[6.7/10] I know The Muppets very well. I haven't ridden Disney’s Haunted Mansion attraction in at least twenty years. So I come to this special only half-prepared. I can’t help but think if I were more invested in the theme park ride, and not just the puppet pals recreating it, I might have enjoyed this more.

As it stands *Muppets Haunted Mansion* is fine. It’s replacement level muppet shtick with a quick runtime and enough set pieces and pace to keep from being boring. But it’s also thin as a wafer. There’s barely a premise, let alone a story, so the whole thing becomes more of a collection of sketches than anything with momentum.

That approach can work! (It’s basically what *The Great Muppet Caper* did.) But the skits and bits here are fairly middling. There’s a handful of solid puns and plays on words. Statler and Waldor’s routine remains funny in any setting. And there’s some creative muppets as ghosts and plant monsters that show the puppet designers haven't lost their touch. But on the whole, this one isn’t amusing or creative enough to justify its scattershot approach.

There’s a vague, very nebulous theme about facing your fears, and the moment when it comes to fruition is the most compelling the special is. Gonzo looking in a mirror, fearing that he’ll grow old and forgotten, that his friends won’t care about him if he doesn’t continue to do great stunts, adds a touch of humanity to the little whatever. His elerly design is inventive and a little grotesque, and the sequence of him looking through a one-way mirror at the party he missed out on for his latest stunt gives the TV movie its only ballast with some neat staging.

Otherwise, the bits here vary from the disposable to the forgettable. The s songs don’t offend the ear, but are nothing special. Taraji P. Henson and Will Arnett hamming it up (sorry Piggy) hould be a hoot, but Henson is a little too much and Arnett isn’t quite enough. (Though Yvette Nicole Brown and John Stamos get the tone right.) Pepe has never been my favorite muppet, and the bits of him trying to find a celebrity party or almost marrying a black widow are tepid and middling at best.

Visually, the special looks cheap, with flat lighting and conspicuously digital sets that prevent something already a little unreal and artificial from having a real sense of place amidst its famed setting. And not for nothing, this is the first Muppet project I’ve watched since Steve Whitmire was fired, and Matt Vogel’s Kermit voice just sounds wrong to me.

Again, some of this might be more enjoyable if I was more familiar with the Haunted Mansion right, and so could better appreciate the melding of the two properties. But as someone who knows the Muppets but not the spooky attraction they’re placed into, taking this as a standalone project, the story and the humor alone weren’t enough to make this a thumbs up from me.