I'm sorry baby, i love you most
Are you at all familiar with the 2002 miniseries ROSE RED? That's okay, I haven't seen much of it myself but the first 2 episodes myself. to make a long story short Stephen King pitched the idea to Steven Spielberg in 1996, envisioning it as a loose remake of Robert Wise's 1963 film The Haunting. The series follows an unorthodox university psychology professor, who leads a team of psychics to the massive and antiquated Seattle mansion known as Rose Red in an attempt to record data which would constitute scientific proof of paranormal phenomena. Despite King pitching the idea as a feature film and writing it as such, Spielberg wanted more action and more detail. After surgery and a month's recovery in the hospital after being hit by a van, King returned home and completed work on the Rose Red script over the next month, recasting the project as a television miniseries.
I couldn't help but think of those intriguing first episodes of that show while I was watching this movie, but I must admit that this movie does it better.
Haunted Mansion is a 2023 American supernatural horror comedy film directed by Justin Simien from a screenplay by Katie Dippold. It stars LaKeith Stanfield, Tiffany Haddish, Owen Wilson, Danny DeVito, Rosario Dawson, Dan Levy, Jamie Lee Curtis and Jared Leto. In the film, Gabbie (Dawson) and Travis (Chase W. Dillon) enlist the aid of a team (Stanfield, Haddish, Wilson, and DeVito) to help exorcise the ghosts around them.
Plans for the reboot adaptation based on the Haunted Mansion began in July 2010, when Guillermo del Toro, who intended to write and produce, stated the project would take place in a heightened reality rather than in a real-world setting. Del Toro was no longer attached as the project's director in July 2013. After years in development hell, Disney officially announced Haunted Mansion in August 2020, with Dippold signed on to write a new screenplay. Simien negotiated to direct the film by April 2021 which was officially confirmed three months later. The primary cast was confirmed from July to October, and additional cast was announced the following year. Principal photography took place from mid-October 2021 to late February 2022 on a $150 million budget.
The reason I ramble so much about the mishandled ROSE RED is this movie suffers from the exact opposite problem. Del Toro stated as early as 2010 that this film would not take place in a real-world setting, but in a heightened reality. The Hatbox Ghost would have been one of the main characters and in interviews, Del Toro claimed the film would be "scary and fun at the same time, but the scary will be scary." Given Del Toro's exceptional career of ghost stories and fantasy-based nightmare lullabies, his HAUNTED MANSION had the potential to be a lot more than just another Disney remake. Given both the success of Mike Flanagan's various horror miniseries and Disney's similar approach to episodic entertainment, This could have easily been one of the best HAUNTED MANSION stories so far.
Instead, we are given 2 hours and 4 minutes of wasted potential. Don't get me wrong, I still think it's far better than the original film. But we don't get enough of what really works about this movie, and It often feels caught in the lurch between a more mature ROSE RED kind of story and one long-fart joke. Even so, it's a movie. I'm able to turn my brain off and enjoy it for most of its run time, and a few crimes it does commit aren't really upsetting or distracting enough to ruin this movie for me. If you ask me, this movie is only really guilty of one unforgivable sin (make it 2 if you want to count the distractingly terrible ghost effects)
Madam Leota. She is unquestionably the best part of the original film, and building up to the seance for the character's attempt to contact her. I was pretty dang excited. That is until the wild shock of hair parted, and I both heard and saw the terrifying visage of Jamie Lee Curtis. If you were even remotely a fan of the original haunted mansion, her performance is an open-hand slap to the face. She's clearly trying to do some sort of Jennifer Tilly accent that doesn't work at all, and every time she's on screen, I found myself cringing deep within my soul.
But you know when it's all said and done, it's not a terrible movie. Just mishandled.
6/10
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