Ex-Rent Hell Presents… The Haunt­ed Mansion

Ex-Rent Hell is a col­umn ded­i­cat­ed to the seami­er side of the 1980s VHS boom (and beyond). Each time, ERH selects a film from this cursed era and asks one sim­ple ques­tion: what went wrong?

With thanks and apolo­gies to the cut-up tech­niques of William S Bur­roughs, David Bowie and the IMDb User Reviews section.

The Haunt­ed Man­sion, huh? Mak­ing rides into movies, huh? Only Dis­ney, with its famous theme rides, could get away with this. Can you imag­ine mak­ing an entire film set on a gener­ic fer­ris wheel in a shop­ping cen­tre park­ing lot? Would have made a good Warhol film. The words cliché, pre­dictable and tire­some don’t even begin to describe my thoughts as I shook my head again and again at the droll that was being thrust into my brain. Some­times I just want to relax with a mind­less movie. Not all movies have to make you think. This movie def­i­nite­ly did not make me think. The hour and a half I sat there, I did not have to stress about things like work, bills, ex-wife, etc… It brought me to a com­fort­able state of non-thought. It’s not bad enough to make lit­tle kids cry.

As pres­i­dent of the unof­fi­cial Haunt­ed Man­sion Fan Club, one would think that I could scrounge up even a lit­tle bit of love for this movie. I even have a copy of the lim­it­ed sound­track of the entire ride, as well as the oth­er ​“Haunt­ed” hous­es at Dis­ney parks world­wide. If any of you have been to the attrac­tion either in Flori­da (the best ver­sion), Paris (the scari­est ver­sion – although it’s not as scary as sim­i­lar hor­ror attrac­tions in the Copen­hagen area where I live) or Cal­i­for­nia (I haven’t been there yet), you will note that through­out the film, the resem­blance of the man­sion was uncan­ny, not a mis­take to be seen. But from read­ing, this plot is more based on a ride in EuroDis­ney ™ called the Phan­tom Manor, so I may have my ques­tions answered there.

I put off see­ing this movie because I believed a few poor­ly neg­a­tive reviews and a poor­ly analysed bad review from a friend. Recent­ly, this movie was rec­om­mend­ed by a sev­en year old that I am relat­ed to and I thought ​“Well why not?” and watched the movie before I left for work that evening. I thought, here is the chance to sat­is­fy my bizarre and dif­fi­cult-to-quench movie crav­ings! As a pro­fes­sion­al, Goth/​Macabre/​Erotica author, any­thing chill­ing, roman­ti­cal­ly trag­ic and down right ele­gant­ly creepy is right up my alley. It opens with two sui­cides. Ha ha ha ha ha ha haaaaaaaa!

In this fun-filled event, a guy named Jim Evers (Mur­phy) takes his fam­i­ly to a man­sion. He is a mon­ey-grub­bing real estate man with his wife who takes his unloved fam­i­ly to the man­sion hop­ing, and hilar­i­ty ensues. The plot was so sim­plis­tic and done a thou­sand times. A guy, in this case a ghost, wants his long lost love back, who he thinks is rein­car­nat­ed as Jim Evers’ wife. He believes she com­mit­ted sui­cide back in the day. Also fea­tures an enter­tain­ing per­for­mance by a bar­ber­shop quar­tet (the singing con­crete men). Maybe a talk­ing ani­mal could have helped this movie, but I doubt it.

The plot was very thin (par­don the pun) and the rip offs quite evi­dent. This is with­out doubt the worst film ever made and I have seen Faust. I mean it was racist; it was about a black real estate fam­i­ly being defeat­ed by all those ghosts and stuff how can this movie be con­sid­ered Dis­ney????! I’d rather watch ​“SCHTOOPID­BA­BIES: BABY RETARDS DOO” in title repeat on my DVD play­er than watch this pile of tripe, seri­ous­ly!!!!! How­ev­er, I have seen this movie over 100 times and I do love it. Rent the DVD and see if you like Haunt­ed Man­sion for your­self. If it does not please you maybe your kids will like it if you have any.