By Rob Bricken in
Daily Lists, Movies
Wednesday, Oct. 29 2008 @ 5:08AM
4) Jack Ferriman, Ghost Ship
We’ll give Ghost Ship some credit for kicking things off by slicing an entire ballroom of partygoers in half with a stray wire. The rest of the movie’s a downhill slope, as a crew of easily killed-off salvagers boards an Italian liner that mysteriously vanished back in the ’60s. With most of their demises guaranteed by cliché, Ghost Ship speeds into action-movie territory at the expense of any real scares. The movie conjures up what few memories we have of Virus, and it’s easy to blame the same school of filmmaking that gave us the Resident Evil films. This school tells that any backstory is best conveyed as a music video, one that’s graphic but too MTV-friendly to be scary.
A strangely sedate ghost girl follows the film’s certain-to-survive heroine (ER escapee Julianna Margulies), but the real villain is an otherworldly soul broker who’s posing as Jack Ferriman, a member of the salvage crew (Ferry Man, get it?). In other words, it’s not the ship’s fault that it’s full of ghosts, and, contrary to the movie poster’s skull-faced ship, the ship itself isn’t evil. What a rip-off.
3) Kane and his Minions, Poltergeist III
As with the Jaws franchise, Poltergeist went from a genuinely creepy and highly profitable initial film to an average follow-up and a clunker of a third film. Poltergeist III sadly borrows less from the first flick and more from the second, which retconned in some evil subterranean cult leader named Kane to take the place of the first film’s Native American burial ground. Still, the second film at least had scenes of Craig T. “Coach” Nelson barfing up the new villain’s worm-like form. The third movie loses all of the Poltergeist characters except for Heather “Carol Anne” O’Rourke and the little weird-voiced lady.
The film brings back Kane and his attendant ghosts (yes, poltergeists are close enough), but they simply aren’t memorable, relying on weird fake-outs and weirdly funny moments, such as the scene of our young heroine’s cousin getting pulled into another dimension. And, for a final annoying touch, Tom Skerritt and the rest of the cast can’t just call her Carol.
Aptly enough, Poltergeist III is less interesting than the stories around it. During filming, O’Rourke became the fourth Poltergeist cast member to die, and the movie’s setting, the John Hancock Center in Chicago, has long been the source of ghost stories far more creepy than Poltergeist III.
2) All Thirteen Ghosts, Thir13en Ghosts
The original 13 Ghosts was a campy 1961 flick, remembered mostly for giving audiences special ghost-viewers that made the spirits easier to see (or harder, depending on your faith in the supernatural). The 2001 remake, with its annoying title, has no such enhancements.
We should point out that the specters of Thir13en Ghosts are nicely outfitted in the make-up department and would be frightening in a genuinely scary movie. This isn’t one of those. It’s just a bore that flickers between an unsubtle horror film and some bizarre Disney Channel time-killer. A harried Tony Shalhoub and his children are trapped in his late uncle’s house, a glass-walled deathtrap powered by a ghostly machine. It’s the sort of film incoherent enough to show a thieving lawyer sliced in half, height-wise, early on, and then, 45 minutes later, launch a plot point about how a ghost created out of loving sacrifice could short-circuit Uncle Creepy’s ghost engine.
1) The Cardboard Ted Danson, Three Men and a Baby
No one’s sure who started the rumor, but it spread like a virus through playgrounds and slumber parties everywhere in the late 1980s. A few months after Three Men and a Baby hit home video, just about every kid in America knew that there was a ghost in it. A real ghost, since the movie was a canned little comedy that most kids would otherwise watch once and forget. And it wasn’t just a vague white blur. No, if you watched a closet that Ted Danson’s character and his mother walked in front of, you’d get a darn good look at the lingering spirit of a boy who’d committed suicide in the apartment where the movie was filmed.
This wasn’t some playground legend about pop rocks or microwaved poodles. This was verifiable cinematic fact. The Internet was still in its cocoon and 60 Minutes wasn’t about to cover urban legends, so there was no one to tell children that the movie’s ghost was just a cardboard stand-up of Ted Danson and that the scene was shot on a sound stage. Really, it’s so obvious now; the ghost looks flat and featureless, and without a room of fellow 10-year-olds to share the delusion, what once was unbelievably eerie becomes the most disappointing ghost in movie history.
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21 comments
Comments
cummins said:
This is a list for the ages. Terrific.
allaboutduncan said:
You forgot Bill Cosby and Ghost Dad. I just knew that was going to be #1
Chad Wright said:
Ok, I have to disagree. Vigo from Ghostbusters II scared the crap out of me when it premiered in theaters. Almost 20 years later and he still creeps me out a little to think about.
Poe Ghostal said:
Great list.
And I love the Devil Fish shout-out. MST3K FTW.
mittens said:
allaboutduncan, I was totally thinking Ghost Dad too!
OnanRulz said:
It's evident here that most commenters won't bother to read your prefaces.
Nintendon't said:
Ha! Ghost in the Machine is the biggest piece of shit. I think my friends rented that for a sleepover thinking for some reason there was nudity in it. There may have been actually, but it was still horrible.
Key said:
I'll admit that the black pupiled boy in "The Grudge" was the less scary of all that movie's ghost's but he still set things up for a great slowly creepy movie.
Though I do admit to grabbing my s.o.'s arm in the theater and going "wtf is UP with all that meowing!" a time or two.
astrokender said:
Oh man, that Three Men and a Baby thing freaked me out for years! In my town there was the back-story of it being a little kid accidentally shot with a rifle by his brother/friend. You could even see the "rifle" in the window as they were walking through to see the baby. But, I don't know whether I relieved or disappointed that the ghost (and rifle, via cutout turned sideways) turned out to be Cardboard Ted. Probably a bit of both.
Friginator said:
You laugh, but the Three men and a Baby ghost still freaks me out every time I see that shot of them walking past the window.
Phil-Z said:
You gotta admit, though - the rack on that naked chick ghost from Thirteen Ghosts makes up for the overall shittyness of that movie...
Dead End said:
Man, I'm surprised none of the stuff from The Haunting made it on the list.
joe said:
There was no Indian burial ground in Poltergeist. It was a regular cemetary. Why does everyone remember an Indian burial ground?
The Shadow said:
My nephew got freaked out by the Three Men and a Baby after watching the movie on videotape (remember those) at a friend's sleepover. His mother didn't know what to do about the kid after he started refusing to sleep alone in his room, so I showed him some of my books on how movies are made and how Three Men and a Baby was not filmed in an actual high-rise apartment, but on a soundstage made up to resemble one. So it was not possible for a boy to commit suicide in the middle of a Hollywood studio.
Now the kid is as much a skeptic as I am. I struck a blow for reason.
Snoodle said:
I liked Ghost Ship :p
Agree with this list though! I know he wasn't a ghost technically but I'm gonna throw the film Hollow Man out there too.
Todd Ciolek said:
Joe: You're right. I must've been thinking of the Simpsons parody, which I probably watched more than the actual Poltergeist movie as a kid.
Arcane said:
Thir13en Ghosts raised the same questions as the Ghostbusters movies, namely "What the hell happened to you that your ghost looks like that?"
The idea of a machine made from the visions of Hell and fueled by ghosts is pretty badass though. again, the ghost-manipulating technology as found in Ghsotbusters, but far, far more occult. Awesome concept, shitty execution.
Jangles said:
I think White Noise and The Grudge made me jump a couple of times each, but it is the same reason those internet prank vids get you. You watch some vid that asks you to look closely on the screen and then 5 seconds later it a horrible pic of a dead person pops up and a scream sounds.
And I actually like Vigo in GBII. One of my favorite movies scenes:
Egon: Vigo the Carpathian. Born 1505, died 1610.
Peter Venkman: 105 years old, he hung in there, didn't he?
Ray: He didn't die of old age, either. He was poisoned, stabbed, shot, hung, stretched, disembowled, drawn and quartered.
Peter Venkman: Ouch.
Winston: Guess he wasn't too popular at the end, huh?
Egon: No, not exactly a man of the people. Also known as Vigo the Cruel, Vigo the Torturer, Vigo the Despised, and Vigo the Unholy.
Peter Venkman: Wasn't he also Vigo the Butch?
Ray: And dig this, there was a prophecy. Just before his head died, his last words were "Death is but a door. Time is but a window. I'll be back."
Paige said:
the only comment I have to make is that the Grudge boy in fact had a name I seem to recall it being Toshio or something like that, but I can't be 100% sure but he did in fact have a name.
You went through the effort of listing the names for the other ghosts and I thought he was the most adorible thing on the planet, I hate kids but if i spawned offspring like him I would crazy cuddle the super cute yowling blue cat boy.
Aezetyr said:
Vigo creeped me out a little. Creepier was his Renfield wannabee minion.
Yeah, 13 Ghosts had excellent idea; but craptacular execution. I would have liked to see more of the ghosts themselves (especially the Angry Princess [yowza]). The strobe light effect was bad.
Keith said:
Yeah that Grudge little boy and the little girl were so not scary. The movie tried to make them scary, but they sorta looked like pale goth kids with bad haircuts.
Viggo sucked. I agree.
