Review of Haunted Mansion (2023) by Rebecca31 — 01 Sep 2023

The Disney gravy train continues, and if it’s not another live action remake it’s a theme park ride adaptation. Well although these theme park movies have served them well in the past (5 Pirates of the Caribbean movies, Jungle Cruise etc.), they’ve now had a go at a spooky tale suitable for the whole family. Well that was the idea but unfortunately this new Haunted Mansion movie will be too scary for some young viewers and too boring for everyone else. Not even a strong cast made up of LaKeith Stanfield, Rosario Dawson, Owen Wilson, Tiffany Haddish, Danny DeVito, and Jamie Lee Curtis is enough to save this snooze-fest.

A single mother, Gabbie (Rosario Dawson) moves into a lovely mansion that unfortunately is also home to a whole bunch of ghosts. Enter a tour guide (LaKeith Stanfield) a priest (Owen Wilson), a psychic (Tiffany Haddish) and a historian (Danny DeVito) to all get together and help exorcise the ghosts from the Haunted Mansion. An unlikely group of heroes forced together in a very unusual circumstance that should have resulted in a comedic spooky tale but ends up as a bland, boring story that I couldn’t wait to be finally over.

This isn’t the worst film I’ve seen all year but it’s close. Haunted Mansion fails at a family comedy and fails as a spooky ghost story. It’s got a dull script that even a good cast can’t do anything with. The effects are horrendous, you’d see better looking ghosts in a PS2 game. It can’t fit comfortably into a genre because it’s not funny and not scary. This felt endless and I can’t believe it’s only two hours because it felt more like four. The idea was good and clearly there’s lots to work with from the theme park ride, as all these ghosts with different back stories keep showing up throughout the film. There’s certainly enough of them stuffed into it and perhaps it would have been better as a mini series to explore some of the different ghost tales and actually develop some characters instead of quickly jamming them altogether into the mansion as quick as possible with the 999 other ghosts before the really evil ghost completes his plan of collecting 1000 souls.

Haunted Mansion moves from one haunted room to another, leaving you feeling like you’d rather be in the haunted mansion ride itself rather than this. Hell even those little crappy ghost trains we all got dragged to at some point as a child is better than this because it’s over quicker. I went in with low expectations and I was still disappointed. Haunted Mansion is a wasted opportunity because with that cast it should have been a hell of a lot better than the result. And it’s really not their fault, without a good script you don’t have a good movie and if Disney put an actual film maker in charge of things they might end up with better material because they’ve long since shown themselves to be completely out of ideas. Too bad they can’t understand the importance of good writers and yet another mediocre theme park based movie only serves as a further reminder that originality died at Disney years ago.

We’re entering spooky season now and there are so many better things you could watch instead of this utter mess, Casper, The Nightmare Before Christmas, The Addams Family, Coraline, Beetlejuice and of course Hocus Pocus. Honestly there’s episodes of Scooby-Doo that are more entertaining than Haunted Mansion. But for anyone genuinely looking for a not too scary Halloween movie for the whole family, check out any of the above and skip this utter mess of a movie because there’s very few people I’d recommend this to. Haunted Mansion is recommended for die-hard fans of the theme park, I’m not saying you’ll all enjoy it but if this movie was made for anyone, it’s you guys. For everyone else, I’d say skip this one.