What’s It About
When a reunion trip turns into a robbery, four friends discover the mansion’s owners, ghosts from the 1950s, never left. Trapped by the spirits planning a demonic sacrifice, the friends must battle supernatural terror to survive the night.
MOVIESinMO REVIEW
“Haunted Heist” tries to scare you and make you laugh at the same time, and it fails at both jobs. This new horror comedy takes four gifted Black comedians, locks them inside a haunted mansion, and then forgets to hand any of them something real to work with. What is left behind is ninety minutes of shouting, weak jokes, and a ghost story that never settles on what it wants to be. The movie was shot on location in Detroit, and the mansion at the center of the story is a real one, a home once owned by Motown founder Berry Gordy Jr. in the city’s Boston-Edison district. It is a piece of Black history sitting right there on screen, and it deserves better than what this script does with it. “Haunted Heist” had its first public showing at Fantastic Fest in 2025 before landing in theaters this year, and the buzz around a horror comedy stacked with this much comedic talent should have meant something. Instead, the talent behind the camera gets buried by a screenplay that never figures out its own tone. The film opens with Terrance, who goes by T, played by Karlous Miller, walking out of prison a free man. His former cellmate, a man named Ratface George, played by Anthony “Tony” Baker, slips him a ring before they part and swears it carries some kind of protective power. T doubts the story, but he puts the ring on anyway and heads out into the world. Once he is free, T tracks down three old friends he has not spoken to in years. Shari, played by Tiffany Haddish, runs an online channel where she pushes questionable products to keep her follower count climbing. Ron, played by Lil Rel Howery, is a soft-spoken father working through a rough divorce from his wife, Joanna, played by LaKeysha Edwards. Ellis, played by Andrew Bachelor, is a business owner who just got pushed out of the company he built. T invites the three of them to what he calls a weekend getaway, a rundown mansion sitting empty on the edge of Detroit. Once everyone shows up, T reveals his true plan. The house holds a hidden object called the Ceremonial Jawbone Dagger, said to be worth twenty million dollars, and he wants their help finding it so the group can split the money four ways. Ron doesn’t want to get involved in the robbery and tries to get away, but the mansion doors refuse to open no matter how much he pulls them. Eventually, Ron gives in when his mind wanders to the possible financial windfall. At this point in the story, we see how out of hand things are, and the situation turns out to be much worse than money. The mansion is inhabited by ghosts Alton and Marjorie Dempsey, played by Brett Gelman and Ari Dayan, who are convinced they are still living in the old days, when slavery was a reality. The couple´s scenes hit us with a lot of plantation-related jokes and everything that boils down to a punchline instead of something serious. When Ellis´s assistant Jared (Stephen Blackwell) shows up wanting to party, Marjorie eradicates him in no time. Hoping to summon something strong enough to protect everyone, Shari flips through an old spellbook and instead calls back Ron’s late grandmother, Gram Hawkins, played by Tara Terry, who looks just as confused as everybody else in the room. From here the film stumbles into one of its lowest points, a scene built around a ghostly love triangle that reaches for shock instead of laughs. Ron sums up the moment himself, cracking that it plays like a twisted take on “Roots.” It is a line that says more about the movie’s problems than the movie itself ever manages to say. This brings us to the big dilemma regarding “Haunted Heist.” Does it really offer its actors anything new, or is it just putting them back in the roles they’ve always played? Haddish, Howery, Bachelor, and Miller have done much better in other movies, but here they are merely playing one-dimensional puppets. Treva doesn’t develop her sharp-tongued persona in a single scene. Ron remains that nervous guy. Ellis continues to be a hustler with a softened conscience. The script barely allows them to make use of their past migraines. Director Lil Rel Howery really does show some talent when it comes to filmmaking. There’s a séance scene about halfway through the film that demonstrates some clever lighting choices which manage to create one genuinely fun moment, and some quick pans add some much-needed energy to the screenplay. Unfortunately, the special effects look cheap throughout the film, the pacing drags badly in the last twenty minutes, and the film seems to be desperately trying for a touching finish that it simply isn’t able to achieve. The plot that ties the knife and the ghosts together seems far too thin and half-baked, almost as if the screenwriters took a dozen good ideas and decided to use all of them instead of going with the strongest one. There is a good movie somewhere in “Haunted Heist,” a movie in which a bunch of buddies fight their demons and become closer in the process. Unfortunately, we never see this version of the movie. Instead, we get a production that wastes a great cast, relies on old stereotypes of race and slavery for laughs, and doesn’t trust its own idea enough to take the time and develop it properly.
OUR REVIEW – A LIL REL 3