The Dark Herald Recommends – Ghostbusters: Frozen Empire
Ivan Reitman’s early years in Hollywood are something he would have liked swept as far under the carpet as possible.
His Salad Days body of work included such titles as Columbus of Sex, Cannibal Girls, Rabid (starring Marilyn Chambers in her only non-pornographic role), Shivers, and that groundbreaking classic, Ilsa the Tigress of Siberia. These movies were all slightly better than they had any right to be, but it looked like he was never going to find his way out of B-movie hell.
In 1979, Reitman found himself producing yet another college sex comedy, but he had a slightly better cast than usual, some kid hot off of Saturday Night Live named Belushi was signed. The director, John Landis, only had one credit but he was showing promise, Kentucky Fried Movie had been a terrific little comedy on a microscopic budget. The script was (for a wonder) funny enough (courtesy of Harold Ramis) that he wouldn’t need all that much nudity to keep the audience interested. To top it all off, the movie had a title that did its job by telling the audience everything they needed to know about National Lampoon’s Animal House. It was enough of a hit on a modest budget that a lot of the people who had worked on it were lifted out of the schlock mines.
Reitman naturally asked Harold Ramis, what else have you got? Turns out he had a military comedy called, Stripes. Belushi wasn’t interested but Ramis’ friend Bill Murray was. And just like that, Reitman was no longer a one-hit wonder.
He had one last B-movie in him; Space Hunter Adventures in the Forbidden Zone but that was just something he did to keep the lights on while he was developing a new project that Murray, Ramis, and their friend Dan Aykroyd had brought him.
A supernatural special effects comedy called Ghost Stoppers.
There was a rights issue with Ghost Busters.
As everyone knows Ghostbusters (1984) was one of the biggest comedy hits of the decade.
Here is the big thing you need to remember about Murray, Aykroyd, and Ramis. They had all been part of the counterculture movement of the Seventies but by the mid-eighties, they had gone from hippie to yuppie and were ready to cash in. However, they still had an air of edgy-cool around them. They had reached the crest of a wave between youthful rebellious energy and mature competence in 1984, and everyone kind of knew it. This was an established team that was the height of their abilities. The timing had been perfect to produce a lightning-in-a-bottle mega-hit.
In 1989 it no longer was.
Rather than moving forward, all of the Ghostbusters backtracked on their development. The movie had to arrange things, so the setting and characters were basically back to square one, and ready to repeat their plot arcs from five years ago. Ghostbusters II was the worst kind of sequel, a shot-for-shot remake of the original. And none of the actors were perceived as cutting-edge by then. They were all part of the establishment by the end of the Eighties. I knew it was going to be bad when I saw the first shot of Aykroyd and Ernie Hudson being clowns at a kid’s party and Aykroyd was fat.
Ghostbusters II bombed and rightfully so.
While Dan Aykroyd was nuts, he liked making money, so he wanted to keep making Ghostbusters movies. Ivan Reitman was completely on board with this idea as was Ramis. Ernie Hudson couldn’t stop panting after it. The only guy who dug in his heels was the one Ghostbuster they couldn’t do without, Bill Murray. Smartass conman-with-a-heart-of-gold, Peter Venkman was the real star of the show, without him they had nothing, and they knew it, so did everyone else.
Ghostbuster fans have been furious with him ever since. There was a thirty-year shower of shit over Murray’s continued absence on another sequel. I have heard every accusation, imprecation, and asseveration imaginable about Bill Murray’s abject refusal to do another Ghostbusters.
You know what I haven’t heard? An explanation as to why Ghostbusters III would have been any better than Ghostbusters II.
Sorry to break this to you but there is absolutely no reason to think it would have been an improvement. They probably would have had to bring in another writer because Harold Ramis, (it hurts to say this), ran out of steam early. His IMDB credits page gives mute testimony to this. Of his twenty writing credits since Ghostbusters II only five of them don’t have the name Ghostbuster in the title. His last good movie was Analyze This (1999).
Bill Murray made the right call. His smartass-trickster shtick from Stripes was played out long before he did Ghostbusters II. Audiences were done with it. Going back to Peter Venkman would have been a bad career move.
However, the Ghostbusters franchise was never quite dormant. There were cartoons and quite a few video games. The 2009 game is probably as close as you’ll get to the illusory sequel to the original, and it really isn’t close enough.
Sony Pictures had desperately wanted a franchise other than Spiderman for years and despite its spotty track record, Ghostbusters looked like it was worth a try. After the death of Harold Ramis, Sony executive, and incompetent boob Amy Pascal decided to force out Ivan Reitman and try literally anybody else.
Paul Feige pitched his usual shtick of a female-led parody of an existing property and Pascal declared it genius.
You know the rest. I’m not going into all the reasons that Ghostbusters (2016) was godawful, that would be a 40,000-word novella. Regardless, that overpriced turd of a movie did not stick when thrown against the wall. It was a major bomb.
After the blood was mopped up off the floor and Amy Pascal was sent into internal exile, Sony still didn’t have a new franchise. Reitman’s son, Jason pitched an idea, and the new CEO who had a business (and not entertainment) background said, here is your very small budget, don’t go over it.
The result was Ghostbusters Afterlife
I loved Ghostbusters: Afterlife. It was everything that Ghostbusters (2016) wasn’t. It introduced some new characters that I liked. The nods to the OG Ghostbusters were respectful without swamping the new characters. And it gave Harold Ramis a very nice and respectful send-off, which was sweet. There were brilliant little touches that carried the vibe of the first movie. The ghost of Egon was inhabiting a lamp, when Egon’s granddaughter asked the lamp, “How did you make the circuits so small?”
The lamp turned and illuminated a wall full of Egon’s advanced degrees, which perfectly captured Egon’s dry sense of humor.
Phoebe was the new brains of the outfit, so when her mother asked her, “Why don’t you make new friends?”
Her reply of, “What should I make them out of?” Worked because by then you knew she had enough brains to have some options along those lines. It was a movie with some flaws but I still loved it. So far as I was concerned, it did everything that it needed to.
Ghostbusters (1984) played the horror straight and lightened things up with comedy. Ghostbusters Afterlife did the same thing. It started off with Egon getting killed, which is pretty grim stuff. There was a sense of real stakes being established by that. They followed through on it and made a pretty decent little movie.
However, when I saw Winston in the firehouse at the end of the movie, I had an unquiet moment. Bringing back Ecto-1 for a trailer shot was fine. But transferring the new characters to New York and putting them into the firehouse committed a sequel to a potential memberberrry overdose.
I am sad to report that is exactly what happened with Ghostbusters Frozen Empire.
One of the bigger problems this film had was a certain degree of aimlessness. The last movie did not function as any kind of potential first act. It could have, but it didn’t. It was an entirely self-contained story. That is fine and dandy if you have no intention of making any more of them, but there is zero chance that Sony wanted a one-and-done. So they should have set up a three-act story. Also, they needed to write it but that was beyond them. This one was another bottle episode.
It also had more political baggage than the last one.
The Fandom Menace viewed the last one as a win in the pop culture war. Frozen Empire wasn’t super woke but there was definitely an air of apology to the left. There were a bunch of little signs saying, look guys we are absolutely with the program, look Phoebe is a lesbian now. You have to love lesbians right? We put Patton Oswalt and Kunail Nanjiani in this. The right-wing hates those guys, you know? We were careful to condemn the rich white men who died at the beginning as colonizers and exploiters. We’re all cool now Twitter Left, okay?
And it did damage the movie.
Making the odd but brainy girl a lesbian was hackneyed and lazy. There is a rumor, (and I suspect there is something to it), that the reason Jenna Ortega put her foot down on the Richter scale was that the writers on her show wanted to make Wednesday Adams a lesbian. Because all odd but smart girls are lesbians.
Phoebe also spent the movie being pissed off with a chip on her shoulder, which she hadn’t been last time. This wasn’t just lazy it was reflexively lazy. Giving her a ghost girlfriend when a ghost boyfriend would have worked better is indicative of this reflexive laziness. As well as a desire to play it safe and in 2024, making a girl a lesbian is very, very safe.
Phoebe felt kind of genuine before and now she comes across as a 2020s Disney Girl Genius. That was the problem with the main protagonist.
The problem with the rest of the cast was that there were too damn many of them. Frozen Empire has a real problem with cast bloat. Again, they damaged the film by trying to play it safe. The only characters that were really necessary were Phobe because of Grandpa Egon and her stepdad Paul Rudd because he was both a science teacher, plus Ghostbusters nerd. Phoebe’s mother is needed too because Phobe is a minor but not as a Ghostbuster herself, that was a leap that made no sense. Phoebe’s Mom should probably have been doing Janine’s job. Having her suited up and driving Ecto-One didn’t scan. She never wanted to be a Ghostbuster.
Speaking of Janine, she didn’t need to be there at all. None of the original Ghostbusters should have been there. The original cast was an absolute necessity in the last movie. Ghostbusters 2016 had completely trashed them to try and make the unwanted replacements look good by comparison. They had to be brought in After Life to pass the torch. That was fine. But they serve no purpose now. Okay, you might be stuck with two of them. Ernie Hudson was set up as the money man. The film would also need someone to spew Ecto-babble and Dan Aykroyd actually believes in all of that bullshit which does give his performance verisimilitude. Fine, those two serve a purpose but having them suit up was again, just a memberberry. Bill Murray gets dragged a lot for his performance as Venkman but since he’s standing up, I think he’s actually trying here* He just can’t deliver on being a high-energy trickster like he used, he’s an old man now.
Finn Wolfhard, whose character is so unmemorable I can’t recall his name, (and I just read it five seconds ago), had a reason to be in the last one, to bring in the Generation-X friendly Stranger Things audience and they needed another kid to drive Ecto-1. He wasn’t needed in this one and they burned up screen time giving him Things To Do. Same notation for his diverse love interest, it wasn’t believable for her to leave Oklahoma to do Ghostbusting in New York City. While I’m at it. Ecto-1 is not the Batmobile, it doesn’t need to be there either. A 1959 Cadillac Miller-Meteor Sentinel ambulance was there as A JOKE in 1984, meant to show how much of a shoestring budget the Fab Three were on. It’s yet another memberberry now.
This movie had potential but it got buried in a nostalgia swamp. There was no compelling reason for a well-financed operation, (which apparently this is now) to have a team living in a broken down firehouse and driving an ambulance from the 1950s. This film ignored too many things from the last picture. Ghosts hadn’t been seen in public since the 1980s, in the last one. They are all over New York in this one, without explanation. We are also back to the problem of ghosts only haunting New York.
Was there anything I liked? Yeah, there was. Plenty in fact. Paul Rudd did his level best to carry this mess because, god love him, that’s been his entire career. It kills me to say it but Kunail Nanjiani was the funniest thing in this movie. Even Patton Oswalt forced a deeply resented chuckle out of me. It was better than the Marvels and Madame Web, so it didn’t trip over that bar. The story was actually coherent and I don’t take that for granted anymore. However, none of these things got the screen time they needed to develop because this movie was just swamped with nostalgia bait.
I obviously have a ton of complaints, but mind you I didn’t hate this movie, and I certainly didn’t detest it like I did Ghostbusters (2016). Kids like it, it isn’t that scary and the annoying romance between Phoebe and her ghost girlfriend is more coded than anything else, presumably for markets that aren’t cool with that kind of thing.
But its biggest problem is that it should have never been made. I groaned when I saw that Columbia had revived the Ghost Corps production label. The last time I saw those words was in Ghostbusters (2016). Sony is trying to make Ghostbusters a franchise and it simply never was franchise material. The original was a lighting-in-a-bottle success, that simply can’t be duplicated, never has been, and never will be. Ghostbusters: Frozen Empire brings with it the same air of disappointment that Ghostbusters 2 did. While Ghostbusters 2 is no longer anywhere near the worst Ghostbusters movie, this film has the same problems that one did.
Consequently…
The Dark Herald Recommends with (grave) Reservations (2.5/5)
*Bill Murray likes the director, which is undoubtedly a big part of the reason he got hired for the last movie.
