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The trailer for The Haunted Mansion opens with the audience being taken through the bowels of the haunted mansion itself. We see mouldering crypts dripping with cobwebs. We shoosh by a decrepit graveyard and fly through secret passageways; watch candles light themselves; pore over strange runes carved into ornate Satanic sculptures; pass by freakish statues holding recently sharpened implements of death. While we get this snapshot glimpse of every horror movie set ever, a British narrator tells us (somewhat redundantly) that the mansion contains "a mystery that has cursed the house for over one hundred years." So, wrapping things up for the less observant viewers out there: it would seem the mansion—and I'm just guessing here because I haven't yet seen The Haunted Mansion—is haunted. Following the many scenes of horror, we see an ancient door creak open. Framed in the doorway are a beaming Eddie Murphy with his wife and two adorable kids in tow. The narrator winds up his monologue on the house's curse, slyly adding: "But no one told the Evers family." You could be forgiven for mentally adding in a record scratch noise here, even though there isn't one. The narrator seems to want us to swallow the idea that nobody telling Eddie Murphy about the mansion's curse is somehow a believable enough excuse for him moving his entire family into a rat-infested shithole with devil-markings on every available surface and blood dripping down the walls. I'm not buying this on general principal, and here's why: If you spun a mentally handicapped donkey around and pointed him at a haunted mansion, it'd have the goddamn sense to turn around and stumble off in the opposite direction. If your realtor doesn't bother to explain to you that the large mansion built entirely out of ghosts might be haunted, that doesn't mean you're not going to be held accountable for forcing your children to live there. It just means he assumed you weren't a drooling fucking idiot. I admit that many people, including me, don't believe in ghosts. Even if the house isn't haunted, though, the walls are caving in and, I'm sorry to be rude, but the hacksaw-mangled corpses strewn about the carpets are filthy. In real life, buying a mansion in this advanced a state of disrepair usually means eight months of zoning and safety inspectors surveying the foundations while construction crews rebuild the place until people can safely live there. Only in stupid haunted house movies is there somehow this unspoken logical connecton between signing the deed on a crumbling death-house and unrolling a sleeping bag on top of the crypt in the basement before the ink's dried. Eddie Murphy and his family move in immediately, of course; and in a surprise twist that's sure to have your brains jack-knifing right out of your skulls from the shock, the haunted mansion turns out to be haunted. Feel free to have your socks and shoes exploded off your feet with a comical trombone noise. At this point in a haunted house movie, this is usually where the screenwriter has to work overtime to come up with plausible excuses as to why the heroes don't simply leave the building attempting to murder them. And so in similarily-themed films, the audience gets treated to contrivances like: "All the doors and windows are locked! But by who?" or "I don't care if the fridge did try to strangle you, Martha, we're not getting bossed around by ghosts! You hear me, ghosts? We're staying!"
In the case of Eddie Murphy's dumbass family, however, I doubt this sort of plothole caulking will be necessary. If the man's stupid enough to throw his children and wife through the door of a mansion into the waiting mouth of a winged vampire demon simply because no one bothered to tell him what winged vampire demons are, I don't think the audience is going to have any trouble believing Eddie Murphy's probably stupid enough to offer it a toothpick afterwards and give it a foot-rub. The Haunted Mansion marks what now seems to be a Disney tradition of adapting theme park rides into feature films. I'd make a point of how insulting and ridiculous that is, if Pirates of the Caribbean hadn't ended up being immensely successful and even kind of entertaining earlier this year. Having never been to Disney World, I couldn't tell you how faithful Caribbean was to the original park attraction, though I've been told there are "knowing winks" to the ride throughout the film. Perhaps they were referring to how fake the undead pirates looked. Either way, Haunted Mansion tries to duplicate Pirate's success with another ride-to-film transition. It almost makes me want to visit Disney World, just so I'll be able to see how Mansion could possibly be faithful to a twenty-minute ride where animatronic ghosts pop out at you. If so, I think we as a society will have reached the point where we can officially start making films about absolutely anything. I'm in talks with Warner Brothers, actually, over a feature film version of my laundry hamper. Word is we might be able to get Skeet Ulrich to star as my socks. As the star of Haunted Mansion, Eddie Murphy seems to have turned in what has sadly become his usual performance lately, which I could best describe as an actor sleepwalking on ebonics autopilot. For instance, when a creepy gypsy's head in a crystal ball (Jennifer Tilly in a fishbowl with her head poked through a hole in the table) intones "Dark spirits from the grave come forth!", Eddie Murphy grinds out "Dontchoo be makin' no dark spirits come out while I'm here now!" Ugh. I hope I'm not alone in finding it ironic that Eddie Murphy is now whoring the very comedic device he helped to invent in films like Beverly Hills Cop, 48 Hrs. and Trading Places. In these comedies, Murphy's characters were grifters or bookies or other stereotypical lowlife types, and the joke behind their lightning-fast street talk was that, despite how they talked, they were actually highly intelligent. This usually led to comic scenarios where Murphy used slang to get the upper hand on the white antagonists, who underestimated Murphy as an uneducated idiot, only to find they'd somehow gotten duped with hilarious results. Having discovered they'd been gotten the better of, the white antagonists would then usually drop their canes and top hats while their monacles flipped out of their eye cavities. If you can imagine it, it's pretty hilarious. Having grown up with these films, it's depressing to see Murphy in his more recent efforts, where his fast-talking slang has survived despite the fact that it doesn't make the least bit of actual fucking sense. In 48 Hrs. and Trading Places, Murphy played lovable con-men from the ghetto. In Daddy Daycare and Haunted Manson Murphy plays 45-year-old corporate executives and lawyers; men who have climbed to the very highest echelons of their distinguished professions, yet still oddly talk like streetwise drug mules. The joke isn't on the stuffy white antagonists anymore. The joke is now on our upper-class hero in the Armani suit, who talks like a moron for no perceivable reason. I don't care what color your skin is; if you're defending me in court, and your closing argument starts with "Yo' Honor, here be the thang—this man be innocent fo' shizzle," then guess what? Your ass be fired and shit, since you're clealy the most inept excuse for legal defensizzle on the planet. The Haunted Mansion's trailer doesn't offer too much in the way of details, so we'll have to be content with the premise we've been given thus far: a negligently stupid Eddie Murphy forcing his family to be eaten by ghosts while he practices his Uncle Remus impression. If someone asks you to go see it when it comes out, might I suggest using Eddie Murphy's patented Ebonics-O-Matic Response Generator: "You want to go see Haunted Mansion?" "Man, don't you be talkin' 'bout seein' no Haunted Mansion." "So you don't want to see it?" "I ain't be tellin' y'all what I wants to see or not see." "Are you feeling okay, Geoff?" "Um. No."
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