10 Utter Trash Horror Movies You Loved Anyway
3. Thirteen Ghosts (2001)
This remake of William Castle's not-that-great 1960s horror 13 Ghosts - courtesy of VFX art director Steve Beck, who directed Ghost Ship the very next year - is about as early 2000s as horror movies get.
Yet Thirteen Ghosts is also a film that makes the most of its elevated haunted house premise, trapping a group of hapless fools inside a glass house filled with vengeful ghosts committed to offing them in a multitude of grotesque ways.
This is a high-tech B-movie distinguished by genuinely strong production design and some impressively effed-up gore effects - particularly when the lawyer gets cut in half by a sliding door.
The writing, acting, and editing are all aggressively sloppy - save perhaps for the presence of Oscar winner F. Murray Abraham - but it moves fast and boasts a richness of flavour, no matter how trashy and packed with gratuitous nudity it is, that ensures it's far from just another also-ran millennial horror remake.
Between this and Ghost Ship, Beck clearly demonstrated an aptitude for enticing visuals and creatively elaborate death scenes, so it's a shame he hasn't directed a film in the 20 years since.