So, this largely useless film concerns a group of people trapped in a darkened space with a tedious collection of digitally generated, corporate spokes-spooks. Cinema audiences will know how they feel. Even the better blockbusters – bellicose turtles and post-feminist fashion dolls come to mind – are in the business of selling you stuff you don’t need. It would be naive to suggest Haunted Mansion represents a game-changing nadir. But one imagines the skirls of funereal bagpipes sounding throughout this deeply puzzling slab of unthreatening horror. This must be the end of something. Must it not?
The wispiness of the spectres and the creakiness of the allusions will puzzle legions of whatever audience turns up. The spooks emerge through trapdoors and float about as if projected on to chemically generated vapours. Haunted corridors suggest copies of copies of scenes from Cocteau’s Beauty and the Beast (the effect diluted to homeopathic feebleness). Jamie Lee Curtis’s witch is confined to a glass globe. A “Hatbox Ghost” voiced by Jared Leto looks to have been lifted from the upright of a 1970s pinball game. Perhaps he was. The film-makers seem proud that their work leans so conspicuously towards the eponymous theme-park attraction that, since 1969, has been alarming only the jumpiest children.
It is an odd strategy. Hundreds of thousands have visited the mansion in Disney resorts over the past half-century but still, surely, not enough for the clunky effects to connect with more than a handful in any auditorium. The Pirates of the Caribbean films also borrowed the style of a Disney attraction, but, for all their abundant flaws, they remembered a core mission to stage the saltiest of action sequences. This thing is just a clattering mess. The Eddie Murphy version from 20 years ago seems, in contrast, like a model of discipline.
LaKeith Stanfield plays an astrophysicist fallen on hard times after the death of his wife. Now halfheartedly running the dead woman’s ghost tour in New Orleans, he joins forces with a comedy priest (Owen Wilson), a sassy clairvoyant (Tiffany Haddish) and a ruffled academic (Danny DeVito) to help rout out the ghosts haunting a recent New York blow-in (Rosario Dawson). After an enormous amount of mugging, we trace the disruption back a few hundred years. Translucent beings in period dress are soon being projected on every available surface.
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If the characters spent less time running through their shopping lists we might have got the blasted thing finished in less than two long, long hours
Much social-media hot air has, this summer, been directed towards supposed “erasure” in Barbie and Oppenheimer. How odd, then, that a film with a largely black cast makes no meaningful allusion – there is just the palest of obfuscations – to who was doing all the work on Louisianan estates in earlier centuries. Too awkward for a family entertainment? It is probably not for us to say. We can, however, get in a state about the dizzying degrees of product porn at work here. Dawson is forced to use a popular brand of scented candle that she has been sent by a well-known online retailer. Stanfield’s dialogue addresses both a ubiquitous burger outlet and a prominent ice-cream flogger. Haddish is required to tell us which drugstore chain sold her stationery.
If the characters spent less time running through their shopping lists we might have got the blasted thing finished in less than two long, long hours. There is some spirited work from a consistently fine cast. DeVito cannot fail to be funny. Stanfield delivers a performance more suited to a less-compromised film. Even they cannot save this fatally compromised farrago from sinking into the swamp.
None of which means it won’t become a cult hit in the 2040s. Look what became of the not-much-better Hocus Pocus.
Haunted Mansion opens in cinemas on Friday, August 11th
