Haunted Mansion (2023)

I’ve been on something of a cinematic high lately, recapturing the magic of the movies with a few hits right in a row. I have wondered over the last several months whether I’ve outgrown movies, lapped my favorite franchises and genres, yet movies like Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning, Oppenheimer, and Barbie have reminded this moviegoer that it’s not “a me problem.” Movies can still be fun, they can even be great, but lately they just haven’t been.
 
With Disney’s Haunted Mansion, dear readers, we’re back – back to disappointments at the box office, creaky scripts and undercooked performances designed to cash in on nostalgia, a distinctive brand, or both. This Haunted Mansion is a sight better than the Eddie Murphy foray that preceded it two decades ago, but as bars go that’s a fairly low one to hurdle. 
 
Gabbie (Rosario Dawson) and her son Travis (Chase W. Dillon) have just moved to Louisiana and taken up residence in, well, a haunted mansion. An attempt to exorcise the home unites a grieving astrophysicist (LaKeith Stanfield), an off-kilter priest (Owen Wilson), a history professor (Danny DeVito), and a low-rent medium (Tiffany Haddish) against nearly 1,000 ghouls led by the leering Hatbox Ghost (Jared Leto).
 
I was on the fence about seeing Haunted Mansion for a number of reasons. Back in 2003, the Eddie Murphy film of the same name had failed to impress; today, the trailers were similarly undistinguished, and its Rotten Tomatoes rating was less than stellar. Plus, I reminded myself, the whole affair would likely be landing on Disney+ within six weeks. But too much time on one’s hands is a dangerous proposition, and so I plunked down for two dismal hours (not counting a slate of less inspiring trailers) that I cannot in good faith recommend to any but the most thoroughly indoctrinated devotees of the theme park attraction which lends its name and likeness to Haunted Mansion.
 
The Eddie Murphy take on The Haunted Mansion debuted in 2003, grafting the theme park set decoration onto a fairly boilerplate ghost story about doomed love and spooky manors. But another film was released that year – Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl – and Disney has been chasing that high ever since, hoping against hope that any of its myriad attractions would prove to be the next bankable franchise. (I loved Tomorrowland, though not everyone did, and the less said about Jungle Cruise, the better.) In my head, Pirates and Haunted Mansion are two halves of the same coin: dense and intricate attractions hung together by a mere suggestion of a story amid a collection of memorable mise-en-scènes. They’re handily my two favorite rides at Walt Disney World, over and against even the thrilliest roller coasters.
 
They cracked Pirates well enough, wringing the franchise dry to the point that only Johnny Depp’s mountainous legal woes could end the film series. Yet this is the second Haunted Mansion in as many decades, with no less than Guillermo Del Toro trying to make it work circa 2012. (One has to imagine his Crimson Peak shares some DNA with The Haunted Mansion.) This particular Haunted Mansion has only one credited writer (Katie Dippold, late of the beleaguered Ghostbusters reboot), but a litany of voices have contributed to the script at varying stages, to the point where no character feels like they’re in the same film. Owen Wilson and Danny DeVito clown their way through the film, almost a Disney-fied Waiting for Ghost-dot, while Tiffany Haddish’s character is either a buffoon or the world’s greatest psychic, depending on what the plot requires. And then there’s LaKeith Stanfield, who is frankly better than the film deserves, handily carrying an emotional arc that actually manages to move the audience, even if nothing else in the film is clicking.
 
The film’s greatest mystery is why mega-stars like Jamie Lee Curtis and Jared Leto are anywhere near this thing. Not because they’re too good for the movie, but because their parts could well and truly have been played by anyone, and at least someone slightly less expensive. Curtis is stately and imperious as Madame Leota, but after receiving what amounts to a Lifetime Achievement Award for her role in Everything Everywhere All At Once, she doesn’t need to stoop to a third-rate Eleanor Audley imitation, and her blue crystal ball does more acting than most others in the film. Leto especially makes almost no impression, aside from a brief flashback where we see a Hatbox Ghost pre-decapitation; his ghost face is purely computer-generated, while his voice is run through so many filters that it might as well be Mae West under there. (He gets the “And” credit too, which suggests he made a boatload of money on this movie, which... good for him, I suppose.)
 
There are a few chuckles in the film, and at least one decent jump-scare, but on the whole the film feels like a collection of bits that don’t exactly work together. It feels assembled by committee, and just about the only thing to justify its existence is the presence of a cacophony of cameos from recognizable props like chairs, stanchions, and wallpaper. While stretching rooms and hatchets in the attic may not mean much to the general moviegoing public – and indeed they mean not much more in context – they’re sure to light up any foolish mortal who knows the Haunted Mansion(s) well. And if I’d been streaming the film at home, perhaps I’d have been more forgiving of this Haunted Mansion. But as it stands, those little cameos and winking nods only made me wish I were on vacation.

And why this wasn't released in October, I'm sure I can't say.
 

Haunted Mansion is rated PG-13 for “some thematic elements and scary action.” Directed by Justin Simien. Written by Katie Dippold. Starring LaKeith Stanfield, Tiffany Haddish, Owen Wilson, Danny DeVito, Rosario Dawson, Jamie Lee Curtis, and Jared Leto.

Bat-May: Batman Returns (1992)

I was four years old at the time, but I remember Batman Returns feeling like the most important movie ever made. I had an oversized “making of” book that I read practically to shreds. I studied the biography of Tim Burton, pored over the photographs and teasers for the plot. I could even name for you the producer of the film (Denise Di Novi, a wonderfully Gotham-esque name). I had the toys, the fast food cups. And yet, I have no memory of when I first saw the movie itself. In a way, that’s the best metaphor for a review of Batman Returns – chock-full of unforgettable bits and bobs and yet so unwaveringly strange that the whole gets lost amid the mad sum of its ludic parts.

Batman Returns is the story of three freaks – The Bat (Michael Keaton), The Cat (Michelle Pfeiffer), and The Penguin (Danny DeVito). After the events of the first film, Batman spends his nights waiting for action, silently anticipating the call to fight crime. Amid an invasion of circus clowns, The Penguin arrives from the sewers, pleading with Gotham for an opportunity to learn the truth about why his parents abandoned him. Meanwhile, exhausted secretary Selina Kyle is defenestrated and murdered by her boss (Christopher Walken), only to be reincarnated with nine lives, a feline fixation, and a Shakespearean desire for revenge.

 

Just like I can’t say when I first saw Batman Returns, I can’t remember how many times I’ve seen it, but on this latest viewing I was largely unprepared for just how weird this movie gets. I have always maintained that the difference between Burton’s two Batman movies is that Batman is a Batman movie directed by Tim Burton, while Batman Returns is a Tim Burton movie (co‑)starring Batman. The difference is so apparent in this one; the Gotham sets are freakishly Burton, all odd angles and grim shadows, and Returns doubles-down on its predecessor’s premise that freaks beget freaks, with a brooding meditation on how these freaks find their place in a hostile society (they retreat, or they rebel).

 

In short, Batman Returns is so idiosyncratically Burton that it is impossible to imagine a major franchise film – a sequel, no less – surrendering so entirely to its auteur’s vision that the titular hero ends up being subsumed by the villains. (Today, the claim is usually the reverse, that the villains are largely indistinguishable when the movies are governed by the large personalities of franchise heroes. Can you name, for example, the three villains of the Iron Man franchise?) Indeed, Burton is much more fascinated by the monstrous Penguin and the sideways-feminist Catwoman (“I am Catwoman – hear me roar”), with Batman relegated to a largely supporting role in a film that is nominally his. Keaton’s Bruce Wayne is heroic mainly in that he has sublimated his freakish impulses and wears a mask of normalcy, which Penguin is unable to do while Catwoman is entirely unwilling. In a standout sequence, Bruce and Selina attend a masked ball sans disguise, underscoring that their civilian identities are the costumes. (It’s an image that has been appropriated forever since, with a notable reprise in The Dark Knight Rises.) Penguin, meanwhile, crashes the party, as DeVito crashes the film itself, all shouts and gurgles, bile and bodysuits. 

 

It's clear, however, that Burton’s sympathies lie with the villains. The film begins with the birth of Oswald Cobblepot, ultimately cast into a river for his monstrous appearance; despite the fact that the infant Oswald is clearly dangerous, murdering and devouring the family cat, Burton manages to find pathos in this act of attempted filicide. Likewise, at film’s end, Burton stages Penguin’s final scene as high tragedy, with oversized penguins waddling in what appears to be an impromptu funeral procession. In much the same vein that Batman (1989) belonged to Jack Nicholson’s Joker, Batman Returns is paced as if it’s Selina Kyle’s film. Selina gets a full origin story and ends up in a sort of inverted will-they-won’t-they, akin to Bruce’s arc with Vicki Vale (Kim Basinger) from Batman. Again, Burton feels more sympathy for Selina than he does for the curiously submissive Batman, evidenced by an elegiac sequence where Selina relives the trauma of her murder and proceeds to dismantle her entire apartment in a fugue of rage.

 

Putting it into plain English makes the film sound entirely normal, but I can’t undersell how bonkers this movie gets by adding a number of elements together. And these are all things that happen in the same movie: There’s an extended subplot about Penguin’s borderline-Trumpean bid for mayor, buoyed by Christopher Walken’s industrialist Max Shreck, who wants mayoral regime change to greenlight his construction of a power plant that will instead drain power from Gotham. (Shreck’s son, meanwhile, is played by Andrew Bryniarski, doing a transparently meatheaded Walken impression.) Circus clowns invade the edges of the frame, with Danny Elfman’s score veering carnivalesque at each turn. The whole thing is set at Christmas, casting a Burtonesque pall of sarcastic cheer over the affair. There are actual marching penguins, wearing rocket launchers, plotting to murder the children of Gotham. As delightfully strange as the movie is, one has the acutely nagging question during the whole film, “Warner Brothers was okay with this?!” (Spoilers for next week – they weren’t.)

 

I mentioned Danny Elfman, and he’s one of the main reasons this film succeeds. A good score can buoy any film, and while his Batman Returns score isn’t as bombastic or iconic as his work on Batman, it works really well by being dialed into exactly the movie Tim Burton wants to make. It’s traditionally superheroic when it needs to be (in those rare moments that Batman is doing hero work), but more often than not it’s playing in a strange realm of uncomfortable tragedy. His descending Penguin theme grows more and more militaristic, balanced as it is by the aforementioned carnival music. His Catwoman theme, on the other hand, plays like a tragic music box, swirling like his Edward Scissorhands work while highlighting the tragedy of Selina’s fall from innocence and her attempts to claw her way back toward peace.

 

Batman Returns is a film of beauty and of pain, in distinctly Burton ratios, but it is also a film almost as broadly painted as Batman ’66. Walken plays Max Shreck like a boogeyman, right down to the electrified hairdo, while DeVito’s Penguin is a thing of perverse revolting fascination, gruesome and grotesque in equal measure. Burbling black-green bile and groping every woman he finds, it is nearly impossible to find the tragic sympathy Burton feels for this grunting, snarling antagonist, who is handily the most revolting Batman foe ever committed to film. And yet, there is something expertly calibrated about Burton’s Gotham; as exquisitely eccentric as Burton’s vision may be, his Gotham seems very much of a piece with the comic book depiction. Gotham is a city of unending crime and corruption, of perpetual peril. Despite the mayor’s objections, a marauding gang of killer clowns seems to go hand-in-hand with Gotham City as a whole, particularly given the intimation that the clowns constitute a kind of haunting courtesy of Nicholson’s Joker. It’s almost a chicken-and-egg situation, where it’s unclear whether the comics birthed Burton or if Burton’s shadow warped the comics in his wake. (I’ll go out on a limb and venture the latter, though it’s equally Frank Miller’s fault.)

 

When I drew up the Personal Canon in 2016, there was no question that Batman belonged on it. That movie was nigh elemental in my love of superhero narratives. But Batman Returns was always the weird younger brother, the one who went away to art school and came back a changed man. I was never all the way comfortable with it, but neither could I relinquish it entirely. It’s always had a weird pull, especially as distinct from the twin day-glo Schumacher films; it was, before Christopher Nolan, what Batman movies ought to be.

 

Batman Returns is rated PG-13 for “brooding, dark violence.” Directed by Tim Burton. Written by Daniel Waters and Sam Hamm. Based on the DC Comics. Starring Michael Keaton, Danny DeVito, Michelle Pfeiffer, and Christopher Walken.

For more Bat-May action, the good folks at Collected Editions posted my review of Batman: The Movies, the comic book adaptation of the Batman Quadrilogy. Give them a click - no one reviews comics like Collected Editions!

Top 10 Christmas Season Movies - #6-5

This week, in anticipation of the Christmas season, we at The Cinema King would like to bring you more than just your usual share of recommendations.  So we present to you:  this week’s Top 10 list.  More specifically “The Top 10 Christmas Season Movies.”  Rather than fill the list with “obvious” choices of Christmas-y movies, there are a few “alternative” choices on the list – the overarching determining criterion is whether or not this is a movie that I will watch beginning to end, especially during (but not limited to) the Christmas season.

#6 – Batman Returns (1992)
Come on, you’re reading The Cinema King – you had to expect Batman at some point on this list.  I’ve commented elsewhere that Batman stories and Christmas go together like gingerbread cookies and eggnog, and Tim Burton’s second outing as the Bat-director plays that card to the hilt.  Burton’s Gotham remains gothic under a blanket of snow and all the tinsel of a major metropolis decked-out for the holidays.  Michael Keaton is back as Bruce Wayne; Batman’s enemies here are The Penguin and Catwoman, with Danny DeVito and Michelle Pfeiffer turning in iconic performances.  It’s never a bad time to watch a Batman film, and Batman Returns is one of the better Bat-movies – even if it’s more a Tim Burton movie where Batman plays a supporting role to a literal traveling carnival of freaks.  But watching Batman defend the lighting of Gotham’s Christmas tree ought to give anyone a dose of holiday cheer.

#5 – Die Hard (1988)
In many ways, Die Hard is a de facto choice for any tongue-in-cheek list of Christmas movies.  It’s so far from most films classically considered to be Christmas movies; it’s clearly a late-80s action movie starring Bruce Willis as the yippee-ki-yaying cop John McClane.  But there’s an element overlooked by most, what those in the know remember about this movie once December rolls around:  that office party that Hans Gruber (Alan Rickman) and his gang raid?  It’s a Christmas Eve soiree, which accounts for how every cop in New York can surround the skyscraper when the heist goes down.  Add in John McClane’s classic “Ho Ho Ho” message he scrawls on the body of a thug wearing a Santa hat – you can bet that wasn’t on Gruber’s Christmas list.  At its core, though, Die Hard is just a great bit of fun, filled with classic action, clever dialogue, and enough Yuletide cheer to make even the grouchiest Grinch a little peppier.

Come back tomorrow for #4-3!