Movie Title: The Haunted Mansion
Genre: Comedy, Family, Fantasy, Horror, Mystery
Starring: Eddie Murphy, Terence Stamp, Nathaniel Parker, Marsha Thomason, Jennifer Tilly, Wallace Shawn, Dina Spybey-Waters, Marc John Jefferies, Aree Davis, Jim Doughan, Rachael Harris, Steve Hytner, Heather Juergensen
Review: A pair of realtors, who are also husband and wife (Eddie Murphy and Marsha Thomason), along with their two children (Aree Davis and Marc John Jefferies), are summoned to a mansion. What they think is the listing of a lifetime they soon discover is haunted estate filled with secrets, spirits, and scares! Welcome to Disney's The Haunted Mansion.
The only reason that I decided to watch The Haunted Mansion was my love for the Disney attraction down in Orlando, Florida. That is my favorite place to visit at Disney World; I wish I could live in the mansion. It's the coolest! However, when it comes to this film adaptation of the Disney attraction...it was as enjoyable as standing in line at the DMV behind a guy with beer farts that hasn't showered in 10 days.
This lame attempt to capitalize of the success of other rides turned into films, I'm looking at you Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl, this one falls flat on its face! It's not scary, funny, entertaining or enjoyable. Its run-time is just under 90 minutes, but it feels like an eternity of non-jokes, disconnected scenes, and a plot that doesn't quite make a lick of sense. Oh, and none of the actors or their characters, other than the legendary Terence Stamp and Jennifer Tilly, seem to know what movie they are in, or what to do, or look like they are having any fun in this production.
Eddie Murphy is horribly miscast and doesn't energize the movie with his humor or star-power. He kind of sucks all of the fun out of it. He just seems sadly out of place. The actors that play his kids seem to really hate being on-screen. They should be our leads since this is a movie for the youths, but they don't have much to do and don't do much with it.
The biggest strike against The Haunted Mansion is the mansion itself. It's not very scary or visually interesting. It's not spooky or mysterious. It just looks like a very well lit movie set with bored actors reciting uninteresting dialogue and "jokes" while trying to make it through this snooze-fest.
I really hated this movie! If my life depended on it I couldn't explain the plot if its writer was telling my what the hell was happening. Scenes just happen without a setup and make little to no sense. And characters react to ghostly occurrences without consistency even when they know that they are stuck in an actual haunted mansion.
The only thing scarier than The Haunted Mansion is that it made it to the viewing public. Save your time and money for the actual Haunted Mansion attraction. All I can say is, "BOOOOOOOO!!!"
Fun Fact: The make-up designed by Rick Baker for Ramsley was to make him resemble Boris Karloff.