Haunted Mansion: A Film That 'Gets' Disney's Best Old-School Park Attraction
By Jim Slotek
Rating: B
Here’s a flashback from my ‘70s teen visit to Disney World and my impression of the classic rides, in the days before they called them “simulators.”
The lamest: It’s a Small World (for little kids, with an earworm jingle that should have been illegal) and Pirates of the Caribbean, featuring mannequin-like pirates with painted-on lascivious grins, chasing wenches in circles on something like a series of merry-go-rounds.
The best: Space Mountain, basically a roller-coaster in the dark, and the imaginative, pre-digital The Haunted Mansion, the latter of which used visuals, jump scares and even placed a ghostly decayed corpse next to you in a mirror.
Some tenants of The Haunted Mansion
If there were a vote over which attraction to turn into a movie, I couldn’t imagine anyone not choosing The Haunted Mansion. And if somebody had told me that the inert Pirates of the Caribbean would be turned into a multi-billion-dollar series of comic-action adventures, I’d have advised them to get out of the Florida sun for a while.
What can I say? It’s a funny world.
As far as the Disney theme park transition to screen went, It’s a Small World did inspire a classic episode of The Simpsons, and Eddie Murphy starred in a bland version of Haunted Mansion in 2003.
The curse from that failed effort took 20 years to lift, apparently. The latest version of The Haunted Mansion, opening this week from director Justin Simien (Dear White People), plays like a movie made by a fan of the theme park ride. It carries an understanding that an apparition you see in the mirror is more frightening than one standing in front of you. Ghosts come and go, some comical, some malevolent, some way more malevolent than the one before.
Through it all, the movie keeps a light tone to leaven the scares. It is less-than-serious-horror that lifts serviceably from predecessors as disparate as Ghostbusters, Beetlejuice and even Scooby-Doo (right down to the trademark hallway-door-to-hallway-door chase scene).
It has the cast to carry off the more obvious gags and punchlines, including Owen Wilson as a fraudulent minister/exorcist, Tiffany Haddish as an equally dubious voodoo queen and Danny DeVito as a crackpot professor of the paranormal.
And it has a subtext of dealing with grief, but not so deep that it overpowers a movie that is essentially forgettable fun.
In the New Orleans-set Haunted Mansion, LaKeith Stanfield (Judas and the Black Messiah) plays an astrophysicist named Ben who falls in love and marries a psychic named Alyssa (Charity Jordan). It’s a doomed marriage, barely lasting an opening montage before Alyssa dies, apparently in a car crash (yeah, yeah, I know, she didn’t see that coming).
The grief-stricken Ben gives up science to turn to the bottle, between sessions of working as a bitter tourist guide of the city’s famous haunts (a perverse tribute to his late wife).
We then meet Gabbie (Rosario Dawson), a physician and widow who tries to make a new start with her young son Travis (Chase Dillon) in a fixer-upper house that literally screams “haunted!”
Once ghosts start appearing and threatening them – and supernaturally unable to leave their nightmare dream home – Gabbie and Travis set up in the living room, and seek help from “experts,” including Ben. The aforementioned ghost-hunters also fall under the can’t-leave spell, so the movie becomes both an exorcism story and an escape tale, with much banter.
But the real star of the show is the house, as it should be – home to spectral tenants like The Hatchet Ghost, The Mariner Ghost and The Bride, with walls that move and a tale of centuries-old evil that starts to build on itself and may be a tad overcooked. (Jamie Lee Curtis has a small but key role as original witch-queen Madame Leota, another of the haunted house’s trapped denizens).
At a little more than two hours (about the length of the line to get into the actual ride), Haunted Mansion sometimes strains to keep up its frenetic pace. But the fun tone is on point, and younger family members in the audience are in little actual danger of being traumatized by fear.
Haunted Mansion. Directed by Justin Simien. Starring LaKeith Stanfield, Rosario Dawson, and Tiffany Haddish. In theatres July 28.