It really shouldn’t be so tough to transform Disneyland’s beloved Haunted Mansion ride into a robust family spookfest. The attraction boasts a cult of kookiness, ripe and ready for the picking. There are characters decades in the fine tuning and ingenious animatronic effects primed for direct transfer to cinematic fun times. Rob Minkoff’s 2003 effort plumbed heavy on undead slapstick, casting Eddie Murphy for rent-a-mouth zane. It’s a far more fondly remembered nostalgia dump than any film with barbershop busts has any right to be but did a least enjoy a certain exuberant energy. Two decades on, Justin Simien’s reboot lands dead on arrival. The only real scare this time is a realisation that this incompetent mess comes from the man behind Dear White People.
It would be reductive, if not entirely unfounded, to one-line Joy Ride as being Adele Lim’s ‘Asian Bridesmaids’. For a film all about heritage, the Paul Feig comedy is an inescapable ancestor. Malcolm D. Lee’s Girls Trip sits too somewhere on this most scatological of family trees. It’s less mimicry than shared intention with impressive and engaging cultural specificity. The formula is as genealogical and gynaecological. Oh but Joy Ride does it so well. What’s more, Lim delivers high on thought provocation in ways Feig never has. This is fiercely funny stuff, smart as a whip, and delivered with gross abandon by a pitch perfect central quartet. In short, there’s ample riding and it’s a joy to behold it.
When is dumb fun just dumb? When is homage just stealing? Meg 2: The Trench – and the definition of a un-called for sequel – answers on both counts with with two soggy thumbs in its own wet face. As directed by the once interesting Ben Wheatley, the film plods along with listless energy, tugging along a desperately shipwrecked cast with all the enthusiasm of an industrial trawler. To its minor credit, things pick up in a last ditch dash of bonkers. This is a film of thirds. The first third is poor. The second is even worse. Only in the final third does Meg 2 find any semblance of the batshit mojo it should have enjoyed from the off and only by pilfering from the back catalogue. Jaws was never really about the shark, Meg 2 is but frequently seems to forget it.
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