This was the second Grim Reaper video to be watched and commented upon by Beavis and Butt-Head. The only difference was that, opposed to See You In Hell, the band actually requested that Mike Judge roast this video. They were definitely good sports about that whole thing, unlike a certain singer named Kip Winger.
Here are Beavis and Butt-Head, with their thoughts:
Enjoy!
“Did I say there’s a petting zoo downstairs? No! There are ghosts downstairs, Arthur!” — Dennis Rafkin
In Thirteen Ghosts, getting a spectacular house for free turns out to be considerably worse than struggling to afford one. That cruel little reversal gives Steve Beck’s 2001 horror film a promising starting point: a family’s apparent good fortune becomes another nightmare they have to survive. As a remake of William Castle’s 1960 film 13 Ghosts, though, it isn’t interested in preserving much of its predecessor’s low-budget charm. Beck trades playful spook-show entertainment for grotesque creatures and brutal violence. The result has an unmistakable identity, but its impressive visual imagination often outpaces its ability to tell a compelling story.
Tony Shalhoub plays Arthur Kriticos, a widowed father trying to provide some stability for his children. When his wealthy uncle Cyrus, played by F. Murray Abraham, leaves him an extraordinary house, it looks like the kind of opportunity he can’t afford to question. Arthur arrives with his family and their nanny, only to discover that their new home contains trapped spirits and some deeply suspicious machinery. Naturally, the house isn’t simply haunted. Its design has a purpose, and the people walking through it have become part of something they don’t understand.
There’s a nasty streak running through that setup, and the remake embraces it. Castle’s original has the scrappy appeal of an old carnival attraction, where the modest effects and ghost-viewing gimmick contribute to the fun. Beck’s version wants to hit harder. The ghosts look tortured, their attacks feel vicious, and the atmosphere offers little of the earlier film’s playful reassurance. That approach separates the remake from the original rather than leaving it feeling like a glossy imitation. Still, the difference is enormous. It keeps the basic inheritance premise while taking the experience about as far from Castle’s charmingly cheap thrills as possible.
The strongest part of that transformation is the house itself. Its glass walls, strange inscriptions, and mechanical components make it feel more like an elaborate trap than somewhere anyone could live. The transparency is especially effective. Haunted-house movies usually make darkness and concealment threatening, but here the characters can look through walls without knowing what they’re seeing or how to reach safety. Everything appears exposed, yet very little feels understandable. Even during stretches when the plot becomes clumsy, the setting holds your attention. There’s almost always an unsettling detail somewhere in the frame.
The special glasses that reveal the ghosts make good use of that environment. Without them, a seemingly empty room can contain something capable of killing you. With them, the house becomes even less inviting. It’s a clever connection to the original’s viewing gimmick, repurposed to suit the remake’s harsher personality. The bathroom encounter with the Angry Princess is particularly effective because it builds danger around a character’s limited awareness. For a moment, the film doesn’t need complicated explanations or frantic action. The simple possibility of sharing a confined space with an unseen threat does the work.
The creatures are equally important to the movie’s appeal. Their makeup, clothing, and physical behavior suggest distinct personalities and horrible histories. They aren’t interchangeable figures waiting to jump into the camera. Several look interesting enough to support much longer sequences, which makes their treatment frustrating. The movie introduces these elaborate designs and then rushes toward the next confrontation. You want to understand what separates one spirit from another, but the screenplay too often treats them as obstacles in a supernatural obstacle course. The imagination behind their appearances is stronger than the storytelling that puts them to use.
That hurry extends to the scares. Beck frequently pushes the action with rapid editing, loud sound effects, and sudden bursts of violence. There’s some fun in that aggressive approach, especially if you enjoy horror that refuses to be restrained. But the constant pressure eventually flattens the suspense. When nearly every encounter arrives at full volume, there’s little room for dread to build. An ugly figure lingering behind glass can be more disturbing than another noisy attack. The movie creates plenty of striking images, then seems nervous about letting the audience sit with them.
The actors help keep the chaos watchable. Shalhoub gives Arthur a weary sincerity that makes his concern for his children believable. Matthew Lillard brings an anxious, twitchy energy that fits the increasingly frantic situation, while Shannon Elizabeth and Rah Digga add life to the ensemble. Unfortunately, the family’s emotional circumstances get less attention than the machinery surrounding them. Arthur’s desire to turn an inheritance into security should make the house’s betrayal sting. Instead, the film keeps interrupting that thread to explain another supernatural complication or send everyone running. The characters remain likable enough, but they rarely become as interesting as their surroundings.
By the time the house has revealed its true colors, Thirteen Ghosts has made a better case for its production design than its storytelling. There’s real pleasure in its elaborate nastiness, and Beck deserves credit for giving the remake a personality separate from Castle’s original. This isn’t the same haunted-house ride with a fresh coat of paint; it’s a colder, bloodier attraction built on the old foundation. Whether that trade works depends on how much creature design and frantic violence you need to stay entertained. For me, there’s enough to enjoy, but not enough to stop wishing the movie would slow down and let its best ideas haunt us.
Filmed in Dallas, 1982’s Deadly Choice tells the story of a doctor and his daughter.
Dr. Bob Reasoner (Robert Ginnaven) is outraged that abortions are being performed at the hospital where he works. The film opens with a patient dying during an abortion and then cuts to Bob and a group of other doctors discussing how a premature baby was allowed to starve to death because the mother didn’t feel that she could care for it. Apparently, the policy of abortion and infanticide is an unofficial one, but it’s something that all the doctors know about. Bob and his colleagues decide to write an official statement opposing the hospital’s policy.
Meanwhile, Bob’s teenage daughter, BJ (Geraldine Leer), is pregnant. She hasn’t told her father because she’s scared of how he’ll handle it. Bob is religious while BJ is not. However, BJ has told her school’s guidance counselor, Vicky Stewart (Doris Hargrave). Vicky tells BJ that she needs to get an abortion and even drives BJ to the clinic. When BJ expresses doubts about going through with the procedure, Vicky is there to assure her that her baby isn’t even human yet. In fact, Vicky describes it as being “a cancer.”
I’ve seen a lot of movies about abortion. I’ve seen Pro-Life movies and I’ve seen Pro-Choice movies, and almost all of them have one thing in common: somebody has to die. In Pro-Choice movies, the death usually happens due to a back-alley abortion. In most Pro-Life movies, the death happens because the trained doctors who performed the abortion were dangerously incompetent and just didn’t care about the health of the woman getting the abortion. Deadly Choice changes things up a bit. BJ doesn’t die during the abortion. Instead, suffering from a huge amount of guilt, she takes an overdose of pills after the abortion.
Bob rushes BJ to the hospital, where he frantically tries to save her life. He desperately tries to get her heart beating again, just to be told that she’s dead. Dr. Leventhal (Hal Bennett), who earlier defended the hospital’s abortion policy, is the one who tells Bob that she’s dead, and he sort of smiles when he does it. (I imagine that has more to do with the actor than the character. This is Hal Bennett’s only credited performance and, watching this movie, I could see why.) Bob finally steps away from BJ. As soon as he does, her heart starts to beat and BJ comes back to life.
So, yes, BJ dies, but then she’s revived. Of course, even though she’s alive, she’ll always have to live with the guilt of her actions.
There’s nothing subtle about this Pro-Life film. It’s only 55 minutes long and it has the look of a television medical drama. Robert Ginnaven gives a good performance as Bob. For that matter, both Geraldine Leer and Doris Hargrave give good performances as well. That said, it’s definitely a film that was made to preach to the converted, and how you react to it will largely depend on whether or not you agree with the film’s message. It’s not a film that makes a case for its beliefs as much as it’s a film that says, “We’re right and they’re wrong.”
Welcome to Late Night Retro Television Reviews, a feature where we review some of our favorite and least favorite shows of the past! On Wednesdays, I will be reviewing 1st and Ten, which aired in syndication from 1984 to 1991. The entire series is streaming on Tubi.
This week, everyone’s trying to get laid.
Episode 5.9 “Gunn and Bullette”
(Dir by Stan Lathan, originally aired on December 13th, 1989)
Johnny Gunn tracks down Sunset West (Rebecca Ferratti), the daughter of one of Gunn’s friends in prison. Sunset is now working as a stripper. Her boss is an evil gangster guy named Achmed (Aharon Ipale). Achmed tells Johnny that, as a quarterback, he can have anyone at the strip club except for Sunset. Johnny wants Sunset. I wonder how Johnny’s prison friend would feel about Johnny becoming obsessed with his daughter.
In the end, it doesn’t add up to much. Sunset decides to go to the police about Achmed’s criminal activities. Achmed is arrested. Sunset goes into the Witness Protection Program. Johnny remains single. Who cares? It’s always funny to me how 1st & Ten will devote a show to some character we’ve never even met before and we’re suddenly supposed to have some sort of emotional stake in their story.
This episode’s second storyline featured Jenny (Shari Shattuck), a cheerleader who finds herself in trouble when Playpen Magazine publishes nude pictures that were taken years earlier by her boyfriend. Westwood offers to protect Jenny’s job if Jenny sleeps with him. Jenny gets revenge by inviting Michael to her apartment, dressing him up in a corset and stockings, and then having Bubba and Jethro snap some pictures. Westwood flees. It later turns out that Kristy is actually the one who came up with the idea of setting Westwood up. Kristy arranges for Jenny to get a new job in New York and Jenny gives Kristy the pictures.
The third and final storyline featured Kristy wanting to trade Dr. Death. Denardo convinces her to give Dr. Death another chance. Dr. Death has to have a good game to save his job. Dr. Death has a good game and he saves his job. Hey, that was easy!
The main thing that stood out about this episode was just how badly acted it was. I mean, I’m not surprised to see OJ Simpson and Shannon Tweed giving less than great performances. But even the usually reliable Christopher Meloni seemed to sleepwalk through this episode. The worst performance came from Aharon Ipale, who turned Achmed into the least intimidating gangster that I’ve ever seen.
This episode didn’t add up too much. Are the Bulls even trying to make the playoffs this year?
Tonight, on In Search Of…., Leonard Nimoy guides us through an investigation into UFOs cover-ups!
Congratulations to the Milwaukee Brewers on winning their first World Series! The Rays put up a good fight and I hope they’ll get another chance (though not before my Rangers) but the Brewers pretty much dominated this World Series and they ended up winning in five games.
Congratulations to the team and their fans! And thank you to both teams for giving us one of the best World Series of my lifetime. There’s nothing like watching two hard-working teams that understand the importance of fundamentals both playing for their first World Series title.
I was hoping the World Series would at least last until Halloween but it looks like I won’t have a baseball game to watch on the 31st. That’ll give me more time to concentrate on being the best Playboy Bunny I can be while handing out candy. Or eating the candy, in case it rains.
I can’t wait for the start of next season! Go Rangers!
Tonight, from 1976, we have The Paul Lynde Halloween Special.
In this special, actor and comedian Paul Lynde celebrates Halloween with Betty White, KISS, Donny and Marie Osmond, Florence Henderson, Billy Barty, Margaret Hamilton (the original Wicked Witch of the West), and I’m going to guess a mountain of cocaine that was probably sitting backstage.
This special is definitely a product of a very certain era in America’s cultural history.
There’s trouble in the African nation of Tigora. The kind and wise King Jabolni (Clifton Jones) has been assassinated, and his younger brother, former football player Prince Otwani (Trevor Thomas), has been elevated to the throne. With his brother’s former fiancée (France Zobda), Otwani is planning to sell out the Zambouli Tribe because their land sits on a very valuable titanium deposit. Having framed the Zambouli Shaman (Princess Elizabeth of Tooro, a former Ugandan government official who barely escaped from Idi Amin), Otwani hires a group of mercenaries to wipe out the Zambouli people. Sheena (Tanya Roberts), a white woman who was raised by the Shaman after the death of her parents, stands in the way of Otwani’s evil plans. Working with both the animals who obey her commands and also with reporter Vic Casey (Ted Wass), a former teammate of Otwani’s, Sheena protects her people and her land.
After several failed attempts, this film brought to the screen Sheena, a comic book heroine who was first introduced in 1938. Tanya Roberts was selected over contenders like Farrah Fawcett, Cheryl Ladd, and Bo Derek, and it must be said that she’s not bad in the role. No one is going to mistake her for a classically trained actress, but she was enthusiastic, athletic, and beautiful. She also didn’t have much chemistry with Ted Wass, which made their scenes feel awkward and dull. If the film had just been Sheena and her animal friends fighting the mercenaries, it probably would have been a lot better, but instead, the movie seemed to think that we needed to be introduced to Sheena through Vic’s eyes. Obviously, I disagree. Everyone already knew who Tarzan was, so I don’t think they would have had a hard time recognizing a female version.
Sheena still has its moments. I really liked the idea of the villain being a rich kid who left his country to play football in America and then returned to overthrow the government. We don’t see many villains like that. The main problem with the movie is that it feels really long. Director John Guillermin was an old-fashioned director who specialized in epics, and he lets too many scenes drag out. With more energetic direction and a stronger romantic lead, Sheena could have been a B-movie classic.
I knew that I had to review an Alex Magana film. Afterall, he makes them … on purpose and I’m sure that I’ve been wrong about things … maybe? But, not these films. This is going to be terrible because you can’t fix this, but we’ll get through this together. Maybe.
A woman is taking the elevator in a parking garage, but all of the buttons are pressed. Every time the door opens, who’s there – yep, Elevator Man. He appears to be Amish. For real, check out this Amish vibe. Maybe, Rumspringa took a dark left turn?
I think you can survive Elevator Man, if you just throw a zipper at him; he’ll be confounded for weeks…weeks!
She sees him on every floor. When she gets to the 5th floor and he’s waiting for her; so, she goes to the roof and he’s now in the elevator and really slowly grabs her like really slowly. You could’ve just walked to your car and he’d be like “A Car?”. Then, you drive away to safety and he goes back to selling well-made furniture.
“Butchering people is hard work. Physically and mentally.” — Ed Kemper
The scariest thing in Mindhunter isn’t a crime scene. It’s how quickly a conversation with a murderer can start to feel normal. Someone makes a joke, offers an observation, or answers a question with surprising thoughtfulness, and for a moment you settle into the exchange. Then comes a detail that makes your stomach turn, delivered in exactly the same conversational tone. Across its two seasons, the Netflix series repeatedly catches you making that adjustment. You become comfortable listening to people whose actions should make comfort impossible. That’s where the show finds its particular kind of horror: not in making monsters seem alien, but in showing how easily they can sound like anyone else.
Created by Joe Penhall, with David Fincher serving as an executive producer and a defining directorial presence, Mindhunter draws from John E. Douglas and Mark Olshaker’s book Mindhunter: Inside the FBI’s Elite Serial Crime Unit. It follows the early development of criminal-profiling research within the FBI’s Behavioral Science Unit through agents Holden Ford and Bill Tench and psychologist Wendy Carr. We’ve watched countless investigators study killers and connect behavioral patterns, but what feels different here is the uncertainty. These characters aren’t applying an established formula. They’re trying to determine whether their questions can produce anything useful at all.
That gives the procedural material an unusual texture. Holden and Bill travel, negotiate access, conduct interviews, and deal with colleagues who don’t necessarily see the value in their work. Wendy wants to turn their encounters into research rather than a collection of gruesome anecdotes. The process can be repetitive, awkward, and bureaucratic, which makes it convincing. Instead of treating profiling as a supernatural gift possessed by the smartest person in the room, Mindhunter presents it as a developing discipline shaped by observation, disagreement, and mistakes. Getting someone to talk is only the beginning. Knowing what to do with the answers is another problem entirely.
Unlike Se7en, Mindhunter doesn’t surround its characters with a grimy, nihilistic atmosphere that makes the entire world feel rotten. Nor is its main driving force the obsessive, cat-and-mouse pursuit that consumes the investigators in Zodiac. Its horror comes from somewhere quieter: the suggestion that beneath everyday normalcy lurks a darker, much darker world. Ed Kemper, Dennis Rader—the BTK killer—Wayne Williams, and Charles Manson weren’t inventions designed to populate a nightmare. They existed and walked among the masses. Their histories aren’t interchangeable, but their presence throughout the series punctures the comforting idea that dangerous people must somehow announce themselves as dangerous.
Calling Mindhunter a crime thriller or police procedural, then, only gets you so far. It has horror in its DNA and both feet firmly planted in the genre. That isn’t simply because it deals with murder and sexual violence. It makes normalcy itself feel unreliable. A calm voice, a familiar routine, or an apparently reasonable explanation tells you remarkably little about the person behind it. These people occupied ordinary spaces, held conversations, and participated in a world that didn’t always recognize what they were. There’s no supernatural threat to identify and no reassuring boundary separating their world from ours.
The use of the killers’ own recorded words makes that realization harder to shake. Although Mindhunter dramatizes its encounters rather than reconstructing them as a documentary, portions of its interview dialogue draw from actual statements. You aren’t simply hearing a screenwriter invent something horrible for a villain to say. There’s a real person behind the language, someone who found ways to describe, explain, or rationalize appalling acts. The matter-of-fact presentation makes it worse. The show rarely needs to insist that you be disturbed. It simply gives you enough time to understand what you’ve just heard.
Cameron Britton’s Ed Kemper is the clearest expression of that approach. He’s articulate, conversational, and seemingly pleased that someone wants to listen. Britton doesn’t play every exchange as a warning that violence is about to erupt. He lets Kemper be engaging, which creates a more uncomfortable response than constant menace would. You understand Holden’s fascination even while recognizing the danger in it. Kemper’s willingness to talk doesn’t mean he has surrendered control. Sometimes it means he has found another way to exercise it. Britton makes the difference between access and understanding frighteningly easy to miss.
Fincher’s influence is apparent in how patiently these encounters unfold. The controlled framing, subdued interiors, and measured pacing encourage you to notice small changes: a pause, a look, a shift in posture. A room can remain physically unchanged while the balance of power inside it moves somewhere unpleasant. These are horror sequences built around conversation. Nobody needs to jump out of the shadows. The tension comes from proximity and the possibility that the investigators have become more exposed than they realize. They can leave the room, but that doesn’t mean everything they heard stays behind.
Jonathan Groff makes Holden’s confidence both understandable and irritating. His curiosity opens doors, but he starts confusing his ability to provoke a response with an ability to control the encounter. Groff preserves the earnestness beneath that arrogance. Holden wants the work to matter, but he also wants to be right. His frightening encounter with Kemper exposes how little professional enthusiasm can do when intellectual curiosity becomes physical vulnerability. Understanding danger isn’t the same thing as feeling another person take control of your safety.
Holt McCallany’s Bill Tench supplies the weary perspective Holden lacks. He’s practical, skeptical, and more aware that a useful interview can still leave damage behind. His dry humor keeps the series from becoming suffocatingly solemn, but exhaustion always feels close to the surface. The second-season situation involving his adopted son and a toddler’s death brings his professional anxieties home. The parallel sometimes feels overly arranged, yet McCallany grounds it in a father’s helplessness. Anna Torv’s Wendy provides another necessary counterweight, insisting on methods and conclusions that can withstand scrutiny. Her personal story integrates less smoothly, but her presence keeps the project from becoming a celebration of Holden’s instincts.
The Atlanta child-murder investigation pushes those instincts against a reality that refuses to accommodate them. Behavioral patterns collide with racial distrust, political pressure, institutional priorities, and families whose grief cannot be answered by an interesting theory. Holden’s certainty becomes harder to admire when the stakes extend beyond proving his approach works. Meanwhile, the glimpses of BTK quietly undermine any comforting sense of progress. Whatever knowledge the team acquires, other lives continue beyond its awareness. Understanding some offenders doesn’t mean the investigators can recognize or stop them all.
The lack of a third season makes that expanding scope especially frustrating. Fincher has declared Mindhunter finished, citing the difficulty of justifying its production costs against its audience. Instead of reaching a deliberate conclusion, the series stops with important threads still hanging. The recurring glimpses of BTK suggest a longer game that never gets played out, while the futures of Holden, Bill, Wendy, and their developing work remain unresolved. For fans and critics who championed the series, that’s more than the disappointment of losing a favorite show. It’s the frustration of watching something grow more ambitious only to have its possibilities cut short. There’s a difference between deliberately withholding easy answers and losing the opportunity to continue asking the questions.
Still, its unfinished state doesn’t erase what those two seasons accomplished. You can admire the performances, the filmmaking, and the intelligence of its procedural detail, but its lasting effect is less comfortable than admiration. It leaves you thinking about pleasant exchanges and ordinary faces that gave nothing away. Other crime shows let the solution create distance between us and the horror. Mindhunter keeps taking that distance back. By the end, the troubling question isn’t how anyone could sit across from these men and listen. It’s how many people sat across from them before anyone knew what they had done.
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