Twenty years after Eddie Murphy flailed his way through The Haunted Mansion, Disney performs an IP double-dip with Haunted Mansion, yet another mirthless and fright-free film based on their popular theme park attraction. It may abbreviate its predecessor’s title, but Haunted Mansion (in theaters July 28) is just as busy, corny, and predictable as its 2003 iteration—as well as destined to swiftly pass into the cinematic afterlife that is both convenience store bargain bins and cluttered streaming platform libraries.
One week after Barbie demonstrated that established properties can be cleverly translated to the screen when auteurs take bold chances with their material, Haunted Mansion proves that such inspired efforts remain anomalies. Written by Katie Dippold with the same humorlessness as her 2016 Ghostbusters script, Justin Simien’s horror-comedy bears no plot relation to its ancestor, which would be welcome news if not for the fact that the story it concocts is equally groan-worthy.
In a New Orleans whose inimitable personality only shines through during the opening credits, Ben (LaKeith Stanfield) has thrown away his promising quantum mechanics career—he coulda been an Oppenheimer!—in the wake of his wife Alyssa’s (Charity Jordan) death. When not drowning his sorrows at the bar, he’s giving the city tour that Alyssa once ran, as well as grumbling at anyone who tries to interact with him. What he’s not doing, however, is taking tourists to see ghosts, since as a man of science, he’s convinced that they don’t exist.
