Daniela was gone for the evening on Monday, so Denisa and I were looking for something to watch with Michaela. She’s been branching out into things that are a bit more intense (emphasis on “a bit”), and it’s still Halloween season, so why not something on the scarier side? I’d never seen the new Haunted Mansion, but it had a 6.0 on IMDB which was “good enough for now, since I don’t want to keep looking for something else to watch.” (Reviews are relative, people. If you’ve got a fixed amount of time, and you haven’t actively picked something to watch, there comes a point where you just take whatever’s on. This is something that was much easier to do back when I channel surfed, but feels harder to do now that I can watch whatever I want, on demand.)
In any case, we gave it a shot, and we all enjoyed ourselves, so I’ll call it a win. Was it the Best Movie Ever? Nope. But it was chock full of winks to Disney fans, and it had great effects and fine performances. I realize that “it was fine” isn’t a glowing recommendation, and I want to be sure I’m not selling this movie too hard. I gave it a 7/10, which is squarely in “I liked it” territory. But I really appreciated the line it walked in terms of scares. One of the main character is an 11 year old kid, after all, but this didn’t feel like it just stopped at kid level scariness. If that level is a 5, it went to 6 at times. Scary enough that you probably wouldn’t want to watch it with an 8 year old who doesn’t like scary things, but intense enough to provide some real thrills for kids a bit older. (Though naturally, this is all going to depend on the individual kid in question.)
The plot is about what you’d expect: a disparate group of people get stuck in a haunted house and want to get unstuck. Drama and adventure ensue. It’s got Owen Wilson, Rosario Dawson, and Danny DeVito. It’s on Disney+.