(courtesy IMP Awards)
Creative inspiration can come from all kinds of strange, beautiful and unexpected places – a waterfall at sunset, a colourfully-dressed woman on a train at peak hour or a snippet of history, long forgotten but dredged up to fill a social media post with a fascinating factoid.
Anywhere, really, can be a source of inspiration but does that extend to theme park rides?
After all, they’re there to entertain with thrills and spills with backstories as threadbare as the ply used in non load-bearing walls; how on earth could they send someone off on a narrative jaunt into the imaginative unknown?
While this reviewer may be sceptical, Disney, it turns out once again, is not, and while some of their theme park ride-impelled cinematic gambits work – think the first Pirates of the Caribbean, Jungle Cruise and yes even Tomorrowland in its unevenly enjoyable way – a great many other do not and we can add Haunted Mansion to their number.
Now, to be fair, Haunted Mansion is by no means a complete, ghost-producing trainwreck.
Balanced on a reasonably enticing premise of a house filled with ghosts that refuses to let the living, once have stepped through the creepily creaking front door, live anywhere else, the film does have a certain appealing sense of scary fun, helped along by actors who certainly do their best, with a fairly lacklustre script, to give it their all.
Or, at least, not look too obvious phoning it in.
Where it does lose points is the fairly pedestrian narrative wherein a grieving mother, Gabbie (Rosario Dawson) brings her son Travis (Chase W. Dillon), a nerdy kid with a predilection for bowties and suits which, yes, does not endear him to the kids at his new school, to live in a huge home in New Orleans, essentially sight unseen.
How else do you explain that, arriving at night in a fog-laden night (because of course they do), they walk into the house, discover it’s full of freaky lace-clad zombie brides and suits of armour with sneaky ambulatory powers, only to turn and run, vowing never to return.
Who does that? Not the running from a clearly haunted house which makes sense but buying a place way out in the country, an hour from the city, without checking to make sure it has even the basics like a roof, windows, and yep, no ghosts.
Perhaps you can blame it on the grief but honestly while it gives Dawson and Dillon a chance for some oneliner-heavy slapstick running in the other direction, which is mildly entertaining, it feels more than a little rote, a retread of a thousand other ideas that have come and gone and also not left much of a mark.
In time, Gabbie, seeking to exorcise, cleanse or whatever she needs to do to make the place livable, is joined by a dubious priest, Father Kent (Owen Wilson), a psychic with training wheels and a keen way with quips, Harriet (Tiffany Haddish), who’s a hoot, college historian Bruce Davis (Danny DeVito) and the main emotional hook of the group, Ben (LaKeith Stanfield), an astrophysicist-turned-tour-guide who’s mired in a considerable amount of grief at losing the love of his life, wife Alyssa (Charity Jordan).
They’re a surprisingly unfractious group for people who have been hoodwinked into coming into the house and are stuck until they solve a mystery centuries old, and while everyone initially vents about being trapped in a very, VERY creepy house, they all settle, in handy, script-convenient time into a found family of sorts whose job is to figure out how one house end up with so many ghosts in it.
And, rather pertinently, why it won’t let any of them go until they figure out what led to it being a permanent waystation between the realms of the living and the dead, terrorised – yes, turns out, ghosts can be scared too which adds another freaky layer to the already hair-raising proceedings – by an entity known as the Hatbox Ghost aka Alistair Crump (Jared Leto), who wasn’t especially good, kind or lovely in life, and who’s taken an even more toxic turn for the worse in death.
So we have premise and purpose and a cast more than able to add some vivacity and life to some very dead surroundings but somehow Haunted Mansion never really gets going.
It’s light and fun enough to hold your attention, and there are scenes where there’s enough movement and Inception-like twisting of hallways and rooms, and quipping and running and Scooby Doo!-esque running that you’ll hold onto the duration without cursing the moment you hit play on the device of your choice.
And yes, there’s enough of an emotional backbone to the film in the form of Ben’s struggles with overwhelmingly corrosive grief that you hang in there hoping he’ll get a happy-ever-after of sorts, most likely with Gabbie because it is that obvious a movie.
The thing is that’s about the only thing of emotional substance in the film, and while Haddish and Wilson do bring sparkle and mischief to their roles, and Stanfield is solid enough in his role as grieving sceptic-turned-ghost buster, Haunted Mansion is let down by willful inconsistencies such as when Ben convinces Travis at one point not to give into a ghost’s entreaties only to fall, or appear to fall, for the same tactic later on. (It eventually proves to be a ploy but initially you wonder why the hell they make Ben seem like such a dolt after he’s the one largely keeping the ship afloat.)
Haunted Mansion is not, it must be said, a film framed to be anything other than popcorn-popping, vanilla-scary fun with a little gentle innuendo thrown in for good measure, and if you approach on that basis you’ll have a reasonably okay time of it.
Alas, like the ghosts who wink from existence into a phosphorously glittering ether the moment you stare at them, Haunted Mansion winks from memory the moment you hit stop, a trifle of a film that could’ve been a real supernatural romp of hilarity and spectacular imagination but which feels like a damp squib that aims for ghostly glory but never really delivers scares, emotional impact or a sense of otherworldly diversion which, in the end, is what you want from a film like this.