I’m not sure who came up with the idea of turning Disneyland rides into movies, but it is not a particularly bad one. (*) If you need proof, run — do not walk! — to get a copy of “Pirates of the Caribbean”, which, looking back, was one of the better movies of last spring and summer.

To turn a ride into a movie, you need a story and characters, and to get these you have to hire somebody to dream them up (the original ride generally comes without a coherent story or sympathetic characters). The team that put together “Pirates of the Caribbean” was able to provide these. The individual who wrote “The Haunted Mansion” seems to have been less adept.

Jim Evers (Eddie Murphy) and Sara Evers (Marsha Thomason) are a couple of workaholic real estate salespeople down in the bayou country of Louisiana. Well, Jim is workaholic; Sara would like to take a break every now and then. On a quick journey with their two kids to “the lake” (Ponchartrain?) for a family weekend, Jim insists on stopping off at the mansion from which a prospective seller phoned Sara (asking her to come out there alone — here is a family that has difficulty in paying attention). The stop won’t be more than 20 minutes, Jim assures Sara. Ah, if only that were true. The mansion turns out to be filled with ghosts, corridors that lead to secret chambers, and a horrible plot to marry Sara (who is supposedly the reincarnation of someone who died a century earlier) to the owner of the mansion (who hanged himself a century earlier).

Best ghost actors (best actors period, if you ask me) in the film are Terence Stamp as the cold, evil, ghostly (with good reason) butler Ramsley, as nasty as was his General Zod in “Superman II”, and Wallace Shawn as one of the ghostly servants. Neither Murphy nor Thomason does himself or herself proud. The kids are sadly underused, except, perhaps, in the crypt scene.

The story is hardly half-bright, but what bothered me most was the refusal of the movie to meet head-on the basis of the whole story. The mansion’s owner (Nathaniel Parker), it seems, had been in love with Sara’s progenitor, but everybody else was against the marriage because they were an “inappropriate” couple. Inappropriate? Why were they inappropriate? Was it because he was rich and she wasn’t? Did he, perhaps, have leprosy? Was he a Baptist and she a Catholic? Have we all forgotten how to say “black-and-white”??? Have the Disney people forgotten, perhaps, that as late as when I was in college there were still states in this great and free nation (Louisiana might well have been one of them) in which a man and a woman weren’t legally allowed to marry if their skin colors were different? Heck, we all know this, even the kids today know it, but the people in the film aren’t even allowed to address the question for fear (one supposes) of offending some ticket-buying viewer.

Okay, rant over. Still, if you want to see a ride film, go out and rent “Pirates of the Caribbean”. Or, perhaps, wait to see what they’ll do with the Mad Hatter’s Flying-Cup-and-Saucer ride or Space Mountain …

—-

(*) Most of “Indian Jones and the Temple of Doom”, almost twenty years ago, was basically one great big amusement park ride.