13th Floor, The (1988)

... aka: 13º, o Andar do Pavor (The 13th Floor of Dread)

... aka: Electrocutor 1

Directed by:

Chris Roache

Aussie producers David Hanney, Charles Hannah and Tom Broadbridge produced four genre films for the international video market in the late 80s. The best known as these now is James Bogle's Kadaicha (1988), which was re-titled Stones of Death for its U.S. video release and was given another chance at life thanks to inclusion in that popular Severin "All the Haunts Be Ours..." folk horror box set a few years back. And then there was Karl Zwicky's To Make a Killing (1988), a sharply-written, surprisingly nasty coming of age drama / home invasion horror, which was appropriately re-titled VICIOUS! (1988) for video and deserves another look. Brian Trenchard-Smith's Out of the Body (1989), which involves a psychic's search for a serial killer, hasn't seemed to build up any kind of reputation whatsoever over the years and is the most difficult of these to find. And then we have The 13th Floor, which was a very well-circulated tape here in American and is still easy to find now on numerous streaming sites since Umbrella Entertainment is handling it. It's currently doing the rounds on Shudder.

At a high rise construction site, young Heather Thompson (Kylie Clare) witnessed her father, Robert (Tony Blackett), and two of his goons kill a man who owed them money, along with the man's young son, who was electrocuted. Twelve years later, now-grown Heather (Lisa Hensley) may have blocked out all of the details from that fateful evening, but the psychological scars remain. As a result, she fell in with the wrong crowd, started doing drugs, dropped out of college and is now living on the streets.

Heather's evil father wants her back home ASAP, not necessarily because he's worried about her but because he's now running for political office and fears what having a troublesome daughter is going to do to his reputation, and thus his chances at winning the upcoming election. Not only that, but prior to running away Heather stole some potentially-incriminating documents that could get him into a lot of trouble. Robert hires sadistic private detective Brenner (Vic Rooney), who has a reputation for violence and getting desired results whatever the means, to find her and the documents.

A completed and functioning high rise building now stands at the same site of the previous murders, only use of the 13th floor (the exact spot of the deaths) has been prohibited. Any business that has attempted to set up shop there in the past has been plagued by problems, namely electrical ones. Since they need a place to stay, Heather, who's now clean, and her best friend Rebecca (Miranda Otto), who's still using, decide to make the 13th floor their new home. They receive help from a friend named Nick (Paul Hunt), who's recently gotten a job there as a night shift janitor. He swings by after hours to bring them food, wine, a TV, pillows and such, and even sneaks some naps in. The girls find another ally in John Burke (Tim McKenzie), who works in the social security office there. He takes such a fancy to Heather that he's willing to break the law and falsify documents just so she can collect a welfare check under an assumed identity.

Brenner ends up catching up to Heather outside the building late at night and chases after her. She eludes him long enough to fall into the clutches of chubby, horny, Schwarzenegger-worshiping live-in security guard Bert (Jeff Truman), who shows her his porn magazines and attempts to coerce her into going skinny dipping. Instead, she pushes him into the pool, steals one of his guns and runs back up to her 13th floor pad where Brenner is already waiting for her. He punches her, pins her down and tries to burn her with a lit cigarette, but she elbows him in the crotch and runs off. Since it's now 40 minutes into this and we've long ago forgotten this was supposed to be a horror film, it then comes as a mild surprise when electric bolts shoot out of a utility closet and Brenner falls to his death down the elevator shaft.

Some other stuff happens, but little of it has to do with the haunting. John's bossy, effete colleague keeps nosing into his business and almost busts him falsifying records, Heather and John have sex and Rebecca, who has an unrequited girl crush on her friend, get jealous and then later overdoses in the bathroom and the dad sends a bunch of violent thugs to break into Heather's records and rough John up. There's a surprise twist toward the end (that actually IS a surprise) and a lively final showdown, but it's difficult to make it there after an entire hour of slow-paced tedium.

One gets the impression that the writer / director wasn't particularly interested in making a ghost / horror movie but because that's the product the producers wanted, he kinda, sorta obliged. He mostly just made a drama here but the characters aren't particularly likable or interesting, the plot meanders and the supernatural stuff all feels like it's thrown on the side. And that's a real shame the first hour is mostly a slog because this eventually does go somewhere interesting. There's some style. It's often quite colorful (lots of blue, green, red, purple and neon) and visual stunning, thanks to cinematographer Stephen Prime. Performances are generally fine, though I'm not sure why every man looks like a broiled lobster. 

Though you'd never predict it watching her here, Otto became the breakout star and would go on to appear in several Lord of the Rings films, Spielberg's War of the Worlds, The Thin Red Line and many others. For some reason, there's also ample coverage given to an issue of the men's magazine Mayfair, which features future B-movie star Gail Harris / Thackray (SORORITY HOUSE MASSACRE II) as the cover model.

In the U.S., this was given a VHS release from Paramount in 1990. Australia, Brazil, Canada, France, Greece, Mexico, Netherlands, Spain and the UK also got to share our pain with a release of their own. If there's an official Blu-ray or DVD release, I'm not aware of it.

★★

Bi gui zhuo (1986)

... aka: 俾鬼捉

... aka: 誰當鬼

... aka: Bei gwai yuk

... aka: Ghost Snatchers, The

... aka: Invasion from the Beyond

... aka: Shui dang gui (Who Is the Ghost?)

Directed by:

Ngai Choi Lam

Nearly every guy working at Fox Centre, a high rise office building, has the hots for secretary Judy Hsu (former Taiwanese model Shu-Yuan Hsu). She's so in demand she makes interested parties fill out an application that, according to the subtitles, is "To check if you've in recent years got V.D., syphilis or AIDS. Also your size and lastingness." What nobody knows is that Judy is the target of evil spirits. During a late night office party, lightning strikes the building and Judy is accosted in the bathroom by said spirits. The walls split, a long corridor opens up, hands burst through and start throwing her around and then a giant hand grabs her. Now possessed, a voice regularly calls out to her, demanding she "Kill all men and women!" Sometimes her eyes glow red and she's aided by the pale-faced ghosts of former Japanese soldiers. So why Judy? Well, it has something to do with her having a yen horoscope.

Meanwhile, we meet luckless "fatty" Bong Chu (Jing Wong); your standard HK ghost-comedy leading men who creates a mess out of pretty much everything he touches ... and life returns the favor! He's the type who can't even sit down for a simple breakfast without a fly landing in his fish congee. Since he's unemployed and still living at home, his parents make an arrangement with his uncle, Pien-Chou Fan (Stanley Fung), for him to work as a security guard at Fox Centre. He's trying to save up money to get married to his girlfriend, Hsueh Tai, who's played by the super-cute Joey Wong. Yes, part of the joke is that she's way out of his league, even though there's a catch. Hsueh's brother, Erh-Lung (Michael Wai-Man Chan), is a low rent underworld figure with a thug entourage who swindles his money away and tries to prevent him from dating his sister. Also, a bird shits on his lunch.

Because of its design, the Fox Centre is cursed. It all has something to do with yin and yang and magnetic forces and spiritual fields and feng shui and Japanese soldiers being executed on the site of the building during the war and now wanting to rebuild the Nippon Empire and, well, let's just say Fox Centre was erected in the wrong place in a super-specific way that's made it a hot spot for paranormal activity. Back when the building was first being built, several construction workers died under mysterious circumstances. And then the architect who designed the project (supposedly) died by suicide. And then the Inquiries Commission chairman in charge of investigating the mysterious deaths died himself. You get the picture.

Since it's a special time of year when all the yins and yangs are compromised or something, anyone working there who was also born during a certain time of the year is in danger, which happens to include Bong, his uncle and Hsueh. They seek assistance from Hsueh's fortune teller godsister, Ling Chang (Miss Hong Kong 1984 and future Mrs. Sammo Hung, Joyce Godenzi), who advises the chairman (Wai Shum) of things he can do to thwart the evil. That involves closing up parts of the building, like the top floor and the parking garage, and other things that he's not willing to do. 

Ling, who's young, beautiful and has a good personality, also becomes the unlikely love interest of Pien-Chou, who's middle-aged, average and a pervert who spends all his free time in porn theaters and massage parlors. Hey, you guys already used that hot-chick-who-can-do-1000-times-better-hooking-up-with-a-complete-idiot joke once already! Ling goes out of town for a single day to try to get them help and what does Pien-Chou do? He tries to have sex with the possessed Judy, even after he's explicitly told she's a ghost!

Dumb moments aside, this movie is packed with so many ghostly, gory, weird shenanigans that it almost succeeds in spite of itself. We get a face pulled off, an ear bitten off, a heart ripped out of a chest, eyeballs ripped out, an exploding head, a nightmare inside of a nightmare, someone split in two with a giant guillotine, someone split in two with a samurai sword, centipede eating, a ghost pissing blood, a movie theater slowly filling with ghosts, a "safety charm" that can be used once to ward off ghosts, a male spirit medium with a dubbed-over female voice, a haunted TV set that eventually sprouts arms and legs and lots of other entertaining stuff. The only thing we don't get is a decent screenplay.

While there's certainly some fun to be had here, that's a bit compromised by needless complication in the plotting, overly familiar characters and too many detours away from the primary story. A good example is a long and utterly pointless scene where Ling summons a "Mahjong ghost;" an awful, big-nosed, stuffed animal looking puppet wearing sunglasses, to help our bumbling heroes win a game. And then there's a subplot where one of the guys loses 3 of his 10 souls and the rest of the cast have to rush around trying to find them and then reunite them with his body before the hospital staff can conduct an autopsy. So what does any of that have to do with the haunted building? Not a damn thing really. It's like someone just came up with ideas they liked and threw them into the stew whether they belonged here or not.

Toward the end, we learn the only way to banish the evil is to locate the portal to a spiritual realm called "Asolo Field." While there, they must find the "Ghost King's skeleton," put a spell on it, return intact with something called a "longevity rope" and then let a virgin (Joey Wong's character) hold it. Oh yeah, and the only people who can enter are those that are yang. Got that? Nope, well then forget that and just enjoy the strangeness of the colorfully-lit ghost realm, which is accessed through a portal in the women's restroom mirror and culminates in a fight against an undead Japanese general and his animated skeleton (a well-executed puppet effect) around a lake of acid.

The director also made THE SEVENTH CURSE (1986), a better, more-polished horror-comedy than this one, the excellent rape-revenge film Her Vengeance (1988), the manga adaptation and box office hit The Peacock King (1989) and its sequel, Saga of the Phoenix (1989), Erotic Ghost Story (1990), another big hit in Hong Kong, the cult classic Riki-Oh: The Story of Ricky (1991) and, his final film, The Cat (1992). With a track record like that, it's a true shame he abruptly stopped working in film altogether in 1992.

Also in the cast are Charlie Cho (THE FIRST VAMPIRE IN CHINA) as a Mahjong player, Lap-Ban Chan (HOUSE OF THE LUTE) as Hsueh's granny, Tony Leung (who also wrote the script) as a security guard, Tau-Wan Yue as a cross-eyed security guard, Siu-Ming To as a cross-eyed TV ghost and lots of other familiar faces.

This Golden Harvest production did middling business at the box office. It was first released on VHS in Hong Kong in 1986 on the Pony Canyon label. That was followed by VCD and DVD releases from Fortune Star. The latter includes an English subtitle option, as does the Malaysian DVD release from Speedy Video. There's no Blu-ray to my knowledge, though this seems like a prime candidate for such a release so it'll probably happen eventually.

★★1/2