Hey Lindsey, it's October.
my gosh, finally.
So glad that it's October.
I love the fall.
Me too.
Favorite season, favorite month, everything about it.
uh couldn't be happier.
Fantastic.
I'm so happy to be here.
I am so happy to be here as well and I'm so happy that we get to share a movie that is not
National Lampoon's Class Reunion.
Correct.
Got a special guest, got a great movie.
You ready to get going?
I'm ready.
Let's do it.
Here's another episode of Die Laughing.
I'm very excited.
Me too.
I'm very excited about our guest.
I'm very excited about today's episode.
It was a fun watch and I think it's just about to get even more funner.
Yes, I'm so ready.
Our guest today, he is a former mythian now living in uh San Antonio, Texas.
One of my absolute favorite comedians always just loved, much like you, Lindsay, just love
hearing words come out of his head hole.
I can sit there and listen to both of you talk all goddamn day.
Excited to have him in the studio and to talk about the 1996 Peter Jackson classic,
underrated classic, The Frighteners.
Welcome to the studio and to die laughing, Brandon Sams.
Brandon.
Hi, how are you today Bart?
Lindsay, how's it going?
It's going great.
I'm so happy you're here.
I miss you, friend.
Memphis misses you.
yeah, I miss Memphis too, and then I go back and I'm like I could leave I could leave
again You hit the airport you're like, oh no, I don't want to do this again.
Why why?
Well, as soon as Trump gets the National Guard in there, we'll be OK.
And we can start making Memphis great again.
Let's, let's hope so, Bart.
That's yeah, I can't wait.
Yeah, wait, we can only hope.
So what did everybody think about this week's movie?
What do you think about that?
Where do you want to start?
Let's assume that there are listeners out there who have not seen the movie.
Okay.
So we'll tell them a little bit about what's going on.
Released in 96, executive produced by Bob Zemeckis.
And Zemeckis had originally hired Jackson and his partner Fran Walsh to write the script
as a spinoff from Tales from the Crypt.
Yeah, for Zemeckis to direct, but once you get the script, he's like, oh, this is much
better as a feature film, it's much better as a Peter Jackson project.
So that's how that came about.
And so glad it worked out that way.
You know, it's funny at the time Zemeckis was the shit and Peter Jackson was still sort of
up and coming other than really great low budget horror comedies.
And he had done Heavenly Creatures, which is also a pretty amazing movie, which launched a
couple of actresses, think.
But yeah, so that's the story behind it jumping right in.
There's a there's a mystery heart condition plaguing this little sleepy town of Fairwater,
California, which looks suspiciously like New Zealand, by the way.
not suspicious, that's weird for Jackson.
If you don't mind, Bart, I have asked ChatGPT to provide a scene-by-scene breakdown of the
movie.
ah So, scene one, introduction, car crash backstory.
We meet Frank Bannerster, Michael J.
Fox, a once successful architect.
Now, here's an interesting point that I would like to make about this movie before we
start.
At no point in time does it explain why he was an architect, what he did as an architect,
except for build one failed house.
And then never finish it.
And then at the end of it, I guess you assume he goes back to an architect role, right?
He is done being a psychic con artist and then returns back to being an architect only to
be seen knocking down the only architectural building we know factually that he built.
He is, I make this point, he is not actually an architect.
Maybe, you we never see who's driving the heavy equipment that knocks down the house.
Maybe uh he's now started a deconstruction business and he was driving that and knocked it
down.
That could be it.
We never get it explained.
But yeah, the only thing that we see in the film that he was a high flying architect is
his bad suit and his bad hair.
huh.
I love the movie.
Like, I'd forgotten about it, and then you made me watch it.
And then I remembered it.
And I remembered that I like it, but I also remember...
I mean, let me get a character breakdown from Chad GP2.
I hope.
Yeah, enter and done.
Just side note, I, a few months ago, started using chat GPT as my therapist.
I'm not alone in this.
I'm sure millions of people are doing the same.
Then I started using Monday, which is the snarky version of chat GPT, which I highly
recommend.
there a free version of that?
I was looking into it after you mentioned it to me and I was like, do I need to pay for
this?
No, it's at the bottom of the page.
I play good cop bad cop with them if I need positive affirmations I go to chat GPT and if
I want someone to tell me to suck it up and stop being such a wimp uh I'll go to Monday
Yeah, Chad is so good about being like, that's a that's an approach.
Look at you approaching things.
Maybe you should try this.
You're pretty.
Thanks CatGBT.
Yeah, can do anything, Bar.
Just believe in yourself.
such an impressive background.
Why would you want to stab your eye out?
Let's pick it up with who these main characters are.
Obviously, Frank Bannister is Michael J.
Fox.
He kind of plays a grifter who's using his own band of ghosts to frighten potential
clients into calling him to come rid their homes of their poltergeists.
Now, I did find this odd that he always goes to funerals, but we never see a client from a
funeral.
So what had he been doing?
Having their loved ones come back at some point and then having to rid their homes of
them?
It never really gets covered.
We just see he's the sort of a predator of people's grief.
So I'm trying to remember who was the first funeral.
It was one of the victims, I guess, that we opened the movie with when the newspaper
editor and her assistant are looking at a headline, or they're writing the headline of uh
the newest mystery heart condition fatality, where it seems as if their hearts have been
crushed.
So yeah, I think that was the first funeral we see him at.
So that one he has no real connection to at all.
We don't ever realize whether he knows this person or not.
He didn't pass them on the street.
He didn't see the number on the forehead.
None of that happens in this particular first scene.
Okay, so in the first scene, he is a true creeper.
think he goes to kind of suss out and feel out who is at the funeral, who is upset by it,
and what he can pray on for that type of person, right?
So he knows he's gonna go to this woman's house later whose husband has died, right?
He wants to get a feel for how upset she is, what type of person she is, so that he can
adequately sort of like pray on what he needs to pray on and push the buttons that he
needs to push to make his case.
I feel like that's what he does.
That's why he's here.
handing out your business card at someone's funeral and grieving, let's say their deceased
child kind of a dig.
Well, I like the fact that he doesn't just hand them out though.
I like the fact at the end of the scene, frustrated by the fact that I guess he doesn't
find any clients.
He just spins around like a cartoon drunk and hurls a handful of the cards at the thing
and then proceeds to wreck his car down the side of a mountain.
I feel like they're missing an article in their newspaper that we watched them try to
write at the beginning of the movie, which is, who the fuck is this guy?
And why does he keep wandering about the town like a drunk and attacking funerals?
The direction of that scene has got to be one of the weirdest things I've seen in forever.
You put yourself in the director's seat and go, okay, Marty, I like what you're doing
here.
I think you're doing great.
But can you get a little wilder?
Can you be like a cloud?
Can we get you to just spin around a little bit and maybe, I don't know, throw the car?
I love how you call him Marty.
Which reminds me there is a tremendous blooper reel.
Have you guys seen this on YouTube of the times that he called director dot.
Yes, it's so good.
They're like, it's not Doc.
Well, and you know, they had to figure out a way to put in a scene where he's driving so
crazy that he could crash into a white fence.
You understand this, right?
He's done it in three films.
Doc Hollywood, Back to the Future and The Frightened.
now, yes.
Okay.
Yeah.
It's just, it's an odd setup.
It's an odd way to visualize.
And I still think that, you know, mean, it really, it's Peter Jackson finding himself at a
younger age.
It just made me realize that he is kind of tormented as a character, right?
Having gone through what he did with his wife and I don't know, it didn't throw me.
think he's a crack.
And let me state a caveat.
I'm gonna nitpick a lot about different scenes and different things that I thought was
kind of crazy and odd and especially from the mindset of a person in 2025 who remembered
when this movie came out in theaters and saw it in theaters in the 90s.
ah I love this movie.
It's weird as shit, but I love it.
It's very fun.
I enjoy it.
love it.
Yeah, I thought it was fantastic.
I loved every second of it.
Yeah, it was pretty much flop when it came out.
Critics liked it.
Yeah, audiences were a little non plus by it.
I liked it the first time I saw it.
Really innovative, tons of special effects, especially for 1996.
oh incredible.
Are we?
Yeah, was.
Didn't it break the record for the number of effects at the time?
Yeah, they spend an extra like six months or something working on a fact alone.
All right, our next character that we meet is Dr.
Lucy Linsky.
By the way, that name Linsky was inspired by actress Melanie Linsky from Peter Jackson's
film from two years earlier, Heavenly Creatures.
How about that?
So we follow Dr.
Linsky.
She goes to the spooky ass house.
It's the Bradley home to visit her patient, Patricia Ann Bradley, who's played by Dew
Wallace.
I can't.
can't.
I mean, I was immediately sold.
I mean, just say Dee Wallace and I'm in.
I don't care what it is.
I am obsessed with her since I was a little girl watching ET.
I was so thrilled when I saw her name up on that screen.
In the scene, we find out that she was at 15 years old and accomplice to this hospital
shooting of her boyfriend, Johnny Bartlett.
Together they killed 12 people before being apprehended.
Bartlett got the chair.
Her boyfriend, Johnny Bartlett, played by Jake Busey.
Jake Busey at his creepiest and man, can he do creepiest.
Well, given who his dad is, that's not really a stretch.
Yeah.
His father was the poet Lawrence Ferlinghetti.
His dad is Gary Busey.
oh
That motorcycle wreck that he had in the late 80s, early 90s, that's why Gary Busey is the
way Gary Busey is, right?
Because his head hit the curb with no helmet on.
I mean, I've, yeah, I doubt it.
He was in a coma and I'm sure a lot of brain swelling.
think that's why we have Gary Busey the way Gary Busey is.
I think it's the way why we have a world with Alex Jones the way Alex Jones is because
apparently Alex Jones was body slammed on concrete in high school as well.
He was in a coma and we get Pizza Gate.
Yay!
That's interesting, okay.
All right.
Well, thank you traumatic head injuries for keeping it interesting.
You know I'm saying like let's never let it get a boring
Maybe a little trauma in the head is why we got the frighteners because of something we'll
find out later.
When we get there, we'll chat about this.
I have thoughts.
So Dr.
Linsky is in the Bradley home and we get the impression that she's being held captive.
And we've already seen at this point that there is some evil in that home.
um The opening scene of the movie is Patty Anne being chased around by this wraith type
figure that we just don't know what it is.
So that's where we are at that point.
So as we talked about, we saw Michael J.
Fox's character, Frank Bannister hit that fence.
So he sends his frighteners to the home of Dr.
Linsky and her doofus husband, Ray.
30 years later, that guy, that actor, that performance, not a huge fan.
Yeah.
What?
I loved Ray.
You love Ray?
Are you kidding me?
Ray is fantastic.
What an asshole.
I mean, he played a good asshole, I guess, but I didn't love him.
I just think he's undeserving of Lucy as I think that's how it should be.
I we could cheer for Michael J.
Fox to uh maybe woo her at some point.
I mean, the ghost has an arc.
mean, he dies, but then he kind of learns a little bit better, and then he sacrifices
himself to save his girl towards the end.
mean, is he a good person?
No, of course not.
He's right.
He's not supposed to be a good person.
But at the same time, I thought the performance was good.
thought whoever the guy was, I forget his name, but he's been in like 100 things.
Peter Dobson.
So why you looking at Chad GPT?
Bannister hits his fence and as a way to, I guess, call it even, he sends his frighteners
to the Linsky home.
They have what appears to be a poltergeist, the bed spinning Dr.
Linsky on the bed.
And they happen to see the card for Frank Bannister.
Call Frank Bannister, comes over, said you got a classic poltergeist and does his little
mumbo jumbo thing and boom, poltergeist gone.
And then let me bring something else about our friend, Mr.
Peter Dobson, in this scene that I really enjoyed.
He gets so upset at the price that Michael J.
Fox gives him, the $450.
And you think about that for a brief second.
Okay.
Maybe it's the mid-20s Trump economy brand and looking backwards at the 90s with a sort of
hungry eyes of when, but $450 is reasonable for removing poltergeist from a single
location.
You do that nowadays, that is easily $1,500, $2,000.
You're not getting out of there for under four figures.
I'm sorry, sir.
Frank Bannister is doing you a deal, and you need to step back and just say thank you,
sir.
the price of inflation and paranormal taxes.
I don't even want to know what that would cost you these days.
And allow me to jump here just real fast.
uh Mr.
Peter Dobson also played, by the way, Elvis Presley in a little movie, I don't know if
you've ever heard of it, called Forrest Gump.
Subpoint, do we see Elvis's face in Forrest Gump?
It's behind him.
It's an over the shoulder of Elvis and you just see for us, right?
Yeah.
wow.
So it could have been a mannequin with a mechanical hip for all intents and purposes.
Mm-hmm.
Could've been me.
So in this moment, I will forgive you guys for not knowing that fact.
Thank you.
Because technically, it would have been tough to know.
But me and Chad will let you slide this once.
Thank you.
But Bart, what you're missing is what he sees on his forehead, right?
Important moment.
he's at their home he sees for the first time a glowing number number 37 on Ray's forehead
and he obviously is Really taken aback by this more than you would expect a paranormal
person to be by a number on someone's forehead We don't know what that is yet, but is a
glowing number 37 on Ray's head
Anyone's gonna get taken aback by that.
I'm gonna at least double take
Even if you walk through graveyards and see ghosts everywhere of all different makes and
models.
Bart, we're gonna get there, okay?
When we get there, you're gonna understand how I feel about that particular trope.
That's all context.
All right, after that, we see Bannister go back to his, as you mentioned, his unfinished
home.
And we really see that his only friends are his frighteners, uh played by Chy McBride, Jim
Fife, and the Judge, a decrepit old ghost who just wants to go lay in his grave, played by
John Astin, best known for his role as Gomez Adams on the fucking original Adams Family
series, and the father of Sean Astin, who played Sam Gamgee,
and the Lord of the Rings trilogy.
Yeah, and apparently he talked to John and convinced him to be in the film because of his
experience with Peter Jackson on The Frighteners.
By the way, Judge's makeup effects were designed by Rick Baker.
I saw that!
How about that?
He is the best.
Around this point, I it's like the next scene after we see Bannister's home, we get to see
a cameo of Peter Jackson himself as a multi-pierced leather-clad punk and a Grim Reaper
t-shirt.
Robert Zemeckis was probably like, listen, I was in the Jeep and back to the future.
You got to put yourself somewhere in here.
You know what?
You brought it up.
I didn't notice it.
I didn't catch that.
Not in 96, not in 2025.
It's a great shot too.
It's a great little swish up down, zoom in on his shirt, pull back out.
Yeah, there's some very Beetlejuice moments and I mean, it's not.
I mean, obviously the music.
The score was by Danny Elfman.
it is not as bong bong bong bong bong bong bong as Beetlejuice, but great soundtrack.
In fact, I think that's my next purchase on vinyl.
It's pretty dope.
Very quickly, it was very abrupt.
We find out a few days later that Ray Linsky has died of this mysterious heart condition.
And so Bannister goes to Ray's funeral.
We don't know how many days it's been at this point.
We find out a little bit later, but you know, it's like, it months later?
You just don't know.
So he goes to the funeral with the ghost of Ray.
Well, and see, that's the next funeral we find Bannister at.
And I think that that makes that make a lot more sense, because at this point, he's not
just showing up to kind of shill his product or throw business cards at strangers.
He is there to help Rey sort of deal with this moment because Rey is freaking out, and he
doesn't really want to, but he's sort of...
He's an unwilling participant.
Rey is kind of dragging him along, and he's just not letting Rey go by himself.
And I think that's kind of nice.
It shows that, you know, shows that there's a redemption arc for Mr.
Bannister.
coming down the line.
also key in a Peter Jackson film, right?
Yeah.
And then he passes another 90s trope that I truly enjoy, the over-enthusiastic army drill
sergeant type character, the...
Ronald Lee Ermery from My Basically uh
I want his career.
I'm sorry.
except for the years in the military.
all the times after that.
I mean just the voiceover work, all the Toy Story movies.
yeah, that character was his career.
He's like, guys, this is so fucking easy.
Right?
Every day.
Just phone it in, here you go.
Because everyone freaked out about his performance in Full Metal Jacket and so they're
like, well, you're that guy and he's like, I will gladly be that guy.
literally sets up how these characters will present themselves until now.
mean, I don't think you've ever seen a drill sergeant not do that shtick in a movie sense.
Name one.
This would be a great time for a commercial break, by the way.
Give us 30 seconds for sponsorship ads.
Lot of mattresses, guys.
What do you think of them?
They're soft, they're comfortable.
Back to the show.
um This is another jump in time where like, long has it been?
The next scene, we see a dinner between Frank Bannister, Dr.
Linsky and the ghost of Ray.
They all have dinner together.
And I really liked this scene.
I've always liked this scene.
Again, I think Frank is showing a little kindness there.
I'm sure he has other intentions, but.
movie really doesn't work without this scene.
This scene is sort of the glue, right?
Because this is where and how he proves himself to her that he's just having a
conversation with Ray.
He's relaying what Ray is saying to her and it validates for her that he's not a crackpot
and a snake oil salesman, right?
But that this is legitimate.
And then so their relationship can grow from there basically because of that scene because
they've built trust.
So I liked it.
And we get to find out also that Ray's even more of a heel.
She wants to know where her $16,000 is and Ray tells Frank that he blew it all on a bad
investment.
And he didn't want to pony up the dough for Frank Vanister, the 450, but he doesn't mind
blowing that 16K.
There you go.
That's why he gets so upset about the 450 is because he doesn't have any money at all.
It's all back.
There you go.
The Peter and Fran, they weave it all in.
Also something we learned is that whatever small town they happen to be in right now has a
medieval style.
Obviously you can't get too much into setup, right?
We can't always show the exterior of the restaurant so that we know what it's called.
can't always.
There are some more, more egregious and less egregious versions of not having a setup, but
I do love the idea that you just appear in a medieval times and you're just sitting there
on a, not a date, but he has flowers for some reason.
You never see the flowers get by, you never see anything.
He's just.
kind of there in the midst of this.
I enjoyed that.
I thought it was jarring and interesting.
The dinner serves another purpose too.
goes to the bathroom and in the men's room, we see the next victim.
A lot of kills in this movie.
For just a fun comedy horror, there are a lot of kills, especially later when we see
hospital stuff.
So in the restroom, Bannister, first he sees a man with yet another number on his head.
The wraith appears and kills the man right before him.
We see it all starting to come together, but now Frank Bannister has been...
the last person to see two people who are now dead alive.
it's starting to seem a little suspect.
police get involved, kind of.
love that coffee.
Yes, agreed.
Sort of that naivete and just a nice guy.
everything points to Frank Bannister.
was like, ah, it's small town.
know, love Frank's Frank's a good guy.
He's been through a lot.
You know, come on, let's just, let's just work this out.
I like that he talks to him in the way a police officer would talk to a detective and in
no way, shape, form is frank a detective.
Like if you were just standing outside and a cop was talking to an architect like, now let
me get your thoughts on this case, Frank Lloyd Wright.
How do you feel?
Who do you think the murderer is?
I think that shows the cops distrust in his coworkers.
He doesn't trust their opinion.
And it's a low talent pool in Fairwater, California.
Wink.
So because Frank was seen as the last person to see the guy live, they bring Dr.
Linsky into the police station to answer some questions as a material witness.
And there at this police station, I'm gonna really milk this for dramatic reasons.
We get our first glimpse of special agent.
Milton Dahmers of the FBI, played by the one and only Jeffrey Combs.
Now, Combs, as almost anyone who would listen to this podcast knows, is best known for
Stuart Gordon's Reanimator, Reanimator 2, and From Beyond.
I personally, I'm a bigger fan of From Beyond and the Reanimator series, but hey, we agree
to disagree.
Combs has been in eight HP Lovedcraft adaptations as of today, the year of
No.
How about that?
I step out on a very thin branch here and say that his performance is my favorite in this
movie.
This was one of my questions to Bart.
My question was, Jeffrey Combs as Dammers, over the top genius or just too weird?
I think we know Brandon's answer.
My answer in the 30 years since I first saw this has completely flipped.
When I first saw this almost 30 years ago, I thought it was over the top.
I thought it was distracting and I thought it should have been dialed back.
Now here we are 29 years later and I enjoy every second of it.
When he keeps dodging in and out behind the wall to take a peek at her for the first time
and he's afraid to go in.
I love every second that he's on screen.
just to talk about how they did narrative stories in the 90s.
There is not a ton of backstory that tells you why he's that way, who he is, where he
comes from.
He literally just wanders out of the woods as an FBI agent.
Is it too much?
Sure.
But then again, remember this is Peter Jackson.
If Peter Jackson didn't want it, Peter Jackson would just ask you to do it again.
It's not like this is.
Peter Jackson's first student movie and he's like, I don't know how to talk to actors.
You got to look at it from the perspective of this is what he wanted in the moment.
And I think the reason why you have it is, okay, you have cartoony ghosts, regular people,
you need a cartoony person to balance the visual aspect of the movie out in front of you.
You need a weirdo from the police side, because if you don't, you have a villain, right?
The ghost who you barely ever hear.
until the end of the movie.
You really don't have a great antagonist to Marty McFly's journey in this movie.
You have to have the weirdo.
And I think Jeffrey Combs does a really good job of playing an insane person.
I think that Peter Jackson as a horror fan was a little starstruck by having Jeffrey Kohn.
I think so.
I think that's a thousand percent true and just let them run wild and so just do whatever
you want to do.
and was in love with every second that he was on screen.
I mean, apparently the haircut, all of his mannerisms, the bulletproof vest, like
apparently that was just all him.
And Peter Jackson was like, go.
I'm just going to turn the camera on.
Just you go.
This character reminded me, which I thought was interesting, this character reminded me of
Judge Doom from Who Framed Roger Rabbit.
I thought it was very similar in its kind of wackadoodleness.
And I think it's also interesting that it's Christopher Lloyd, right?
So Doc?
Yep.
But I'm just gonna go out on a limb and say, I thought he was in a different movie and I
didn't enjoy it.
I just thought it was distracting and it seemed to come out of nowhere.
And his Go To Eleven was way too 11 for me.
And I thought it was like just off putting in weird.
And Brandon, think maybe part of that was because he just wandered out of the woods and
was like, I am a crazy person and I suddenly showed up and I have a weird haircut and I
like Nazis.
And I was like, I am a little, this is a little jarring.
There's no real reason why he's so mad at Frank.
I kept waiting for the other shoe to drop.
I was like, there's got to be something that is gonna be revealed about why this is
happening, why he's so intense on this.
And there just seemed to be no connection.
And so maybe that's kind of what it was.
Then I was like, meh, I don't get it.
You share my opinion of 29 years ago.
Let's check back 29 years from now.
I'll be dead.
So you and Brandon discuss 29 years from now and see if your opinion changes.
Fine, sir, you give yourself not nearly an- What are you, 43?
Give me a break.
20 years now.
I felt the same way back then.
Love it now.
To Lindsay's point, you do have to let go of the fact that you know nothing of this
character.
You just have to kind of say, okay, yeah, I guess I don't really know anything about this
character.
I'm just gonna watch him be weird and I'm gonna enjoy that aspect of it.
And this is gonna be one of those moments where I'm gonna remind you that I love the
movie, but I'm still gonna be mildly critical.
There's a lot in this movie that does not have any real setup at all.
A lot of this.
This movie consistently asks you, okay, why does the ghost look like death?
At no point in time does he fly under a sheet and go, hey, this is a great thing.
You know, there's no, like I said, there's no backstory to it.
You just kind of have to either get into it and enjoy the ride or probably the reason why
it was somewhat of a box office flop, or you just kind of say, Hey, I don't really
understand what's going
Yeah, jumping ahead without giving too much away.
The Grim Reaper character, that character gets to spend the afterlife looking pretty dope.
Right?
Scary ass character.
And everyone else just has to die in their clothes of that era that they died in.
No explanation at all about that.
I think he did some pretty terrible things right and so I'm a believer in what you do in
your life It is indicative of what happens to you in the afterlife.
He earned it.
He had killed lots of people
It's like a merit badge.
Like the merit badge sign.
He earned it.
true, Jeffrey Cohen's character does just show up, no backstory, but they start piecing it
together a little bit.
he's obviously, anytime Dr.
Linsky raises her voice, he covers his ears, steps away, and he tells the cop that he
can't handle women yelling.
And then the cop tells Dr.
Linsky that he spent a lot of time inside cultists.
Okay.
oh
That was the weirdest thing to be like his crutch, right?
Like he can't listen to a woman yell at him.
And let me say this, this scene has my favorite line in the entire movie.
The cop puts his hand on Jeffrey Combs shoulder, he snaps around, you are violating my
territorial bubble.
I'm sorry.
Even though I enjoy it now, it feels like this scene with Jeffrey Combs is 30 minutes
long.
It does.
It does.
Yeah.
Yes, don't disagree, but I did enjoy it.
I've been in both camps though, I understand.
Alrighty, so again, another quick jump.
There are a lot of quick jumps in scenes here.
At a certain point, you just start accepting them.
So he's driving with his frighteners and sees a portal to the afterlife open up over a
museum.
And so he instinctively goes to the museum to see who was dying.
Every time someone dies, does
small town.
He's going back home and he just happens to pass the museum bar.
That's fair enough.
It doesn't have to make sense.
Okay, see I would argue that 90 % of this movie makes no sense, but this scene made sense
to me.
He's driving around.
He's like, man, I just saw this guy his heart got crushed.
This is kind of crazy.
There's not a lot of death in town.
I apparently see big tunnels to the afterlife and hey look, there's one.
I'm gonna go figure out what's happening here.
Yeah, investigative curiosity.
curious cat that Frank Bannister is goes into the museum just in time to see one of the
spirits leaving the body of a new victim.
And this effing scene, all hell breaks loose and is probably the most botched local police
force response other than Yuvaldi.
than Yuvaldi.
Oh my god, could you imagine the paperwork?
Supposedly, every time you pull your gun out, you're supposed to do paperwork, right?
These two cops have to go back and write a fucking novel about when we walked in, a guy
yelled at us, we just opened fire.
We're like, let's just shoot at everything.
All of the natural artifacts are just totally destroyed.
Can we talk about it, please?
Yes.
Can we please talk about it?
Yes.
Yes.
So at this point, during the melee, Frank also sees a number on the head of Magda Reese
Jones, the newspaper editor.
So she's an ex-victim.
The Wraith is still in the room flying around and trying to kill her.
As they're shooting at him, the Frighteners show up to help him escape the cops who are
apparently have unlimited supply of and just shooting the shit out of all the artifacts in
this museum.
So the judge shows up and with his six guns, starts shooting the wraith and it works.
For the first time we see that the ghost can affect the other ghost.
So he's shooting this wraith and it's knocking him down and the judge is feeling his oats.
Is that a saying?
Yeah, I think it works.
Throwing something.
sowing his seeds of love.
No, that comes later.
He's feeling frisky because his manhood has been returned.
So he goes into a sarcophagus and has sex with a mummy.
You see, this is something you could do in the 90s.
I don't know that you write this in 2025.
No!
I think that the pitch meeting stops right there.
hey, by the way, in middle of the gunfight, we're gonna have a ghost.
I don't wanna say assault a mummy, but maybe assault a mummy.
I mean, at no point in time do we see any consent in this scene.
He says, I love it when they lay still like that.
The camera is right on him when he comes up from the sarcophagus and it's just looking
dead at the camera.
And he says, I like it when they lie still like that.
I like I let out an audible scream when I was watching this movie and I was like, no, that
did not just happen.
I had to pause it.
cannot believe that just happened.
Somehow, I don't know why.
I don't know for what reason.
It went straight over my head the first time I saw it.
I don't know if I just wasn't paying attention because there was so much freaking chaos.
And maybe that's why Universal decided to keep it in because apparently it was so
outrageous, they almost cut it.
um
There are times when it played, like on TV and stuff like that, they would cut that scene
out.
of their hand because it was his butt kept coming in and out of the sarcophagus to show
that he was humping it.
I would love to hear a meeting with the studio where Peter Jackson's saying, uh guys,
trust me, you're gonna need this scene.
This scene is vital.
We're trying to figure out what comic relief is in this movie.
We were leaning for Jeffrey Combs, but he's gone way off on the right side of it.
the ghosts are kind of funny, but borderline racist a couple of times.
What can we do?
What if, what if the old gunslinger rapes Sarkofis?
Is that a joke that we want to throw into the movie?
Like, it's just, it's just rough.
It's just a rough and odd aside.
It's too much.
Now that he's had his dry ectoplasm-less release, Bannister's character kidnaps Reese
Jones to try to escape the wraith who's trying to kill her.
sure out in the scene is that what I do I remember that right
punches her out and throws her over his shoulder and runs her out to the car.
Once again, this is very indicative of the 90s vision of women, okay?
It's just not what it is now.
We'll just put it that way.
Yes.
So I think this was the Wraith chase scene.
So he's trying to get away while the Wraith is chasing the car.
The Frighteners are trying to help, but uh...
may I say this is the scene that I remember.
This is from the 30 years later, the vision of death holding on to the top of the car as
they race through town, throwing in and out, bouncing all over the houses.
I mean, this, think, is in terms of effects in this movie, I think this is where it really
shines.
Like, it looks creepy.
And as an inventive and imaginative person, I always carried that scene forward and like
would look up at buildings like...
How cool would that be if the little thing was like zipping across the buildings and
jumping down at you?
Like it's, it's pretty tight.
I enjoyed this, this sequence probably the most.
That scene made you feel alive.
Sure.
How ironic.
Yes, I mean other things too.
Yes, but yes definitely alive like jazz little
Jazz, but only modern jazz.
Not that boring classic stuff.
Not that Dave Brewback.
Not Dave Brubach.
don't know if you know that he's pronounced it.
That's how he pronounces it.
So the Wraith chases Bannister and Reese Jones into a wooded area, which just happens to
be the same spot where Bannister had the car accident that killed his wife.
Something we forgot to mention earlier during the interrogation scene between Jeffrey
Combs and Dr.
Linsky, he tells her that Bannister had been drinking the day of the car accident and that
he had a box cutter in his car, which is so specific that someone would know he always
carries a box cutter in a toolbox in his car.
and that that box cutter was missing and also that Bannister's wife had the number 13
carved into her forehead as she lay dying.
with his big initials on that box cutter.
F-B.
Look, I cannot tell you the number of times people have swiped my goddamn box cutter.
like, give me my box cutter back.
And I like, can you prove it?
You don't have, there's no initials on it.
BS uh
It says G-B-S on it.
I apologize, Bart.
I think I just gave you a new first name.
So sorry.
Jeff.
Jeff Bart Shannon.
Spelled with a G.
Not the J-Jeff, the G-Jeff.
Did we also, okay, in that scene, and by the way, I do think it is interesting that the
cop knows what the box cutter looks like with no real reason to have ever known.
I mean, if it's missing from the murder scene, first off, how does he know it's missing?
Because how do you know it was there in the first place?
Second off, how does he know all of the fun sort of like nitpicking story nonsense?
Let me set it up real quick.
They're being chased by the Wraith and they have a crash in the woods.
The car flips over and she crawls out of the car as Michael J Fox is laying there stunned.
And then the Wraith shows up.
The flashback scene that Frank has of his wife's death and that the story of his wife's
death, the story of the argument is, well, she as a woman would like a flower garden in
their house, but he as a man wants a sports ball in his face.
And then apparently this argument is so heated that it carries on to the car later.
They're driving down the road.
She is like, flowers are pretty, Frank.
he's like, basketballs are pretty too, Sharon.
And then he dares so deeply into this argument that he just simply does not turn because
that is the crux of both of the accidents.
There's a turn, he could take it, but he doesn't.
He goes straight head off a cliff.
Watch the effects.
Head off a cliff both times and then slams into the woods.
Thoughts, feelings, and emotions.
What do we think?
Brandon, so I think your opinion of this shows that you're in a healthy relationship.
You are correct I love my wife and we are very happy.
Because a fight about a basketball court versus a flower bed is never just a fight about a
basketball court versus a flower bed.
Correct.
It goes so much deeper, so much farther back.
Yeah.
It's hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of unresolved fights that just boil over and get
bigger and bigger every single argument.
What I'm trying to say is that it was tropey.
It's a tropey argument.
It was very tropey.
It was so tropey, it kind of pulled you out of the experience.
100%.
It felt a little lazy.
And his wig was bad.
His word was terrible in that, yes.
I guess Rick Maker.
I just don't understand why he can't turn.
The whole movie, he just keeps driving straight off clips into fences and off shit.
It's just turn.
Is it your car?
Maybe it's the old car.
It doesn't have power steering on that thing.
can't make a right or a left with it.
But in this scene, Reese Jones, the editor of the paper, is yet another victim of the
mysterious crashed heart.
And we witness the Wraith character kill her and she's floating up into the afterlife and
says to Frank, you know, calls him a murderer, said, you killed your wife and you you
killed me.
Would you think there'd be a little afterlife awareness?
Yeah.
To know who was your killer?
The big...
Were you not paying attention, lady?
You were right there.
and do ghosts haunt the wrong people sometimes?
Like, you killed me, I'm avenging you.
It's like, I have never met you.
I wasn't even living in the state at the time.
Sorry, thank you.
So at this point, he's been the last person with four victims to see them alive.
So he finally just gives up, turns himself in, defeated.
Dr.
Linsky goes investigating and ends up at Bannister's house with her ghost husband in tow.
And while she's there, she overhears a voice message from Mrs.
Bradley saying that there is an evil in their home and it's come for Patty Anne.
So Dr.
Linsky goes there.
Patty hides her in the closet because she doesn't want the mom to know she's there.
And in the closet at the Bradley home, she finds the box cut.
Infamous box cutter.
The box cutter.
How does she know it's Frank's box cutter?
She's been told at this point that the box cutter with his initials on it, FB.
So that doesn't belong to Frances Bartlett.
Barksdale.
mean, there's the thousand different FBs in that town.
How embarrassing would that be if she busts it out like, this is Frank's.
Like, no, that's Fred's.
That's Fred's.
We're not murderers at all.
Yeah, there's Johnny Bartlett, there's the Bradley family, there's the Bannister family,
there's a lot of bees going on.
lot of
You had to turn your brain off a lot in the 1990s.
I'll just take it.
Grain of salt.
There's only one FB in town.
will say we're missing a little kind of fun gag that I thought was in here that I really
enjoyed is when Jeffrey Combs is on a rant in the police station and he's like, what?
I'm sorry, what do you think?
Frank Bannister is just gonna walk in the door.
Oh, that's a great bit.
Very funny scene.
just gonna walk in the door and turn in himself.
It's just not gonna happen.
And the deputy just kinda like saunters away and he's like, come on in, Frank, what would
you like to say?
And I was like, my God, that was played so perfectly.
The setup was great.
I thought that was a great gag.
I did enjoy that.
The comedy in this are the ghost and Jeffrey Combs.
And occasionally the cop and it just more in his delivery because his delivery he's got a
really funny delivery.
Everything else it's a spooky movie.
But the ghosts are silly funny and Jeffrey Combs is over the top.
and completely necessary.
The movie is not as fun if you pull the caveat.
Yeah
my god, yeah, really dark, just murder after murder after murder.
How can he see the murder?
Because he murdered.
Come on, break it up a little bit.
So Lucy finds this box cutter and that's her moment of realizing, oh, okay, Mrs.
Bradley did it, which is a very odd stretch.
So she goes to the jail pretending to be his doctor to therefore, guess, for a psych
visit.
And while they're in the cell and they have their moment, because he's kind of given up at
that point and they have a moment, and then the God dang Wraith shows up in the jail.
What a small place for a Wraith to show up.
You would think there would be some sort of boundaries.
uh
Very nice fight scene.
Well done in that tiny space.
Very believable.
Much more tension because Lucy can't get out because everything's going crazy.
No, I liked that a lot.
And I couldn't help but think this, it initially grabs her heart and starts crushing her
heart.
Right.
And then the fighters show up and protect her.
And then she gets her heart crushed again later and it's like, yeah, I don't know where
your life's gonna go, but at some point that heart condition is gonna get you.
yeah.
yeah, yeah, yeah.
You're not long.
You're on borrowed time at this point.
Is that like a final destination moment?
At some point it's coming for you, Luz.
Incidentally, that's my favorite horror comedy series.
I cannot get over the fun Rube Goldberg nonsense that they keep throwing these people
into.
Adorable.
Let me run through this real fast.
Okay, so they're in the jail.
Lizzie fights her way out of the jail cell, Frank Dinto.
They call for the guard.
Michael J.
Fox knocks him out by.
Throw in the door in his face and then he falls down.
Yep.
Okay.
And Jeffrey Combs shows up and Lucy sprays him with a fire extinguisher.
And this is a great physical gag.
Jeffrey Combs falls on the floor in a cloud of fire extinguisher smoke and Michael J.
Fox kicks what we assume is Jeffrey Combs character and his gun pops up into the air.
So cartoony and fun.
That is a good scene.
is,
And this is when he tells Lucy, uh, there's only one way to defeat him.
gotta be a ghost and big leap of faith on the doctor's part.
She puts them in a freezer, gives him a shot to slow his heartbeat.
with the intention of you've got 20 minutes, your flesh starts to become damaged at 20
minutes.
So I have to revive you in 20 minutes.
have 20 minutes to defeat Johnny Bartlett.
And by the way, Frank Bander says he doesn't look at her and go, now why 20 minutes
though?
Can we go over the science behind this arbitrary number of 20 minutes?
So 19, it's better for me?
If I can do this in 15 minutes, do I get out of this alive?
Much better.
Yeah, she's the doctor.
She knows.
He just trusts him.
And the type of doctor she is, a psychiatrist.
huh, that's right.
But she still had to learn all that.
I have killed several people for 20 minutes.
So here we go.
uh
I know that 20 minutes is the max.
So we have to bring you back in 20
And then he looks back and goes, you have 20 years with that heart crushing thing, just so
you know that.
You 20 years to figure that out.
So he goes in the freezer waiting to freeze to death.
so yeah, old MJF passes away in the freezer.
On the outside of the freezer, special agent Milton Dommers shows up again, always a dick,
always there at the wrong moment to ruin everything.
She says, need to revive him in 20 minutes.
And he says, no, you don't.
And kidnaps her, takes her to the police car and handcuffs her to the backseat of the car.
They get to the cemetery and
And this is another scene that slightly suffers from no backstory, because you really
don't know why Milton wants Frank to die in this moment.
Well, I thought this was the time that they were going to tell me why he's here.
And they didn't.
And I was like, mm, all right.
We do get my second favorite quote from Jeffrey Combs at this point.
So Lucy's locked in the back of the car.
She starts screaming, which we've already established that he can't handle when women
scream.
So he turns up the radio and it's Sonic Youth's version of Superstar by The Carpenters.
First time I ever heard the cover.
em And then it got a lot of airplay in the nineties.
So he gets out of the car and opens his shirt to show her all of the scars on his chest
and says, my body is a roadmap of pain.
Ha ha ha!
Now please, Peter, stop.
Stop the rest of this movie.
Put the fucking brakes on it.
Who is this guy?
Why does he have all of this stuff?
And okay, at this point I thought, ah, now I see what he's doing.
He is going to become Johnny Bartlett's new vessel.
That's the thing that's gonna happen, right?
He's gonna eat the ashes.
Yeah, I thought there was something like that or that they were close friends or he knew
the Bartlett.
I mean, I thought that was just there was there's going to be something that or he is a
ghost.
or a third option, nothing happens and we never
I mean, it does seem kind of logical that there would be somehow, you know, he was a
disciple of Johnny Bartlett or something like that.
But I kind of like it where he's just this rogue agent who spent most of his life in cults
and a lot of cutting, a lot of torture, and it just made him the man he is.
Like he wanted to be Patricia and he wasn't.
So he's taking this opportunity to help Johnny from the other side or whatever.
I just thought there was gonna be something, but you whatever.
So here we are, Michael J.
Fox is a ghost.
And also you find out it's really easy to get out of a handcuff situation because there's
always just a loose screw in the car that you can use a nickel and unscrew.
That is a classic thing.
That's why I keep a nickel on me at all times.
For just that scenario.
That is not true.
Please do not.
Just as a disclaimer from the podcast side of the world, please do not think that a nickel
will protect you from the police.
Hang on, I'm reaching into my pocket to grab a nickel.
Don't panic, I'm just getting a nickel.
Bart Shannon said it, so I did it.
As Lucy starts to escape from her handcuff situation, the car starts backing up on its
own.
And Jeffrey Combs thinks he's doing it with his mind.
It's very funny.
It is, it was very funny.
He gets very excited that he's doing it and he's saying, yes, yes, yes.
And as the car's backing away from him and then he realized it's backing too far away.
He's like, no, no.
So he chases after and we see that it's Frank Bannister's ghost driving the car.
get to see the drill sergeant again and the drill sergeant is sort of Jeffrey combsing him
and getting away.
He's a wraith blocking him.
The wraith is there.
The wraith cuts the drill sergeant in half with his scythe.
just rips him in half right as he pulls out his machine guns.
that the- No.
Rey is the first ghost death.
Rey gets thrown in a nice little jump scare moment that we didn't talk about earlier and
lands right on the hood of the car and boom and it's really the only I think jump scarish
moment in the entire movie.
It's a ghost flesh suit.
Everything's been sucked out of him and there's still just the skin.
Because at this point they're still trying to go for the soul eater vibe right there I go
it's the soul grabber getter vacuum thing
This is obviously some entity straight from hell that's completely unrelated to any
character that we've met so far.
spent five or six minutes learning the backstory of.
Exactly.
So here we are in the cemetery and the drill sergeant gets cut in half.
Michael J.
Fox's character gets hold of these ghost machine guns and these machine guns start working
and he starts shooting the Wraith character and the Wraith character starts kind of
breaking up into pieces.
He is battling and doing quite well.
Banish was about to kill Johnny Bartlett.
He's got his scythe and he's hitting him and hitting him and you can tell he's losing his
power and he's dying.
And then just as he's about to do the death blow on Johnny Bartlett, uh
He gets revived.
you
and yank back.
Son of a biscuit.
Damn it.
And now here we are back at the lab and Lucy's boss, another psychologist.
Who is there for no reason?
Where did this person come from?
This is one of those wonderful production meetings that I would have loved to have been a
part of where they ignore the fact that they have let all of this stuff go to nonsense.
Yeah, but I don't believe that Lucy could revive him.
What if we just had another doctor show up?
Do you want to see him park at the building?
No, what if he just like came out of a closet and just like reviving and then disappeared,
never came back again for the rest of the movie?
What do you think?
I think his role was to uh know that someone was helping Michael J.
Fox recover while Lucy went on her next adventure, which was to head to the Bradley house,
which I got to tell you this graveyard scene where he's fighting Johnny Bartlett then gets
revived.
Then Lucy goes to the Bradley house and then I'm to jump ahead.
And then we end up at the old hospital.
That is an adrenaline filled, like 20 minutes fucking action and
gunfire and battles.
It's a, stick around for the third act and you are rewarded with a really action packed
chunk.
Yes, 100%.
So Lucy takes off, goes to the Bradley house, goes inside, immediately runs into Patty
Anne.
She thinks she's going to help Patty Anne escape.
so Patty Anne says, well, let me go see if mother wants to go.
I think that's how that goes down.
Even though mother doesn't want you to leave the house ever.
And now you want to check to see if mother wants to go too.
so later she comes back and says, uh, I talked to mother.
She wants to go as well.
Wait here while she gets ready.
She's got to get her travel box cutter.
Mother doesn't have a go bag, all right?
She's got a pack.
oh She was not prepared to run from the sive.
She's scooting her armoire down the stairs.
So while Lucy's waiting, Johnny Bartlett arrives.
So she's having a conversation with Patty Anne while Patty Anne's also having a
conversation with Johnny Bartlett right beside her and they're discussing killing her.
Another really cool scene, really cool performance by Dee Wallace.
She's having this conversation with a living person while also flirting and uh rubbing the
cheek of her ghost boyfriend as they talk about killing her.
Mm-hmm.
And Busey's performance in this scene is fantastic as well.
mean, now we start to...
This is really where he starts talking, right?
I this is the first scene that he's like, shit, okay, this guy's kind of crazy.
great line when they're talking about killing her because this would make, I think this
would be body count 41, which I think they said would be more than gasey.
Yeah.
But anyway, Johnny Bartlett says that this record should be held by an American.
when you're coming to mass murders, mean, I think it should.
I agree.
Yeah, I agree.
I'm not letting that go to the French.
Are you kidding me?
Come on.
Also, just in a little aside too, just on Dee Wallace, so during filming, her husband
died.
oh That's why she's listed as Dee Wallace Stone.
Her husband at the time, Christopher Stone, died of a blood clot while they were filming.
And so she had to fly back and forth from New Zealand to the US.
So she's going back and forth for all of this during the filming of this movie.
And after the filming ended, she found out that Peter Jackson personally paid.
for all of her flights.
Oh well that's very nice of him.
That's very sweet.
wow, that's gotta be rough too.
And you're that move.
Like that's just...
And it's funny, afterwards she's done a tremendous amount of horror.
So she's not affected by horror.
She's been on a bunch of Rob Zombie films.
Oh God.
yeah.
But like her career has kind of been revitalized over the last decade because of the Rob
Zombie films.
But I got to tell you, the only thing that would make your husband dying while you're
shooting a movie worse is if The Cause of Death was a mysterious heart problem.
Yeah.
Oh, that would be.
it's your blood clot.
It a blood Okay, yeah, sure.
That's kinda fucked up.
Way to go, Peter Jackson.
Yeah, how do you get back in that headspace?
I'd love to know how long it actually was that she was away recovering and then went right
back into this traumatic experience and nailed it.
uh Johnny Bartlett and Patty Ann are trying to decide what they're gonna kill her with.
And I think her line is, I'm in the mood for some vivisection.
yes.
Then she runs upstairs.
Yeah.
Right.
She runs upstairs and finds her mother bloody all over the bed.
That's when Patty Ann starts shooting at her with a shotgun.
J Fox arrives then he starts running towards her at one point.
Oh, no, no, this way.
Like you're running towards a shotgun blast.
Yes.
and mother initially had the shotgun and that's how Patty Anne gets it at the end.
She pulls out mother's old shotgun, blasts open, like blast the hole in the door, all that
stuff.
Okay, go ahead.
Frank Bannister and Dr.
Linsky discovered that the ashes that we thought were Father Bradley, that they're
actually Johnny Bartlett's ashes.
They decide to take the ashes to consecrated ground.
He says, we got to get this to a church.
He says, there's an old chapel at the old hospital.
The old hospital is the old hospital where Johnny Bartlett did his best work.
And he doesn't go hey is there another church in town?
Yeah
Do you think there's another option besides that creepy old hospital?
There's a ton of thousand people.
Surely somebody's got, you know, at least a strip mall Baptist church that we could swing
into real fast, toss these things and be done.
But okay, fine.
Let's go to the most dangerous place possible.
And here's another thought.
If you're wanting to go to hospitals, why not go to the hospital that's functioning?
They have a chapel, I'm sure.
Right.
I'll forget.
uh
But then we can't get the scene, Bart.
You know, we gotta go back.
I think it's the best scene in the movie.
This is the scene that I always remember because it gets really dark.
They get to the old abandoned hospital and then as soon as they get inside trying to find
the chapel, Frank Bannister starts having flashbacks to the day of the shootings.
I just love everything about this.
And so he gets to witness the first kill of a doctor who keeps calling Johnny Bartlett a
moron.
And Johnny Bartlett says, well, I guess you're number one.
I was like, he jumps in front of the bullet for some reason.
Yeah.
No, wait, stop.
then boom.
Yeah.
I have to save this 30 something year old ghost.
So then they continue to try to find the chapel.
Frank Vennerster gets a lot of information from the past as he hears someone explain.
It's on the fourth floor.
Over.
comes back to present day and tells Lucy it's on the fourth floor.
Patty Ann shows up with her shotgun.
Jeffrey Combs shows up with his Jeffrey Combs.
The whole sequence is fantastic.
really enjoy it.
I like just the hair-raising fight scenes.
It's great.
And then of course, the actual conclusion is definitely once again, horrific in a really
well-done way.
Bart, tell us all about
think Patty Anne is the biggest impact at first.
So she's blasting up the place with her shotgun.
Dr.
Linsky gets trapped in an old elevator with the ashes and Frank Bannister goes and hides,
oddly enough, chooses the one floor where most of the shootings took place and crawls
under a bed and hides.
And another great scene of just D.
Wallace's character standing with the shotgun in front of the bed and then just quick cut
to 15 year old.
Patty Anne, same position, holding the gun exactly the same.
Beautiful daylight scene.
And she starts shooting at the place, looking for him, thinks she's got him, and then she
hears the elevator and leaves, just as she's about to uh find Frank Bannister, heads
towards the elevator, and then Frank takes off.
He beats Patty Anne to the elevator.
And she can't get out.
She hands him the urn through the bars, and then she goes down to another floor.
Is this the point where you find the door for the old chapel has been boarded up?
got to have two hands to try to break down a door.
So he puts the urn on a board, precariously placed on a board and he drops a statue on the
board and sending the urn flying into the air.
And then it's caught by Jeffrey Combs, special agent Milton Dahmer's as bad.
He utters my third favorite line of his jerk.
First, he grabs the urn and he goes, Oh, let me guess.
and you must take these ashes to the consecrated grounds to rid the evil of this world.
And he opens up the urn and lets all the ashes out and Frank Vanister goes, you don't know
what you've done.
He says, you're an asshole.
um And Dahmer says, yes, I am.
I'm an asshole with an Uzi.
Now am I right that at some point in time in this scenario Michael J Fox finds the rotten
board right like he steps in the almost falls in it and then later he falls through it am
I correct about that
It's right after this scene because Jeffrey Combs is about to shoot him with the Uzi and
he steps back, sees that there's a hole in the floor and then looks behind him and sees
Patty Anne on the other end of the hallway with her shotgun and he steps through the hole
in the floor and falls through the floor and then she shoots Jeffrey Combs' character in
the face and immediately you see his face as the ghost version of Jeffrey Combs with his
face blown off.
that's right, his whole head explodes, but it's still there in the ghost.
That is a great effect.
That's a great effect.
And then Frank falls one, two floors, like Frank falls, like he goes.
He falls a happy amount.
Yeah, a hefty amount.
Yeah.
So special agent Dahmers is dead.
I Bannister's laying unconscious on the next floor.
Johnny Bartlett shows up and he's excited about Patty Ann killing them.
Patty Ann starts choking Frank Bannister with her shotgun and chokes him.
Yeah.
The man has died twice in the same night.
which will not affect his future health at all.
He will be old age.
I'm not going to give anything away, but I'm just saying theoretically, if Dr.
Linsky and Frank Bannister become a couple, they're both on very limited.
least they know that.
That's, they're made for each other.
Live in the moment,
Hey man, we will get there.
So here we are, MGF.
Portal opens up.
He starts going up into the portal.
Johnny Bartlett is holding down Dr.
Linsky on the floor.
That's right.
Doing a very good job as a ghost holding her down and not letting her up off of the-
assuming about to murder her inches seconds away from from number 43.
I would assume at this
Moments away from number 43 exactly.
we're 44 that I mean, uh, old marty mcfly new zealand style would be
So he's 43, this is 44.
be 44.
So Bannister's floating up into the portal, grabs Patty Anne, which great thing to do,
grab a living person and start taking them up into the effing portal with you.
They start getting sucked up into the portal.
You you got to give it to old Johnny Bartlett.
He's a lover.
He's an old softy at heart.
He can't let the love of his life go up.
So he flies up into the portal to try to save her and grabs her, does successfully pull
her away.
And they start drifting down just as old Frank Bannister starts drifting up to the
afterlife.
he is greeted by.
His ghost buddies, ghost buddies!
But no longer ghosts there now.
Mm-hmm.
Heavenly ghost beach.
And I guess that John Aston was probably at this point so old they were like, yeah, you
don't really want to see John Aston as as a young.
Yeah, yeah, he's tired.
without like serious effects.
They couldn't have made him look young, fresh, and vibrant, which is the point, was to
say, hey, now that you're in the afterlife, you look so much better.
Like you can have cigars.
And also, who's to say he's going to the right afterlife since he's a mummy raper?
Where do you draw the line?
Yeah.
He was gonna get there, and somebody was like, dude, you went too far.
You went too far.
We took that card away real fast after that moment.
Your invite got lost in the mail.
Here is where we have a scene that is both incredibly creepy and also very dated, special
effects wise, but still very creepy.
Both Patty Anne and Johnny Bartlett, as they're laughing like, sayonara, Frank, they start
drifting back down to Earth, but no, everything turns dark.
Uh-oh.
Giant snakes appear and start going through their face orifices.
this was another trope of the 90s.
There were several 90s movies that tried to make you understand what hell would be like.
And then there's like Ghost, and there's a bunch of them where you just see that.
And I thought this one was a particularly interesting, it's not scary until the snake goes
through Bartlett's face and then through his eyes, sewing its way through his eyes.
I was like, that's pretty dark.
That's pretty fucked off.
That's pretty scary.
I'm not a fan of that.
Camera pulls back even further and then we see they're essentially in Hell's rectum.
It's one giant colon of pain.
Yeah, and it turns out it was the monster from Star Wars the whole time.
They were inside of the snake what and then they're sucked in the hell, but guess what
guys?
Did you think the movie was over?
No, it was not because it turns out It's not your time Frank Now how they know that why
they would send him back will remain a mystery for all of
His frightener buddies seem to know why.
They say something like, we've gotten word from the authority figure of the afterlife.
I'm very busy today.
I can't meet with him personally, but tell your friend it is not his time and send his
dead.
We heard from the studio there's a possible sequel.
Frank, you're going back!
So yeah, he does get to see his wife again.
to step backwards and talk about their unhappy marriage, she is not the first person he
sees.
She is the third person he sees.
He likes his ghost buddies more than his wife.
I'm
I think the actress that played Dr.
Linsky is, uh I think she's enchanting.
Yeah.
I think that's why they chose an actress who's kind of enchanting as the future partner
and the past partner as someone who's a little lesser, a little lesser.
I'm going to say it, lesser.
They did that on purpose.
Sure, he loved her at one point, but there's greener pastures down back on earth.
Yeah, no, she looked at her watch.
I was like, shit, I gotta go meet my husband real fast before I continue enjoying heaven.
A little pop down in there.
Hey Frank, it's cool.
Go back, do your thing, whatever.
See you later, goodbye.
He must not know about my heaven family.
Sorry.
I had to move on, Frank.
He comes back to earth, he comes back to life, and so he survived death for the second
time that night, and the scene ends at the hospital.
That's where we end at the hospital.
So, and then we zip down and this is, and I just want to wrap up this little, my thought
here, because there's a thing that the nineties did a lot and that was creating inside
cinema, dangerous tropes that would be universe wrecking if they were real.
And it pulls you slightly out of the moment.
But the final scene, they're having the picnic, the house is getting knocked down.
It's a happy day, but she can see the ghost too.
She can see the ghost.
of Jeffrey Combs in the backseat of the police car as the police officer drives away and
then she says, well, I guess I went through a traumatic instance too.
All right.
Let us just say that this is how this universe works, that every time anything traumatic
happens, you begin to see ghosts.
Okay, let's jump back and make one real point here.
After Frank's wife died, does he go to her funeral?
So the car accident happens.
That's the traumatic moment.
Now Frank can see ghosts.
is the first thing that he does to, I guess, understand this, the scene we don't see,
where he is standing at his wife's funeral trying to adhere to the guilt and the grief of
this moment, but ultimately around him there's like a, there's a drill sergeant over here
yelling at me and there's all of these people falling out of graves everywhere and it's
fucking terrifying.
Like how would you make it through that funeral without literally just shitting your pants
and running for the hills?
You have stated now two people have had traumatic experiences and now can see ghosts.
Okay, so this is 1996.
Let's flash forward five years in the future to 2001.
Now the entire country watches it because that means the entire country.
Now everybody can see ghosts everywhere.
If we go through a traumatic experience.
go forward to 2025.
We're all trauma survivors now, all of us.
We're all surviving trauma.
We all have our trauma.
We're all recovering.
But imagine if on top of all that shit you can still see ghosts.
Everywhere you go there's just ghosts and Trump and you have to handle it all together.
I don't think America survives.
I'm just saying.
I don't think this...
I pray for the day when we do finally get to see the Trump ghost.
That would be there you go be one everyone would be clapping the hammer relapse in his
throat
A lot of work to get there, but you know, it's the little dreams that keeps going.
Before the cop friend does arrive, he arrives as they're having your picnic.
She says, I have something to tell you or I have a surprise for you.
can't remember how she phrased it.
says I have something to tell you and then he cuts her off and the cop car moves away and
he goes he looks unhappy or however she acknowledges the fact that she can see Jeffrey
Combs in the backseat and then the entire world falls apart because now everyone can see
ghosts because everyone has gone through trauma it's a nightmare to live in
You're not thinking about this correctly.
I'm sorry.
You're just not.
It is the trauma that they have been through together.
They have had this experience together.
There are couples that you know that have stayed together because they have experienced
trauma together.
Okay.
She is now completely a part of his world because now she can see the ghost too.
And that just kind of makes everything right for this experience that they've been
through.
So it's not just a random byproduct of trauma that you start to see ghosts.
it were, then I would force trauma on myself so I could see ghosts.
Eventually it would be very hard to even find ghosts traumatic, right?
I mean, because there's like, everybody sees them.
Hey Dave, how's it going?
I lost my foot in a farming accident and now see goddamn ghosts everywhere.
that's a shame.
I do too.
had a bad day at work and now I see ghosts everywhere.
Right, because trauma, by the way, is relative to what you think it is.
I mean, some people are more susceptible to going through trauma than other people.
I mean, it is what it is.
At some point in time, it's just a world of ghosts.
All right, that's it.
That's the frighteners.
uh I want both of you to give me an elevator pitch on what you would tell someone if they
were interested in seeing it.
Lindsay, you go.
Ooh, I would say something like, think Ghostbusters meets Beetlejuice, but directed by
Peter Jackson.
So it's creepier, darker, and way weirder.
I think I would keep it simple and just say, it's Peter Jackson finding his way as a
director, Bob Zemeckis as an executive producer, score by Danny Elfman, great effects for
the time and Jeffrey Combs.
and Jeffrey Combs.
And it's Michael J.
Fox's last leading man role in a feature film.
Was it really?
Yeah.
my God, because of Parkinson's?
Yes, and so he just switched to basically TV series or he was like he did films right but
he was never the leading man again after this in a film.
Wow.
This is his last.
So if you want to watch a fantastic you know swan song performance by a significant actor
from the 80s and an amazing human go watch The Frighteners.
Brandon, what about you?
Elevator pitch.
It is the heartwarming story of a guy giving up on being an architect.
Hahaha!
Ha ha ha ha ha.
Alright guys, this was a blast.
Yes, so good to see you Brandon.
Good to see you too.
Alright, I'm gonna hop off.
Love you guys.
I will see you soon.
Thank you, Brandon.
Thanks for doing this, my man.
See you.
Take care, buddy.
Whoo!
So much.
There's so much going on in that movie.
That was so much fun.
And that was a perfect film for Brandon to be on with us.
Yep, I think so too.
Yeah, there's a lot to unpack on that film.
Hey, that's two episodes in the cam, my friend.
at us go.
Look at us.
We did it.
See you next week, Bart.
uh See you next week.
Bye!
All music for this podcast is provided by MKE.
To hear more of his music, visit his band's website at detectivemusic.com and Detective on
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