4 8 3 7 2 6 1

By Eleanor O'Sullivan
Gannett News Service

(October 26, 2001) -- Who's in charge of 13 Ghosts? The director or the set decorator?

A Web site says the interior set, where all of the ridiculous action takes place, took 40 builders five weeks to make, using more than 45 tons of steel and 2,500 individual pieces of glass. Many rooms are sheets of glass, with Latin engravings on the panes "to enhance the eerie mood."

Perhaps if you are a Latin teacher, or are awed by chaos and nonsense, you will feel in an eerie mood watching this remake, and rip-off, of William Castle's 1960 flick, 13 Ghosts.

A nutty rich uncle with a hang-up about ghosts dies, leaves his bizarre house in the middle of nowhere to his widowed nephew, who moves into the house with his daughter, son and housekeeper. The housekeeper, who also cooks (badly, we're told), is portrayed by rapper Rah Digga, who looks like Della Reese and appears ready to break into a rap, but is sadly fettered with non-lines from the unscript.

It is an unscript because innumerable variations on "Oh my God!" mingled with obligatory profanities, and a gallery of screeches and screams don't constitute a script. If the actors could talk, they would tell you they were told by director Steve Beck to act horrified when they don big plastic glasses that enable them to see grotesque, bloody, eviscerated, headless and otherwise unpleasant ghosts.

Humans and ghosts are trapped in the dead uncle's glass house ("Note: there will be no stones thrown here," quips the nephew) and terrorized by the ghosts, but for what reason? Eighty minutes of incoherence pass before we learn the real reason the relatives are being run ragged -- and when we do find out, it doesn't amount to a hill of beans. Plus, the getting there is such a bore.

Really, the movie is all about that glass house and those Latin writings and how many angles director Beck can get his actors photographed in as they try to make their way out of the house.

In the mix are Oscar winner F. Murray Abraham, way over-qualified as the nutty uncle; Tony Shalhoub, perfect in funny roles (Quick Change) but too odd looking to be a straight man, as the nephew; teen icon Shannon Elizabeth, completely clueless, as his daughter; Embeth Davidtz, remembering the better days of Schindler's List, as a ghost buster; and Matthew Lillard, over-acting even more than usual, if that is possible, as a ghost medium.

Worse, there is something gamy about megaproducer, 49-year-old Joel Silver (Matrix, Die Hard 2) throwing a lot of money at a vanity remake of a flick he remembers fondly from his childhood.