Spooks, Specters and a House of Cards

I don’t know who decided Ghostbusters movies shouldn’t be comedies any more, but I suspect it happened very soon after Paul Feig’s 2016 attempt to reboot the beloved ’80s property with Kristen Wiig, Melissa McCarthy, Kate McKinnon and Leslie Jones.

That version of Ghostbusters was eccentric and funny and held together by the seat of its pants, much as Ivan Reitman’s 1984 original was; I’ll always love Reitman’s movie, but nobody in there knows how that thing is going to turn out – not Bill Murray, not Ernie Hudson, not even Dan Aykroyd and Harold Ramis, and they wrote it. That undercurrent of uncertainty served the performances perfectly, making us believe the characters are the ones making it up as they go along rather than the actors playing them.

Feig’s reboot went a slightly different way, giving its heroes grudges and character flaws that led to a lot of sniping and arguing. Improvisational insults are McCarthy’s superpower, so it makes sense Feig and co-writer Katie Dippold would go that way – especially knowing their heroes would come together as a team in the end. And it works! Sure, the movie was met by a truly gross incel backlash and was perceived as a box-office failure, earning just $229 million on a budget of $144 million. By contrast, the similarly budgeted – and equally undermined – Mad Max: Fury Road made $380 million a year earlier. Either the man-babies improved their boycott tactics or the audience just wasn’t there to begin with.

Their loss, really. Ghostbusters 2016 isn’t perfect, but it’s lively and weird and unapologetically a comedy, which does a better job of honoring the spirit of the original movies than the direct sequels that followed a few years later. Not that Ghostbusters: Afterlife and Ghostbusters: Frozen Empire aren’t satisfying as such – they very much are – but they’ve taken a different path. They’re reverent, and maybe too much so.

Directed and co-written (with Monster House's Gil Kenan) by Reitman’s son Jason, Afterlife felt like damage control. On the press tour, Reitman fils never quite came out and said he was reclaiming the property from the meanies who disrespected his dad's crowning accomplishment ... but he never really had to say it, either. The movie did everything it could to mash down the nostalgia buttons for the fans who wanted more of the thing they wanted, while also reaching out to the new generations who’d grown up with the original films as cultural wallpaper.

It was a family story, introducing Carrie Coon as the estranged daughter of Harold Ramis’ Egon Spengler and Finn Wolfhard and Mckenna Grace as her kids and leading them into the family business, uncovering a supernatural threat that requires all the surviving Ghostbusters to pitch in and save the day. (And also Paul Rudd is there!) It’s fine, and occasionally genuinely moving, and it has maybe four laughs in total. But it turned a profit during Omicron, and the fans loved it, and that was all that mattered.

And so here is Ghostbusters: Frozen Empire, once again written by Reitman and Kenan but directed by Kenan this time. This one cost a little more than Afterlife and grossed about the same in the end – around $200 million, which was great in 2021 but not as impressive in 2024. And since box-office is the only thing that matters to contemporary cultural analysts, it was written off as a dud.

Maybe it’s the franchise that can’t catch a break. Frozen Empire is overstuffed, sure, with a script that juggles about a dozen characters – some new, most returning – in service of a fairly simple plot about a vengeful demon determined to use Lower Manhattan as the epicenter of a new ice age. It expends a lot of effort on making sure the audience gets to see everything they liked from the last movie, right down to the tiny Stay-Puft marshmallow gremlins. Why are they here this time? Why were they there last time?

It's also, as I implied earlier, not a comedy. Like, at all. There are a couple of comic-relief moments, and Dario Marianelli’s score leans heavily on the bouncy piano rags Elmer Bernstein composed for the original film, but this movie feels more like a YA mystery adventure, its characters going on little quests and connecting various dots to figure out what the big bad is and how to stop it. Well, most of them; Wolfhard’s slacker-ish Trevor mostly hangs around the firehouse trying to figure out who keeps raiding the snack cupboard. (This is literally his entire arc.)

But that lets the story land on the shoulders of Grace’s teenage Phoebe, whose status as a minor means she can’t participate in the professional busting of ghosts in the tri-state area, or something. (In the series’ one nod to reality, the mayor of New York is a petty, vindictive authoritarian – namely William Atherton’s Walter Peck, an obnoxious EPA agent who somehow got himself into office on the officious-wiener ticket.)

Left to her own devices while her family runs around dealing with a new surge in paranormal activity – which may or may not be tied to a sinister artifact that Ray Stantz bought from a shifty guy called Nadeem (Kumail Nanjiani) – Phoebe spends her days wandering Manhattan, eventually meeting a ghost called Melody (Emily Alyn Lind), who … isn’t scary. Not even a little bit. She’s about Phoebe’s age, she’s quiet and a little sad, and Phoebe likes her. Maybe Melody even likes her back.

Set aside all the other ghosts-and-demons stuff; this is the part of Frozen Empire that feels interesting. Kenan and Reitman build something new out of the established lore and the characters: After the events of the last movie, Phoebe is open to the idea that ghosts aren’t always malevolent, and Grace and Lind play their characters’ relationship as an instantly relatable teenage infatuation, matching each others’ body language in subtle but charming ways. And their connection provides the heart of what might otherwise have been a pretty predictable sequel. Nanjiani also gets a pretty nice arc himself.

If you’re worried that I didn’t mention your favorite Ghostbuster enough, don’t be; everyone gets a moment or two (or three) to show up and do their thing. Winston’s a zillionaire now, but a good one! Venkman has an office! Janine is here! Most of the kids from Afterlife are in New York now for some reason! But also, the flinty English comic James Acaster turns up as a science boy, and Patton Oswalt joins the gang as a lore guy, a New York Public Library researcher who can research the few arcane stories Ray doesn’t already know by heart.

Once again, one cannot help but note that all of these actors are very funny people, and would have benefitted from being given actual jokes. But Ghostbusters: Frozen Empire manages to work anyway, and for that I am happy.

Speaking of ghosts, specters and whatnots, let’s check out the more grown-up thrills of Immaculate, aka That Movie Where Sydney Sweeney Is The Pregnant Nun.

Personally, I prefer to think of it as the next picture from Sweeney and director Michael Mohan, who made The Voyeurs together a few years ago and had a lot of fun infusing sexy/creepy giallo elements into a retro erotic thriller.

They have a lot of fun with Immaculate, too, with the clichéd figures of authoritative priests and creepy old sisters wandering the cavernous halls of the rural Italian convent where Sweeney’s Sister Cecelia arrives, newly relocated from Detroit after her order was closed down there. But here, the beatific Father Sal (Álvaro Morte) assures her, she will thrive – even if she’s still struggling to master her Italian.

“Thriving” must mean something else in Italian, for no sooner has the virginal Cecelia taken her vows than she finds herself pregnant by unknown means – and once her virginity is confirmed, the convent finds itself preparing for a genuine miracle. But if we’ve learned anything from decades of nun movies, organized religion loves its little loopholes, and a nun from Detroit doesn’t need to be fluent in Italian to know bullshit when she hears it. In which case … exactly who or what is growing in Sister Cecelia’s belly?

It’s the mood of Immaculate that makes it fun in a deadpan way, as Mohan and Sweeney tackle another horror subgenre with genuine enthusiasm for its history, letting us know they’re having a ball coloring inside the lines. Sweeney underplays Cecelia’s gentle nature and humble bearing right up until things go wild, at which point she yes-ands the hell out of the young woman’s emotional journey. And Morte, Money Heist’s calculating Professor, also fully understands the requirements of his role.

And Mohan keeps finding new challenges for both the character and the actor, culminating in a bravura single-take ending that made me wish I’d seen this with a crowd. Would they have cheered? Would they have laughed? Or would they have just wanted more jump scares?

Tarot, on the other hand, is just about the jump scares. It’s your basic cursed-object deal, where a group of young friends make the mistake of treating an occult item as a toy – in this case, someone else’s deck of tarot cards, which it turns out is a great big no-no even if said deck isn’t carrying a sinister supernatural enchantment.

Though writer-directors Spenser Cohen and Anna Halberg used the 1992 serial-killer novel Horrorscope as their jumping-off point, mainly because Sony owned the rights, this is really more of a Final Destination riff, throwing out the entire book and turning the movie into a series of elaborate but teen-friendly kills built around everybody being stalked and murdered, one by one, by the characters from the cards they've drawn.

It’s nothing you haven’t seen before, but the creature design is impressive and the cast is … surprisingly engaging.

Seriously! Harriet Slater, of Pennyworth and an upcoming Outlander spinoff, is the lead, with The Bold and the Beautiful’s Adain Bradley as her once and future love interest; the supporting roles are filled by the likes of Spider-Man’s Jacob Batalon, Mean Girls’ Avantika and Humberly González, a Toronto-based actor you might have seen in from Workin’ Moms and Ginny & Georgia to Renuka Jeyapalan’s lovely romance Stay the Night. Their collective chemistry is the reason the movie’s as watchable as it is.

Tarot reminded me of a Dimension Films release from the late ’90s, back in the days when Bob Weinstein could harvest actors from his brother’s latest acquisition for his next horror quickie. Didn’t you ever wonder how Ben Affleck ended up starring in Phantoms right after he won an Oscar for Good Will Hunting?

Extras on Tarot amount to two short featurettes and a gag reel that does indeed confirm the cast really bonded during the shoot. The gag reel, especially, speaks to a comfortable, relaxed set that feels almost healthy for a genre picture – and seriously, all respect to Avantika for this look in the EPK:

The only extra on Immaculate is Mahon’s director’s commentary, in which he demonstrates that he knows his stuff, loves working with producer-star Sweeney, and hints at further genre reinventions to come.

Frozen Empire, though, that’s a party. In addition to an exceptional 4K presentation – which is accompanied by a constantly busy Dolby Atmos soundtrack – the companion Blu-ray disc offers about an hour of special features, all calibrated for comfort: The 20-minute making-of is literally titled “Return to the Firehouse”, for crying out loud, and makes a point of asking everyone involved how it felt to be back in New York … even though the bulk of the film was shot in London. (Eh, if that’s how they got James Acaster, it was worth it.)

Other featurettes include looks at the new tech and the new monsters, the Easter eggs scattered throughout, a look at Winston’s Paranormal Discovery Center – the other idea in the movie that feels like a logical extension of the original series – a longer look at the retro aspects of Marianelli’s score and nine minutes of deleted scenes. Director Kenan’s audio commentary is included on both the 4K and 2K discs.

It's a fine package for a pretty decent movie, and if this turns out to be the Ghostbusters’ last hurrah, they went out respectably. But if anyone wants to try to take the material in a new direction … well, I know a guy.

Ghostbusters: Frozen Empire is available now in 4K/BD and BD/DVD combo editions from Sony Pictures Home Entertainment, which also released Tarot on Blu-ray last week; Immaculate is available on Blu-ray from Elevation Pictures.

And if you’ve read this far, you can win your very own 4K/BD combo edition of Frozen Empire courtesy of SPHE Canada! Just e-mail normwilner@gmail.com by noon ET on Tuesday, July 16^th with the subject line “Justice for The Lady Ghostbusters”; a winner will be chosen at random. Contest is only open to Canadian residents; apologies, but them’s the rules.