I have written before about how hard it is to get the mix right when dealing with horror comedy. I prefer my horr-com deathly dry, with lots of horror that smolder with humorous traces. Haunted Heist goes way the other way, using the horror trappings as targets in an all-night comedy shooting gallery. It’s a risky move. Only worth making if you are funny as f**k with a funny pack of f*****s to f**k it up. Howery does indeed arrive with such a pack. Haddish kills it with her razor-fine comic timing, like Leatherface swings a saw. Howery himself is a laugh riot, giving us that hilarious excruciation Albert Brooks used to swing in the day. Baker steals the show with nothing but his rat face. The best lines from Reid’s script had me gasping for breath in the seats at times. It is funnier than a Richard Pryor haunted house film; it is as funny as a Richard Pryor haunted house album could have been. Yeah, it’s that funny.
“Haddish kills it with her razor-fine comic timing, like Leatherface swings a saw.”
Haunted Heist misbehaves in the most anarchistic way for a great stretch of the movie. Then, because everything needs to wrap up in the third act, all the fun stops dead. All that explosive comedy that kicked it so hard evaporates like ectoplasm, as everything goes drama left field to conclude each character’s storyline. All the gut-busting devil house reactions fizzle under the wet toilet paper os resolution. This is not a Tyler Perry movie, where we can run out of comedy hot water and still get away with it. It is almost like the ghost of Bob Saget from Full House walks in to deliver the final message of what the audience has learned today. It is almost like that, except even some ghost Saget jazz would have been much funnier than what we do get at the end.
While the tee hees disappear in the end, Haunted Heist delivers on the horror end in the finale. One of the reasons I am glad I sought this on the big screen is to admire the big honking devil at the end. The widescreen geography was well used demonically, the kind of Satanic spectacle that spoke to the 12-year-old headbanger in me. Alas, Haunted Heist needed a bigger body count. I got so excited when there was a truly decent heart-ripping scene, only to find out that was about it. The threat of the racist ghosts is watered down to obnoxious slur throwing. The real story of how lethal the 50s establishment was to your health if not white makes Satanism look like the Mousketeer Club. Once again, Haunted Heist is a great flick that unfortunately cannot find a way higher than its ghost group sex peak. But it made for a crazy Saturday night on the big screen.
"…misbehaves in the most anarchistic way for a great stretch of the movie."
