Gekke Delly, ja! Gekke Delly, ja! Broodjes zijn goed…

Today’s movie review comes to us from Screambox, or Shoutbox, or shitbox. I don’t know. It’s one of the Amazon channels. Technically released in 2021, The Ghastly Brothers just showed up on streaming in America land at the start of the month. So basically the only place where releasing on streaming would matter. Vertaler hier, deze man is een klootzak.

Ghastly Brothers is a comedy horror movie with more emphasis on the comedy and not so much on the horror. Filmed in good old Dutchland, Ghastly Brothers is about Dutch Ghostbusters. Directed by Michael Van Ostade who also wrote the movie with his brother Andrew James Van Ostade, the film stars two brothers Hans and Wout (Andrew and Michael respectively) who are a couple of goofy goobers who also happen to capture ghosts for a living.

They don’t do a great job, not so much with the catching but their method of disposing said ghosts being leaving them at the person’s house locked up (out of sight out of mind) leading to them mostly not getting paid for their work. Their paths cross with Lilith (Eva Luna Van Hijfte) a young girl who finds herself sent off to boarding school when her mother has to travel around the world in search of a rare bird.

Lilith is not happy with her mother, but she meets new friends at school like the eccentric crazy girl Margot (Nilou Hemat), bedwetter Jimmy (Obe Carton), and obsessive nerd Kasper (Henri Medard) who gets a lot of headaches. Lilith is obsessed with supernatural mystery books and wants to become a paranormal detective when she grows up. So naturally she finds herself obsessed with the two ghost hunting dorks in the van.

Ghastly Brothers is a great movie. The dialogue is witty, the characters are vibrant and energetic without being ridiculous or condescending to the audience, and it’s a fun film to watch with the whole family. It’s very silly and despite the language barrier they manage to nail more jokes than they miss. The child actors are quite talented and once again there aren’t any loose threads that drag the film down.

I also really like the fact that they missed the obvious and lazy child trope of having the mean teacher be a naysaying asshole. The teacher who originally poopoos Lilith on becoming a paranormal investigator actually has an open enough mind to invite the Ghastly Brother to the school’s career day. Because what’s the harm in entertaining a little girl’s dream if only for a day?

It even goes into the realm of deepness, as the ghosts make way for demons that don’t haunt houses but instead haunt minds. The characters will have to confront their own demons if they want to come out of this horror show on top.

My only complaint with Ghastly Brothers are the subtitles. I can’t imagine someone who speaks English as a first language handled the subtitles as they are riddled with spelling and grammar issues. And not the type that would be caused by machine translation, but very clear typos that never got caught or double checked. A lot of them. Stuff like spelling “may be” as “bay be”. There are crappy YouTube channels that manage their subtitles better than this film.

Overall though I will say this was a fun film with great actors and a serviceable plot. Check it out on Screambox.

Rating: A-