Anyone haunted, nay, scared witless by Hollywood’s risk averse dependence on sequels, franchises and spin-offs will turn white at this latest soulless manifestation of the once proud Ghostbusters.

Way back in 1984, Dan Ackroyd, Bill Murray, Rick Moranis, and the late Harold Ramis were the Keystone Cops of poltergeist Rentokil. Their amateur hour approach to the job at hand, their marvellously unreliable hardware and sarky one-liners had spark and smarts and found a place in the hearts of a certain generation of nerds and fans of action-comedy flicks.

We need your consent to load this YouTube contentWe use YouTube to manage extra content that can set cookies on your device and collect data about your activity. Please review their details and accept them to load the content.Manage Preferences

Forty years later, and after four Ghostbusters movies, the chill is gone. The franchise has been allowed to linger and spook anyone who might, you know, think the movie business might dream up something new for younger audiences and maybe older folk jaded by constant retreads.

We need your consent to load this comcast-player contentWe use comcast-player to manage extra content that can set cookies on your device and collect data about your activity. Please review their details and accept them to load the content.Manage Preferences

We speak to OG Ghostbusters star Ernie Hudson

This time out, Gary Grooberson (Paul Rudd) and the Spengler family (Carrie Coon as Callie, Finn Wolfhard as Trevor, and Mckenna Grace as Phoebe) have thankfully moved from rural Oklahoma and are settled back into the New York fire station that was part of the charm of the first movie and gunning their cool Cadillac Miller-Meteor Sentinel ambulance around Gotham kicking ghost ass.

Across town, old hand Ray (Dan Ackroyd) is now running a little shop of antique horrors and a YouTube channel where he uncovers the secrets of the paranormal. He buys an orb-like doohickie of Indo-Assyrian (or something) origin from 2000BC frozen over. This is the property of down on his luck huckster Nadeem (Kumail Nanjiani), who’s inherited it from his late grandmother and has a whole room of this stuff secreted away in his fleapit apartment.

This orb looks like an outsized typeball on an electric typewriter but it can do a hell of a lot more than 120wpm of Sanskrit; it freezes things, people and, as we shall see, the whole of New York. Ho and indeed hum. Meanwhile, Phoebe has been benched from ghostbusting duties because she’s underage and Finn is trying to rid the fire station attic of a returning Slimer.

Anyway, the game is afoot and the gang must stop the unleashed spirit of the orb turning New York into a deep freeze version of Roland Emmerich’s 2012, while being stalked by an ancient entity that looks like something from . . . Roland Emmerich’s Stargate.

Ever with an eye to extending the franchise, we are introduced to some new ghost busters in the shape of English comedian James Acaster as a Q like boffin of the supernatural, Celeste O’Connor, and in a rare highpoint, the always great Patton Oswalt as pugnacious scholar Dr Wartzki.

We need your consent to load this comcast-player contentWe use comcast-player to manage extra content that can set cookies on your device and collect data about your activity. Please review their details and accept them to load the content.Manage Preferences

Watch our interview with Finn Wolfhard and McKenna Grace

The amiable Rudd is left to do his usual clowning around, Bill Murray looks like he’s wondering what time lunch is and Ackroyd at least carries off his role with a degree of good humour sorely missing from the rest of old crew. The heavy lifting is left to the younger cast, scarily setting us up for another serving of this encrusted ectoplasm.

A ghost of its previous cocky and absurd self. Who ya gonna call? Script doctors.

Alan Corr @CorrAlan2