Robert Horton is a Scarecrow board member and a longtime film critic. He will be contributing a series of "critic's notes" to the Scarecrow blog—a chance to highlight worthy films playing locally and connecting them to the riches of Scarecrow's collection.
This summer, there is but one movie phenomenon everybody is talking about, a true zeitgeister that has Tinseltown abuzz: Haunted Mansion! I kid, of course, as the Disney theme-park remake opened to extremely low-energy yawns. (I myself have not caught it.) I was surprised to see it referred to as a remake, actually, until I looked through my own files and realized that there existed a 2003 Eddie Murphy film titled The Haunted Mansion, and that I had reviewed it. So that review is reprinted here, just in time to catch the '23 Haunted Mansion b.o. tsunami.
The Haunted Mansion is a pretty good approximation of death-in-life, though not the kind the filmmakers intended. This is a ghost story, but even a ghost story needs some vitality.
If the title rings the bell, it's because this is the second movie released this year based on a Disneyland attraction. The first was Pirates of the Caribbean, a silly movie buoyed up by Johnny Depp's frisky performance.
This new movie has a fatal lack of Depp. The lead role is played by Eddie Murphy, but he's in his bland, Disney-fied, Dr. Dolittle mode. With Murphy asleep, the special effects take over.
The haunted mansion belongs to a mysterious "master" in the wilds of the Louisiana bayou. Murphy is a real-estate agent who gets wind of a possible sale—so he brings his wife (Marsha Thomason) and two children to the isolated estate to meet the owner. A convenient thunderstorm forces the family to spend the night in the old place. Specters, spirits, and spooks obligingly gather. The reason for all this is that the master (Nathaniel Parker) of the house wants Murphy's wife to step into the shoes of his own ghostly lost love. He is aided and abetted by a butler (Terence Stamp), who speaks and moves as though he just woke from a nice long nap in a damp mausoleum.
After a laborious and never especially amusing set-up, the movie settles down to unleash its singing marble heads and secret passageways. One cool scene: Murphy is sent spinning around a room while listening to a talking crystal ball (Jennifer Tilly's head).
If your kids were freaked out by the swashbuckling skeletons in Pirates of the Caribbean, they probably won't handle this movie's rotting corpses climbing out of coffins. For adults, the movie isn't any scarier than it is funny. It just moves dutifully from one situation to another, like an amusement park ride running at slow motion.
The director of this snoozefest is Rob Minkoff, who did the Stuart Little pictures. He is evidently comfortable with computer effects, but not so certain with human beings.
The whole concept is odd. Instead of just a good, stupid haunted house movie, this thing has to be about how Eddie Murphy is really an absent father who needs to spend more time with his wife and kids (an obsessive theme of Hollywood family films). Also, I found myself idly wondering about the backstory of this movie. The haunted mansion appears to be a plantation. If Murphy's wife is the reincarnation of a 19th-century figure whose love for the mansion owner was forbidden, does this mean she was a slave? And if so, isn't this a little heavy for a Disney comedy?
Throughout, there is Eddie Murphy trying to inject something into a script that isn't funny (a very familiar sight over the last decade). He's kept his career going by moving into Disney films, but we have lost a comic force.
August 4, 2023
Robert Horton is a member of the National Society of Film Critics.
