Midweek Mention... Ghostbusters: Frozen Empire

Ghostbusters: Frozen Empire

Dan: Who you gonna call?

Sidey: Ghostbusters. I'm told. I'm fully up to date now in the Ghostbusters franchise. How up to speed are you, Dan?

Dan: I've done.

Sidey: Have you

done the go one?

Dan: I've done, no, I've done Ghostbusters.

Sidey: Yeah.

Dan: Yeah. And I've done Ghostbusters too. Yeah.

Sidey: And that's it.

Dan: And that's it.

Sidey: Okay. What about you?

Cris: two?

Sidey: With Vigo. And there's been loads of memes this week because we've had King Charles revealing his, his photo, his portrait that someone's done.

Yeah. Which even in of itself, if you don't know, It looks like a demon.

Reegs: it looks demonic, even if you don't think that

Sidey: Yeah, but there's been all these different versions of it where he pulls the the the canvas down and there's been Vigo ones

Reegs: Because he's painted, it's almost an accurate portrayal of him, but the

Sidey: Exclusively in red.

Yeah.

Reegs: So his skin is red, so, you know, you just think,

Dan: he's got blood.

Sidey: got blood,

Dan: it's like he's got blood, and there's a little butterfly a black butterfly, but the point of the wings, if

Sidey: I think that represents the good of humanity, which is about to crush it.

Dan: Yeah

Cris: bit like a sausage anyway.

Dan: It's

black, this this butterfly, and the wings, and if When I first saw it, I just saw a point and it looked like there was other brush strokes that indicated a tail, you know It he looked like satan or something. It was an

Sidey: video I've seen in relation

to

Cris: The only, video I've seen in relation to that is two seconds ago, when the revelation was Donald Trump doing the, like a dance, the one that they, all

the kids do with a hand.

Reegs: into oblivion. The opening of the

Dan: What's this Vigo thing you say? What's

Sidey: Vigo is the plot of Ghostbusters 2, with

Reegs: Vigo the

Sidey: possessed photo in the museum.

Picture, sorry, portrait in the

Reegs: He was the scourge of Carpathia Dan.

Sidey: Carpathia Death. That, that I don't know how you feel about where that, in quality terms, picks up from Ghostbusters 1. Was it a continuation or is it a does it fall

Dan: It's been, it's been

Sidey: I think there was quite a few years between Ghostbusters 1 and 2,

Reegs: actually.

Dan: 2 actually. Yeah, well he got talked

Sidey: 2. Bill Murray we're

Dan: 2, Bill Murray, only because he got to do the film that he wanted to do, Raise His Edge.

Sidey: getting to how I feel about his appearance in this one. Because this is Ghostbusters Frozen Empire and I was acutely aware of the frankly frosty reception this had

Dan: Is this the next one in the

Sidey: So you have, you have Ghostbusters, you have Ghostbusters 2. Then I think it's the girl one, which loads of people got really

Dan: so Ghostbusters 2 is the one with the puff.

Sidey: A Carpathian. Viggo. The

Reegs: The state after Marshmallow Man is number one. The Statue of Liberty is number two.

Dan: number two.

Sidey: So then you have the girl one which was not well received. And then you have, they, they just completely just wrote. That one out and they they rebooted it.

Reegs: After life

Sidey: With jason reitman redoing it with ghostbusters afterlife have you seen that you've not seen that one either? Okay, so that one

Dan: to watch

Sidey: It's you know nostalgia fest right, but this one is a continuation and I don't know I don't have the metrics of it, but i'd be interested to know It must have obviously made money for them to continue with this one.

Dan: this

Sidey: is four, but there have been five films, but the third one is the girly one, but does have an appearance by all the others, apart from Howard Ramis even Bill Murray, but they're, Not Ghostbusters. So they're in various different guises but then they kind of try to get the band back together for four, right?

Dan: And

Sidey: so,

it's a new cast. It's a family. It is Howard Ramis's character Spengler, the Spengler family. They are bankrupt. Everything's going to shit and they they, you know, in, in, in, What is effectively four but really three they get that going and It doesn't trade quite so much quite so explicitly on getting All the other characters and saying hey, remember them you like them here they are again for you to enjoy and because we can't bother to write anything doesn't quite so much do that one.

But it's still like fails quite a lot and talking about now. I can't even remember who the villain was in that one. This one in the trailer. It's shown to you to be a frozen. The title is Frozen Empire and it's shown to be the whole of New York is freezes and people die and the very very opening scene is a throwback to the 1800s and there's a load of hoity toity people in a room and there's some artifact and it's there and they play a thing on an old kind of record player windy thing and the guy who's Doing it as he's doing as he's winding the thing he freezes and his arm snaps off and everyone that's watching freezes and stops and just stops as they are And something appears and everyone is just shattered and hits the deck and dies and then cut to present day and you're like, okay, that's interesting.

That's quite an interesting. That's quite good intro, you know,

Reegs: It's in the fire station of the,

Sidey: Yeah, it's right right fucking ground zero new york in the united states in the In the Ecto Ghostbusters Ground Zero.

Dan: Wow,

Right. Okay. So that's beginning of the film. You think you're in for a treat here, then

Sidey: And there's this family that we've been introduced before Carrie Coon and McKenna Grace and Paul Rudd, and he is playing the Stepfather and it's the mom and daughter dynamic and it's the oh, he's not being accepted as the father So they try and bring that sort of shit into it.

And in this one it's quite a long long time. I I Like tend to look at that now and it's a two hour something film Maybe maybe maybe not quite as long as that but it seemed like that and then honestly when you're watching it fucking goes on Instantly kind of hits you that this is actually not very good they they throw

Dan: it's disappointing when you begin to watch a film that you're just not gonna get into It, now

Sidey: sort of really early on just start throwing stuff at you of Oh this character that you liked from the first one So the receptionist lady, I can't remember the name of ghostbusters, you know, janine She's in it the guy that tries to shut them down He's now been promoted to like a really really high

Reegs: Yeah, he's the mayor, isn't he? Yeah.

Sidey: trying to shut them down and, and when he, when he's presented with the, to you in the film, it's almost like, like with a fanfare and you're kind of like, well.

Dan: well

Reegs: Yeah, it's a bit like that South Park episode about member berries.

Do you remember this? Do you remember this? Do you remember

Sidey: That and that kind of is what it's like and and fairly early on you're presented with dan akroyd because He was still all in because he wrote this thing and he's still quite high up on the payroll, I guess and so he is shown the artifact which is just literally a metal ball that um Uh, and they just, they just go on about this sort of dialogue about well, we don't know what it is and, and this sort of language and we don't know, and, and, and blah, blah, blah, and cut.

And they, they throw all these different words at you. And everything gets a little bit cold. And then there's another ghost, right? There's a ghost of a girl. And, and she meets McKenna Grace's character who is Spengler's granddaughter who was kind of the hero in the first rebooted version and she As a ghost, she is still around because she had caused a house fire and had burnt her house to the ground and killed all her family members and she has a book of matches, which she plays with and she's on fire.

And so the other girl is for some reason talking to her, saying, Oh, I really would like to know what it's like to be a ghost. Because that may be significant to the plot later on.

Dan: Are you? You've seen this as well.

No, you've not. I, I'm starting to think maybe I have seen

this. When you've talked about that, and it just means it's one of those

Sidey: So the trailer and the whole thing about it is, is

Dan: the matches is familiar.

Sidey: Frozen Empire, right?

And if you cast your mind back to the original

Ghostbusters movie, it's Gatekeeper, Keymaster,

Reegs: Yeah.

Dan: right?

Sidey: here it is. They don't give it a name particularly but it's everything is presented as being frozen, right? So, whenever this artifact is around, everything starts to freeze and everything's blah blah blah.

And then, there's some sort of the essentially the guy that brings the artifact to Dan Aykroyd. He is the He's saying, I've got this, but then my grandmother had all this other stuff. And they, it's, it's used to live on this plinth. And as soon as it's taken off this plinth, which is around all this other stuff it honestly, the writing is so fucking shoddy, right?

So it, it, the, it's, it appears to be that whilst it's around all this other stuff, it's contained. And then this other guy who you would recognize, I think his name's Nadir, Nabil. Come Johnny,

you've

seen him in Eternals what have you,

he, he's the one who brings this stuff and he's like, Oh, and he's looking for like, you know, like a porn stars.

I'm going to sell this and I can make some money, but his grandma, his like his grandmother had had all this other stuff. So there's horns as like a, you know, like a, like a, like devil horn kind of thing

Dan: of thing.

is

Sidey: when, when, so what happens is and my missus who is I would say if I'm being kind not the most astute necessarily when she's watching a film She's watching the ghost character going.

Well, I don't fucking trust her. She's gonna do something weird She eventually hoodwinks. And she says on camera It just says oh, does it have to be her and she hoodwinks mckenna grace. So the the the young spangler girl into and also I forgot to say james acast is in this who I quite like as a comedian You And there's a podcast and he does loads, yeah, in this he's acting and it's not great.

Right. And so he's, they've demonstrated that they can separate the ghost from what it's possessing. Right.

And

so,

Or

they can, they can take the spirit out of anything. So they eventually, they trick the girl, they trick the young Spengler girl into going into the thing and they separate her spirit from her body.

And then the ghost possesses the body because they need the ghost. It needs to be this incantation said from a human live person and so they do that and that releases the ghost from this fucking frozen sphere and that kicks off the stuff but when you're watching it in real time

I promise paused it.

Bear in mind, I watched this over two nights and the first, so we paused it at whatever point and then we started watching it again and I paused it to go make a drink and there was 25 minutes to go and we still hadn't met. The fucking villain the pacing of this film is Unbelievably bad. I mean it just is so fucking shit at one point they need

Reegs: hour film, you're not seeing the villain

Sidey: Honestly 25 minutes and at one point they they take the guy who had brought the thing they take him back To see this is where you introduce to bill murray's.

 Venkman.

And they, they reenact the thing that he does from the first film with the colander on his head and the, the fake stuff. Because you remember you liked that the last time. And And then it just really accelerates to where she said the thing, she said the incantation to bring out this villain.

And he's just, it's just like a tall, scary, generic villain with long pointy fingernails and everything freezes. And he just descends onto the fire station where it's all been going off. And

I can't remember his name. Ernie Hudson. Ernie Hudson turns up because he's some sort of city official, and he's there.

And Dan Aykroyd, he's running this second hand shop slash thing. So he's there. And Venkman now turns up. And honestly, the whole time, I was, I felt like,

Slash also like, well, fuck it. If they're going to make it, you might as well make your money off it as well. It's one of those. That's how bad it is. And, and they just had, they have this showdown in the fire

Dan: I'm just hearing like paydays for actors here, like, you know, Bill

Sidey: It's just, it's just paid. It's, it's, it's so.

Dan: It

doesn't sound

Reegs: like a greatest hits remix of all the

Sidey: all the stuff we've made.

Dan: what it's like just with the pacing and things, you know, when you're piecing this together. There's nobody saying in the edit, are we gonna bring in sort of, you know, the arch

Sidey: We're gonna bring in sort of, you know, a million or whatever. It's

Dan: But it's gonna stop making money

Sidey: Visually on the screen looks okay. It does look it looks

Dan: the money

Sidey: and there's stuff and it's blah. And they they try to the the crux of the story is to try to force this thing about family. I think Americans are really obsessed about this sort of stuff. I find that they're really, really obsessed about family.

And the real payoff is when She calls Paul Rudd her dad. There's the real payoff moment. You're like,

But

honestly, Bill Murray, because he, there's literally like, you can go on YouTube and watch press comments of him saying, I will never do another I will never do it again. I will never do that. And he shows up.

He does nothing. He literally does nothing. He does, he's, he's just, he gets frozen against the wall and he does nothing. And you're like, he is here. Yeah.

Reegs: Yeah.

Sidey: And part of me

Dan: sad,

Sidey: well, if it's going to be made, you might as well make your money.

Dan: But it is sad

Sidey: so sad. The whole film is so sad. They, they, the, the, the whole plot about it is that he, he's going to, this villain is going to destroy the ghost repository thing that they've got in the ghost business.

And take control of all those and take care of the world. And They kind of stop it via a crack in the floor, literally what happens here. Honestly, it's such a crushing disappointment.

Dan: strong on

Sidey: It's a not

a very good recommend, I have to say.

Reegs: No, that is one of the least strong recommends

Sidey: It says here that it cost 100 million to make And

Cris: says here that it's cost a hundred million to make.

Sidey: it

Cris: the box office, it says 198. 7 million. And it's only been released on the 22nd of March, 2024.

Reegs: Just about then.

Sidey: So it'll probably work. I would imagine this, I hope that this would put a

Cris: this is the thing with Ghostbusters. It's for the same reason that you watch it the same reason that everyone's gonna watch it or at least it'll pop up on their Amazon Prime

Sidey: It popped up and I thought, oh, do you know what? I watched it because I want something easy to watch, something that is

Cris: And you're familiar with and you know, there's gonna be comforting characters that you've already seen or

Sidey: No, honestly, you get halfway through and you think, just give me like an original story, someone that's actually tried and if it fails, it fails, but it's better than

Cris: to be very difficult.

Sidey: better than

Reegs: honoring the legacy of that other shit

Cris: say that, but I was, I was one of those people that you said, I, and I don't, I don't consider myself sexist, but I was one of those people that I watched the 20 minutes or half an hour into the one with the girls were all, they were all women.

And I was like, I can't watch this because there was nothing different.

Sidey: I tell you now, the girls one is. Is, so there's Ghostbuster one and two. The next best one is the girls one, and the next two are shi. They are

Cris: is The Ghostbusters The sequel trades on it's previous IP right? There's still enough in

Sidey: Every, every, every sequel trades on its previous IP,

Cris: pre entertainment film

Sidey: Ghostbusters, there's still enough in Ghostbusters 2 that's still a pretty entertaining film, pretty good.

Like,

the girls one, people get arsed. That's a whole other conversation, right? Whether you hate the girls or whatever. That, that's the better out of these three, they're so shameless, they're so,

Cris: the better.

Sidey: audience, it's really awful, it's like they're an example of just, like, not giving a shit,

Cris: really awful shit. That's it, it's it's filmmaking by committee. He's got

Reegs: have to tell

Dan: Well, for,

Sidey: well, that's it. It's,

Dan: Double their money.

Sidey: by committee. It's just like pure demographic. If we target this and we

Reegs: we I wonder if it,

Sidey: Yeah. Like, like me, he watched it.

Dan: I wonder if it, if it works in, in the case, and you'd like to think that you make these films because there is a mainstream audience that will go and mop it up.

And there's no. Reason to do them badly, you know, I mean his shit, but does that money then go and pay for, I'm thinking of someone like Bill Moy to go and do a film that he actually wants to do, because I can't imagine he, you

Sidey: he was retired.

I thought it was long since retired, but you know, he probably, they probably

Dan: Rod or

Sidey: will you, will you rock up and do it? And he's, he's thinking, well, you're going to do it anyway.

Dan: Well,

Sidey: So I might

Cris: be part

Sidey: make a million quid out of it. It's 5

Reegs: 5 million quid and it's three days

Dan: Yeah, and, and Paul Rudd is you know, another one. You just think, yeah, I like

Sidey: him. Honestly, anyone that's in it, I like him. Yeah.

Dan: But just bad writing and

Sidey: bad, just bad, bad,

Dan: yeah, okay, right.

Sidey: But it's a strong recommend for me.

Reegs: Yeah, strong recommend.

Cris: I've not watched it, but yeah.

Reegs: Yeah.

Yeah.