The Haunted Mansion | AccessAtlanta

The Haunted Mansion

Check your pulse at the door ... if you have one.

FILM FACTS

Starring: Eddie Murphy, Marsha Thomason, Terence Stamp, Nathaniel Parker, Jennifer Tilly
Director: Rob Minkoff
Rating: PG for frightening images, thematic elements and language
Genre: Comedy, Horror

Official movie site

See showtimes (PG) 99 minutes

Grade: C

Verdict: It's no “Pirates of the Caribbean.”

By BOB TOWNSEND
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution

"Dad, I see dead people,” young Michael (Marc John Jefferies) says to his goofy father, Jim Evers (Eddie Murphy), as the ghosts begin to fester in “The Haunted Mansion.”

Besides Murphy's persistent toothy grin, that's about as ironic as it gets in this comedy adventure based on the Disney theme park ride. Director Rob Minkoff (“Stuart Little”) tries to strike a balance between funny and scary, but the movie never really generates screams of either kind.

The story gets started with workaholic Evers and his wife and real estate partner, Sara (Marsha Thomason), trading cellphone calls, trying to arrange a dinner date for their anniversary. The Evers' home life has taken a back seat to selling houses — so much so that Jim misses the dinner to close a deal and Sara decides it's time to take a family vacation. But their jaunt to the country is detoured to an ominous, crumbling estate outside New Orleans that's about to go on the market.

Predictably, when a freakish thunderstorm washes out the road, the Evers get stranded in the old mansion with a graveyard for a back yard. That's when the spirits start flying.

The mansion's ghostly owner, Edward Gracey (Nathaniel Parker), is a brooding fellow with a family secret. In the sole somewhat subversive element in the movie, it seems that Sara and Gracey were interracial lovers in a previous life. But the mysterious circumstances of their parting are known only to Gracey's butler, Ramsley (Terence Stamp) and Madame Leota (Jennifer Tilly), a wisecracking fortuneteller trapped inside a crystal ball.

Tilly has some of the best lines in the movie, spouting riddles in rhyme and kvetching that she “doesn't make the rules,” she “just works here.” Stamp is properly inflected, campy and cadaverlike. And Wallace Shawn and Dina Waters, as quirky phantom servants, are fun to watch. But while the two Evers kids — Jefferies and Aree Davis as his precocious big sister, Megan — get some cute lines, Murphy and Thomason are left with cardboard-cutout roles, delivering tired dialogue and doing takes on the whirl of special effects.

And how are the effects? Mostly, they're very Disney — in a nonthreatening, “tomb, sweet tomb” sort of way. Since the movie mimics one of the Magic Kingdom's first and most popular attractions, there's a definite nostalgia factor at play, with many of the original details from the Haunted Mansion ride, such as the singing busts, ballroom dancers and hitchhiking ghosts, included.

The creepiest scene for fans of horror-show high jinks — and the one sure to frighten young children — is the Evers' trip down to the crypt, where they are beset by an army of cantankerous, decomposing corpses and a pack of crawly spiders.

Is “The Haunted Mansion” filled with “wall-to-wall creeps and hot 'n' cold running chills”? If you're under 10 years old, you may think so. But bigger kids in search of funhouse thrills won't be buying it.