The Muppets are let loose in Disney’s Haunted Mansion for 52 minutes, and the result is slight, cheerfully padded and more fun than it has any need to be. Pepe the King Prawn alone justifies the visit. For children, and for anyone who has queued for the ride.
The idea is a simple one and the film does not pretend otherwise. Take the Muppets, put them inside the Haunted Mansion from the Disney theme parks, and let them bump into every prop, portrait and singing bust in the ride’s inventory. Kirk Thatcher directs from a teleplay he wrote with Bill Barretta and Kelly Younger, and the whole thing runs 52 minutes, which is about ten more than the material can carry. It is a small, affectionate, slightly baggy Halloween special, and we had a good time at it in spite of its stuffing.
The setup is dispatched quickly. Gonzo wants to spend the night in the house where a magician disappeared a century ago; Pepe wants a party with celebrities; Kermit, across town, has a party of his own and keeps ringing to check on them. The film then walks its two heroes through the ride room by room, the stretching gallery, the corridor of portraits, the séance, the ballroom, the attic, and lets the jokes fall where they may. Some fall well. Pepe, performed by Barretta with the pushy confidence of a man who has never once been invited anywhere, is the film’s best weapon, and the writers know it; nearly every scene he is in has a line we did not see coming.
It looks better than a one-hour special has to. Darcy Prevost has rebuilt the ride’s rooms with their furniture apparently intact, the cobwebbed organ and the long dining table and the candelabra that floats down the hall, and Craig Kief lights it all in the purples and sick greens of the attraction itself, so that anyone who has been through the real thing will recognise the exact shade of the wallpaper. Lisa Davis puts the ghosts in bustles and tailcoats and the Muppets in costumes that have plainly been stitched for felt. Alexandra Amick and Jason Bierfeld cut the mansion scenes briskly and the party scenes less so.
Those party scenes are the padding. Every few minutes the film leaves the house to check on Kermit, Fozzie, Walter and the rest, and every time it does, the air goes out of it. The gang stands around in costumes making the sort of jokes Muppets make when nobody has written them anything to do. Statler and Waldorf, moved from their box to the ballroom, fare better. Steve Morrell and Ed Mitchell’s music runs to three or four full songs, and the ballroom number earns its length while the others feel like a schedule being filled.
Here is what we felt. We laughed, out loud and more than once, at Pepe negotiating with the dead as if they were a hotel reception desk, and at Miss Piggy’s fortune teller treating her own crystal ball as a mirror. And then there is a late scene, which we will not describe, in which Gonzo is asked what frightens him, and the answer is quieter and more honest than anything we expected from a film built around a theme-park ride. Goelz plays it straight, with that small cracked voice, and for a minute we were moved. It is over quickly and the film goes back to the gags, but it was there.
Against the Muppets’ own record this is a middling entry. The Muppet Christmas Carol (1992) took a famous property and made it the Muppets’ own; this takes a famous property and visits it, politely, like tourists. Brian Henson, who directed that film, turns up here with a puppet called Sal Minella, which is a nice touch and also a reminder of what the troupe once managed with a Dickens novel and more time. The best Muppet work has always been about the gap between the performers’ ambition and their abilities. Here the ambition is to get through the house, and they manage it without much trouble.
Put it on for the children on a dark October evening, with the lights off and a bowl of something, and nobody will be sorry. Adults who grew up with the gang will get a dozen good jokes and one moment that catches them unawares. It carries a PG and asks nothing of anyone, which is roughly what it offers in return.
