Not to be confused with the later science fiction film The Thirteenth Floor (1999), The 13th Floor (1988) is an Australian ghost thriller with at one ghost and at least that many thrills.
Some of your universe's critics fail to appreciate the chilling The 13th Floor. For example, reviewer HumanoidOfFlesh writes, ""The 13th Floor" is easily one of the worst horror films I have ever seen." Reviewer arfdawg-1 writes, "I love Oz horror movies, but this is barely a horror movie. Even the ending is ridiculous. Unfortunately, there is nothing to recommend here." And reviewer PeterMitchell-506-564364 writes, "This film is undoubtedly one of the worst and tasteless horrors Australia has ever produced, and that goes double for it's [sic] smarts."
Read on for the truth about The 13th Floor...
At night, a car pulls up to a Sydney, Australia building under construction, where a man wearing a tuxedo (the age-old signifier that the man is a gangster) climbs out and tells his young daughter to stay in the car while he attends to some business. After he and his driver disappear into the building, the girl mischievously leaves the car and rides the construction elevator to the building’s thirteenth floor. She witnesses a horrific scene: her father and his lackey slit a man’s throat with a knife in front of his own child, a young boy. There is also a transformer explosion, and suddenly the boy is a ghost.
After the titles, the film cuts to twelve years later. The girl, Heather Thompson, is now twenty years old and her gangster father is running for re-election to public office. She and her friend Rebecca (played by Miranda Otto) enter the building that was under construction years ago, where they hear a security guard helpfully talk about his theory that the thirteenth floor is unlucky, resulting in electrical and computer problems on that floor. Heather and her friend ride the elevator to the twelfth floor, then take the fire stairs to the thirteenth, which looks abandoned.
Elsewhere, at her father’s mansion, Mr. Thompson hires a well-past-middle-aged thug, Brenner,to tail Heather, mainly because he believes she has incriminating evidence on him that will hurt his election chances. He tells the thug to retrieve some documents from her, making sure not to incriminate him.
Back at the 13th floor, Heather and Rebecca have apparently spent the day sitting on the floor in front of a window doing nothing (their plan being to squat on the 13th floor indefinitely). Their friend Nick appears from the elevator, surprising them. The film cuts to later at night, with the three of them sleeping in sleeping bags on the industrial carpet. Heather is awakened by ghostly electrical crackling behind a door, so naturally she goes to her backpack to take out the incriminating folder of documents that could ruin her father and scans them. Then she investigates the mysterious crackling in an electrical closet, so she hides the documents there, where they will most certainly be safe.
In the morning, Heather discovers Rebecca shooting heroin in the rest rooms and scolds her, then of course submerges her face in a sinkful of water, where she has a vision of a ghostly black skull that has been burnt to a crisp!
Later, Heather and Rebecca run into John Burke, a social worker who works for social security, headquartered in the haunted building. Leaving Burke, they return to the 13th floor, where Nick brings them a TV set. Heather scolds him about the uselessness of TV. “It’s all sensationalism and doom, Nick.”
“Yeah, well, if the world’s gonna end, I want to know when. We’ll get a great view of the missiles from that window.”
They watch TV, which coincidentally is showing a press conference with Heather’s father. Nick quips helpfully, “Hey, Heather, it’s your dad.”
“Turn it off,” she tells him.
Heather hears a sound, then finds a rotary phone sitting in a desk drawer, buzzing. Heather answers and finds that John Burke is calling. “How’d you know where I was?” she asks, then waits for his answer. “Really?” she says. “How observant.” It turns out the middle-aged Burke is asking the 20-year-old Heather out for a date. “Look, I’m sure you’re harmless…No, I don’t suppose a drink could hurt. Yeah, okay. Seven o’clock.”
Later, Burke picks Heather up in a distinctive, extremely Australian red car (apparently a Holden Sandman panel van) as a cigarette dangles hiply from his lips.
On their date, they go to a dock on Sydney Harbour to drink bottled beer. The main point of the date, from Heather’s point of view, is to force Burke not to tell anyone she and Rebecca are living on the 13th floor. He agrees, then asks what they do for money. “Do you get the dole or what? Because if you’re dead set about staying hidden, then I’m your man. Mr. Social Security!” He adds, as if it is an obvious, simple matter, “I can change your name on the computer. You can get the dole under any name you want.”
“Do you realize that’s illegal?” Heather asks.
“Yeah,” he replies. “Highly.”
When Burke drops Heather off at the building, she is intercepted by the thug/private detective Brenner, who chases her through Sydney. She escapes by running into a parking structure as the garage door closes, and then she runs into the security officer for the building in which she’s squatting. He takes her to his small apartment, which is tastefully decorated with move posters for Raw Deal (1986) and Rambo III (1988), not to mention pornographic magazines. He shows Heather his loaded handgun as well as his “other firepower,” which includes more guns and knives. After pushing him in a nearby swimming pool, she steals his handgun and runs back to the 13th floor.
Unfortunately, Brenner is waiting for her on the 13th floor. He disarms her, but she runs down to the 12th floor. As he follows her, he describes ways he knows to torture people — apparently as an incentive for her to give her self up. “Best way I know of helping a girl talk is something I do with my little cigarette friend here. It’s called The Measles. You know, red spots suddenly come out all over your body. And I do mean all over. You can pass ‘em off as acne scars…the ones on your face, that is. And there’s The Manicure. One fingernail after another. Oh, so painful. The funny thing is, it all seems to turn me on.”
He manages to subdue her and ask her where the incriminating file is, but when he attempts to burn her with his cigarette he is distracted by mysterious electricity in the closet, allowing her to escape. Then the electrical closet appears to explode and Brenner screams. He crawls away from an unseen ghost, pressing his back against the elevator doors — and then the doors open and he falls down the elevator shaft (offscreen, alas).
(In an extremely subtle visual touch, the filmmakers have Heather wear tiny lightning-shaped earrings to establish her connection with the electricity-based ghost — only the most discerning of film viewers would catch such a skillfully subtle touch.)
Later, Heather visits Burke’s social security office to defraud the government. Burke changes her name in the computer database to Heidi Schultz. As a reward, she kisses him, then leads him up to the 13th floor, where they disrobe and make love on a sleeping bag. After they are done, Burke quips, “Maybe I could pop up and see you tomorrow at lunchtime.”
Suddenly, Rebecca confronts the two of them. She yells at Heather for bringing John into their situation, and then she storms off. Later, she returns to apologize, but when Heather rebuffs her she heads to the rest room, where she sees the glowing ghost of the boy who died in the transformer explosion in the film’s prologue.
Rebecca ignores the ghost and begins to inject heroin into her arm. The ghost, meanwhile, tries to warn Heather, who is sleeping nearby. Oddly, however, Heather does not wake up, and when Rebecca falls into a stupor on the bathroom floor the ghost simply fades away. A while later, Heather discovers Rebecca’s dead body and her used needle in the bathroom. She uses the death of her friend as an opportunity to show her other friend Nick the incriminating documents about her father.
Elsewhere, Burke is beaten up by more of Heather’s father’s thugs. They torture him, force him to call Heather to tell her to give up the documents, and then they kill Burke.
The thugs invade the 13th floor, forcing Heather and Nick to run to the elevator, where the thugs trap them between floors. The force the doors open and make their way to the security guard’s apartment, where they steal his gun — and also find the murdered guard sitting on the toilet.
The thugs drown Nick in the nearby swimming pool, and they attempt to drown Heather too, but she survives. She wakes up in a hospital, but she realizes the doctors and nurses are injecting her periodically with heroin in an elaborate plot to both keep her quiet and discredit her. As she sleeps under a heavy burden of opiates, she flashes back to the opening sequence and watches her father kill the ghost boy’s father all over again.
The next day, as she walks the hospital grounds with her doctor, Heather cleverly steals his keys. At night, she escapes; fortunately for her, the doctor did not notice his big keyring was gone. Heather hitchhikes back to Sydney, where she immediately heads back to the building, and the 13th floor, where everything started.
Suddenly, she hears electricity crackling and sees the boy’s blue-shrouded ghost holding the incriminating evidence — he simply wants justice for his and his father’s deaths.
Heather calls her father and tells him to meet her on the 13th floor, which he does. She lures him toward the electrical closet. He tells her, “You’ve proved to me that you’re worthy of my trust. That’s why I spared you. Cause deep down you’re really just the same as me. We are what the world needs, Heather, what the world has always needed. We are leaders.”
She snickers derisively. “Do you remember this place?”
“No.”
“Well, you should.”
She tells him the incriminating evidence is in the electrical closet, but when he goes to get it the ghost boy grabs him. Shockingly, however, Heather has somehow acquired electrical powers, so she zaps him and forces him to step into the empty elevator shaft, killing him.
IMAGE - ELECTRIC HEATHER
She was up outside on a dock near the Sydney Harbour Bridge and walks confidently into the city.
The End
It is difficult to catalogue all the fine qualities of The 13th Floor, but I will try. First, the cinematography is excellent, showing picture-perfect views of Australia. In fact, every exterior shot and some interior shots show the magnificent Sydney Harbour Bridge in the background, a landmark that I can only assume is visible from every angle in Australia. Next, the acting is excellent, with both Miranda Otto (who appeared in the recent Australian horror film Talk to Me in 2022) and Vic Rooney (playing the reprehensible Brenner) the two standouts. Additionally, this ghost story has a ghost in it (a fact that might be lost on some viewers, as the ghost appears only a handful of times -- but true horror movie aficionados will appreciate the ghost's presence). And finally, the film ends with a supernatural and somewhat ambiguous twist, as Heather has apparently acquired electrical superpowers from the ghost boy. As she walks into the city, who knows how she will use these powers? As with most films we review here, it is a real shame there was never a sequel to The 13th Floor; it would have been exciting to explore the surprise ending and see Heather attack villains with her electrical powers. Perhaps it could even be set on The 14th Floor...