With the local multiplex already offering a theme park of family films this weekend, another movie based on an actual theme-park ride joins the lot. But Disney's The Haunted Mansion doesn't deserve an E-ticket (which is what the ride itself demanded back when Disneyland distributed such tickets). Roger Ebert in the Chicago Sun-Times gives the film, which stars Eddie Murphy, one of its better reviews, complimenting it on its "ambition." Writes Ebert: "It wants to be more than a movie version of the ride. I expected an inane series of nonstop action sequences, but what I got was a fairly intriguing story and an actual plot that is actually resolved. That doesn't make the movie good enough to recommend, but it makes it better than the ads suggest." Lou Lumenick in the New York Post also mentions the ads for the movie in his review, noting, "The advertising slogan for The Haunted Mansion warns, 'Check your pulse at the door' -- pretty cheeky for a movie that flatlines for almost all of its 98 minutes." Jami Bernard in the New York Daily News warns that "the foolish ones who have bought tickets to this fiasco are in for a skimpy plot, hidden stairways and moving panels that were old when Abbott and Costello met Frankenstein." Elvis Mitchell in the New York Times comments that for a movie starring Murphy and called The Haunted Mansion, the basic problem is that there are "no frights and no laughs." Mitchell says it's "the film equivalent of the dark, boring period on a haunted house ride before the gondola crashes into another room filled with dirty mirrors." To Chris Kaltenback in the Baltimore Sun, the movie is "lifeless, unimaginative and almost determinedly uninspired ... paint-by-numbers filmmaking at its dreariest." A few critics, however, take the view that the film, after all, is aimed at kids and shouldn't be judged by normal critical precepts. David Hiltbrand in the Philadelphia Inquirer, for example, writes: "At once vivid and unimaginative, The Haunted Mansion is a pleasant, fright-free distraction for the kids over the long holiday weekend." And Kevin Thomas in the Los Angeles Times, who can almost be counted on to counter the opinions of the majority of his colleagues, describes the film as "uproarious ... lots of fun ... a fright show artfully designed for the whole family ... [with] razzle-dazzle effects and production design."
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