The Haunted Mansion

Eddie Murphy’s career is widely perceived to have been on some kind of upward curve of late – The Nutty Professor and Dr.Dolittle having done the box-office biz in some style – and though unlikely to ever come within sniffing distance of an Oscar, his good name still seems to pack out the ‘plexes effortlessly enough. His latest opus, The Haunted Mansion, though predictably meritless in terms of originality or intellectual acumen, at least has the benefit of compelling awfulness and a consequent curious charm, and though clearly an artistic failure, it may well hold up as one of the more durable so-shit-we-love them DVD cult classics.
As strongly hinted by the title, it’s a haunted-house movie (strikingly similar in all senses to Jan de Bont’s 1999 remake of The Haunting) wherein Murphy – preposterously cast as an oily real-estate salesman – and his perfect family arrive in the middle of nowhere (Louisiana, in fact) at the gates of a visibly dodgy mansion, before being introduced to a sinister hunchbacked butler (Terence Stamp in fine pantomime mode) and the house’s Master, who sets about seducing Murphy’s wife while a series of inevitable exterior catastrophes ensure that they’ll have to stay the night. Cue a feast of creaking doors, and assorted jump-out-of-skin spookhouse-flick staples, none of which serve to render Mansion anything other than the least scary film since Peter Jackson’s 1996 less-than-spinechiller The Frighteners.
Despite its incompetence and the lack of originality. Murphy’s characteristic hyperactivity provides just enough life to command a mortified laugh or two, and Stamp’s butler is the greatest hoot since Glenn Hoddle covered ‘We Are The Champions’. Still, we suggest that you give it a miss.

86 mins. cert – PG. Opens February 13