Thirteen Ghosts (DVD, 2002, Widescreen)

13 GHOSTS Steve Beck's feature debut is the second recent remake (following THE HOUSE ON HAUNTED HILL) of a film by 1950s and '60s camp horror king William Castle. Arthur Kriticos (Tony Shalhoub) is a financially strapped widower struggling to raise two children Kathy (Shannon Elizabeth) and Bobby (Alec Roberts) after losing his wife in a house fire. A stroke of apparent luck arrives when Arthur learns he has inherited a mansion from his mysterious Uncle Cyrus (F. Murray Abraham). Ecstatic Arthur whisks the kids and nanny Maggie (Rah Digga) off to their new home a bizarre glass and steel structure with strange Latin inscriptions carved on the walls. The family is thrilled until a psychic and former employee of Cyrus's Rafkin (Matthew Lillard) reveals that Arthur's departed uncle was a power hungry ghost collector who captured twelve spirits in the house. Arthur is skeptical. But when his children disappear and Rafkin gives him a pair of special glasses that allow him to view the house's gruesome inhabitants he believes. In Beck's special effects-laden gore-fest the two men race against time to find the children as the house's strange internal mechanism begins sealing off the exits and freeing the angry ghosts.