"Thirteen Ghosts" was no more made in the earnest hope or expectation that people would enjoy it than a ten-by-ten centimetre postage stamp is minted with the expectation that people will use it to mail letters. No; this movie, like the stamp, was made expressly for curio collectors of one kind or another. As such it isn't even a real curio.
It wouldn't be so bad to watch a set of poorly-drawn "characters" move without purpose through such an idiotic, jury-rigged plot, if the film weren't so deeply, minute-for-minute unpleasant. To start with it's loud. Not just loud because there are events taking place which as it so happens produce a lot of noise, but loud because the sound engineers wanted to assault our eardrums; WHATEVER happens on the screen, they do what they can to ensure that it fills the dynamic spectrum entirely, producing an ear-splitting din that's only just this side of physical pain. There's gore everywhere, when there's no need (insofar as the story makes sense) for ANY gore. The people are needlessly nasty to one another and the footage is not so much edited as shredded. You don't seriously mean to say that there are people who LIKE watching this kind of stuff? If there are, there shouldn't be.
Some people praise the set design, but you won't catch me doing so. It might have sounded like a neat idea to have every single wall and floor and ceiling made of sturdy clear glass, with Latin phrases written on every surface in white letters, and it may even have looked impressive to the cast and crew as they walked around the set, but to us, it's just shopping-mall chaos that hurts the eyes and conveys nothing. And what's the POINT, visually speaking, of having the house reconfigure itself, if it ends up looking precisely the same after as before?
It wouldn't be so bad to watch a set of poorly-drawn "characters" move without purpose through such an idiotic, jury-rigged plot, if the film weren't so deeply, minute-for-minute unpleasant. To start with it's loud. Not just loud because there are events taking place which as it so happens produce a lot of noise, but loud because the sound engineers wanted to assault our eardrums; WHATEVER happens on the screen, they do what they can to ensure that it fills the dynamic spectrum entirely, producing an ear-splitting din that's only just this side of physical pain. There's gore everywhere, when there's no need (insofar as the story makes sense) for ANY gore. The people are needlessly nasty to one another and the footage is not so much edited as shredded. You don't seriously mean to say that there are people who LIKE watching this kind of stuff? If there are, there shouldn't be.
Some people praise the set design, but you won't catch me doing so. It might have sounded like a neat idea to have every single wall and floor and ceiling made of sturdy clear glass, with Latin phrases written on every surface in white letters, and it may even have looked impressive to the cast and crew as they walked around the set, but to us, it's just shopping-mall chaos that hurts the eyes and conveys nothing. And what's the POINT, visually speaking, of having the house reconfigure itself, if it ends up looking precisely the same after as before?