Professor Popinjay's Compendium of Perspicacity

A Non-review by Professor Popinjay

The following films are nailed into this article:

• Haunted Mansion (2023)
• Muppets Haunted Mansion (2021)
• Haunted Mansion (2003) [SPOILERS]

The first haunted house attraction I’d ever been through was in the Enchanted Forest theme park just outside Salem, Oregon. My dad carried me because I was scared; a difficult task for him considering how much I weighed at 36 years old. Just kidding. I was two years old. I held my eyes shut and screamed like a howler monkey at every startling sound. Eventually I just fell asleep.

A little later, I still wasn’t too keen on haunted houses. My first time through Disneyland’s Haunted Mansion I kept my eyes closed tight. Conveniently for my dad and his chiropractor, Disney’s Haunted Mansion is a ride that carts you around in a little gondola so he didn’t have to carry me.

At the county fair my kids and I went through one of those haunted house rides that carts you around the interior of a folded-out truck bed. To think I avoided these things my whole life only to find out they are the stupidest excuse for a cheap thrill. I think half of the mechanisms designed to startle us were non-functioning anyway. The people most scared of this ride must have been the maintenance team.

My oldest daughter is particularly interested in the spookiness and enthusiastically joined me in seeing the 2023 Haunted Mansion movie at the theater. I kept my eyes open for this one. I didn’t make my daughter carry me. She was 15 years old and I’m 260 pounds of pure muscle and flab.

 We liked it… the movie, I mean. We liked it even IF Jared Leto was in it… which he was. You never actually see him anyway. Jamie Lee Curtis was also there chewing on the scenery which, if you ask me, she should always be allowed to do. She doesn’t do it very often but when she does it’s really fun! Remember Everything, Everywhere, All at Once… I mean the movie titled Everything, Everywhere, All at Once! Jamie Lee Curtis was hilarious! Chewed on everything… all at once! It was great.

I could gush about JLC indefinitely but I suppose I should move on.

Because there’s also Owen Wilson and Danny DeVito in this! You just can’t go wrong with this cast!

Chase Dillion was fantastic. He played Travis, a sad young man who is trying to find a place to live with his mom. I can’t tell you much without spoiling things but this kid knocks it out of the park with his acting. While these other A-listers carry the funny, this kid carries the dramatic load and just kills it. He’s why this movie is good! He is why this film has a soul.

The humor is smart. The story is compelling and genuinely tugs on the heart strings. The ghosts are fun and never the least bit scary. The villain is recognizable, intriguing, and cleverly written. The characters are human, real, and likable.

Best part of all, we get to see both Haunted Mansions in this film, the Disneyland mansion in California and the Walt Disney World mansion in Florida. Some might not realize, the exterior of the Haunted Mansion rides are different at each park. I imagine there are differences inside as well but I haven’t made a study of it. I’ve heard it was one of many major points of contention among Haunted Mansion fans that neither mansions were accurately represented in the 2003 movie.

Once this great movie was watched, we were in the mood for more Haunted Mansion. So on to the Muppets Haunted Mansion we ventured.

I may be biased because there’s not a single muppet anything I don’t like. Seeing a muppets’ take on a Disney’s Haunted Mansion story was really entertaining. All the more great because it’s centered around one of my favorite muppets, Pepino Rodrigo Serrano Gonzales aka Pepé the King Prawn.

The jokes are classic muppet fare. I like the two skeletons who can’t get the timing right on mimicking suspenseful musical cues and spend more time arguing about it than actually being suspenseful.

It was cute and fairly short. Still, some plot elements were a bit gruesome in implication. There was nothing graphic, of course. It is the muppets after all. Even if one of them were to get hacked to death with an axe, it’s just going to be a pile of felt and stuffing laying about… maybe Frank Oz’s hand? Thankfully, gruesome murder is not the vibe Disney wants to present with its own IP what bears the Disney name. It’s fine in everything else they own of course.

That actually segues well into my thoughts on the final Haunted Mansion movie from 2003.

I wanted to write about this one last because my thoughts on it have changed over the years. I’m complicated like that.

When I first saw this I thought it was stupid. After watching it 22 years later, I still think it’s not the best movie but I don’t think it’s as bad as I once did.

For one thing, I think Disney was doing a lot of stabs in the dark to see what would take. Pirates of the Caribbean came out earlier in 2003 and hit its mark. Haunted Mansion, another film based on a Disney park attraction, didn’t.

In both these rides there’s a pervasive silliness that dilutes any real terror-inducing imagery. This spirit of fun is very present in the Pirates of the Caribbean movies for the most part. The 2003 Haunted Mansion film starts out a little fun maybe but just gets darker and drearier as the plot unfolds until we come to genuinely scary situations involving people being chased and pawed at by decomposing zombies and actual soul-consuming hell fire!

When this came out I think people were expecting a fun Disney movie for all ages. I’m willing to bet a lot of 2003 children were terrified by this.

Now that Disney has diluted its brand by purchasing literally everything under the sun, I think people are little more on their guard when it comes to things Disney produces. Seeing it again, I don’t think this is such a bad movie as I once did, knowing now what to expect. I was able to watch it without expecting a fun kids movie. Although, not having Wallace Shawn going around trying to poison people with iocane powder seems like a missed opportunity.

Also Eddie Murphy is generally unlikable until he finally decides to grow a pair and fight for his wife. The Gracie character looks so much like Jimmy Fallon I have a hard time taking him seriously. And I can’t figure out if the villain is racist or just doesn’t like poor people.

Other than that, the film is tolerable. I really didn’t mind it a second time around.