This evening I watched the movie Thirteen Ghosts. I didn't really like it, and so I am planning to use the remainder of this blogging session to whine about it.

*SPOILER WARNING* (not that anyone should care)

This was a really lame horror movie. I won't insult anyones intellect by commenting on the uninspired, cliched dialogue, so I will complain about it's boring plot instead.

There are these ghosts, trapped in this house in special prison cells made for them. They wait around, and do nothing except for antagonising people as they go past with threatening gestures. Eventually they get out, and what do they do?

Well, one goes upstairs to take a bath, and just sits there in the bath as Shannon Elisabeth barges into the room, and proceeds to wash her face in the same bath she is bathing in. If I was a heterosexual woman (as opposed to a desperate male who would relish the experience), I wouldn't take that sort of thing. I'd probably smack her around a little bit to teach her to respect my privacy. Instead she just sits there with an awkward, uncomfortable look on her face that implies a longing desire to somehow ask the interloping girl to leave the room until she's finished in the bath. Hell, this supposedly savage ghost is more patient and civil than I am, and I'm not even undead.

Then another ghost walks around trying to help her living son get out of trouble. If anything freaks me out in a horror movie it is definitely loving, maternal care. The mere thought of a mother tucking her son into bed and reading him a bedtime story sends chills down my spine.

Many ghosts had noble purposes. There was a pair of ghosts who were committed to their cause and were both dedicatedly striving to achieve their goals, which were: to feed a giant kid beans, and eat beans, respectively.

Some ghosts were of cause threatening, such as some jock with a baseball bat. But, as a nerd, I've escaped injury during confrontation with similar adversaries during highschool so many times, the prospect doesn't scare me much anymore.

Most of the others were incapacitated or disabled. Such as the woman with her hands tied to a piece of wood behind her back, the dude who can't walk or really do anything much because he doesn't have a head, and of cause: the eight year old kid. If this collection scares you, then you might be the sort of person who wouldn't attend a lecture by Stephen Hawking because he might come down an beat you up.

All in all, excluding in the opening scene, the total number of good guys killed by ghosts amounted to the grand total of one (done by the least creepy out of all of them). The number of bad guys killed by ghosts amounted to a grand total of one (and it took twelve of them to do it). How is this a legitimate body count after a horror movie?

It turns out that these ghosts were being exploited for the ambitions of a living person and in the end they go free and everything is happy. I think that this movie was more like the sixth sense. More post-modernist crap about the ghosts being the victims. Something about a ghosts existence being one of pain and exploitation, and it is of cause natural to feel pathos and all that sort of sappy crap. This is stupid. I don't care if ghosts aren't really bad. I'm sure that sometime during the thirties and forties that there were many members of the Nazi party that loved their families, life, peace, wildflowers, and jolly conversation by the fireplace. I don't want to see that in a movie though, I want to see those bastards get up to evil like shooting RAF escapees in cold blood, or stealing relics off Indiana Jones or Tibetan monks. I don't want to see ghosts that I can pity any more than female lead characters in action movies that I can respect. It just doesn't work!

*END SPOILER WARNING*