Bovie Movie

This haunted house chiller is the second feature from Dark Castle Entertainment, the mid-budget outfit put together in 1999 to remake the cheesy horror genre pictures of William Castle by his daughter, Terry Castle, and producers Gilbert Adler, Robert Zemeckis, and Joel Silver. Financially ravaged and widowed by a fire that is consuming him with guilt, Arthur Kriticos (Tony Shalhoub) is left to raise two kids on his own: beautiful teenager Kathy (Shannon Elizabeth) and grade school student Bobby (Alec Roberts). Good news suddenly drops into their lives when a lawyer visits and reveals that they have inherited a lavish home from a late uncle, Cyrus (F. Murray Abraham), an eccentric ghost hunter. The Kriticos family moves into the remote house only to discover its odd secret: the dwelling contains a state-of-the-art, elaborate system of moving glass walls that trap spirits inside. Soon the ghosts, which can only be seen through the use of special high-tech spectacles, are loose in the elaborate contraption and are none too thrilled about their predicament. With the exits sealed, the family members try to learn the secret of Uncle Cyrus’ bizarre mansion and survive supernatural assaults with the help of sassy housekeeper Maggie (Rah Digga), neurotic psychic Rafkin (Matthew Lillard), and Kalina (Embeth Davidtz), an activist championing the civil rights of ghosts. The eyeglasses through which the spirits can be viewed in Thirteen Ghosts (2001) were part of a ballyhoo gimmick involving pairs of spectacles handed out to audiences for screenings of the 1960 original, which was presented in “Illusion-O.”

John Carpenter’s well-remembered thriller gets an update in this remake from director Rupert Wainwright. Nick Castle (Tom Welling) is a charter-boat captain in the small coastal town of Antonio Bay. Castle’s ancestors helped to found Antonio Bay, but while the city’s mayor (Kenneth Welsh) and the head of the local historical society (Sara Botsford) are spearheading an effort to raise money for a statue that would honor the city fathers, Castle is more interested in seeing the town’s rickety docks and aging sea wall replaced. However, Castle has been too distracted with personal matters to wage a campaign of his own — he’s been having an affair with Stevie Wayne (Selma Blair), a single mom who runs a combination radio station and lighthouse, while his former flame Elizabeth Williams (Maggie Grace) has returned to town to mend fences with her mother and finds herself renewing her romance with Castle. One night, Castle and his first mate, Brett Spooner (DeRay Davis), discover an antique ship’s bag filled with treasure, not knowing the salvage came from a ship that sank over a hundred years before. As it happens, there’s a terrible secret behind the ship’s disastrous fate, and now that Castle and Davis have unwittingly awakened the watery grave, the souls of the ship’s crew and passengers have come back to claim their revenge in the form of a thick and impenetrable fog. The remake of The Fog proved to be one of the last projects for producer Debra Hill, who also worked on the original film; Hill was fighting cancer when work began on the film, and she died shortly before filming commenced.