Directed by Ivan Reitman
Starring Bill Murray, Dan Aykroyd, Sigourney Weaver, Harold Ramis, Rick Moranis and Ernie Hudson
Yeah, yeah, I know. It's not a horror movie, yada yada yada. But I'm reviewing it anyway, because (a) it's got more legit frightening things in it than a lot of horror flicks that I HAVE seen, and (2) it's my blog and it has 7 followers.
Well, maybe you've seen it and maybe you haven't, but the trailer for the upcoming Ghostbusters remake is out there. To put it bluntly, yeah, it hasn't gone over very well. The negative fan reaction has been both passionate and hilarious, and the official trailer video itself has more dislikes than likes. And there's no point in dilly-dallying around it: it's justified, because the movie looks f**kin' atrocious. All the charm - gone. All the intelligence - gone. All the sense of fear and dread - gone, and then some. That, and it looks like Leslie Jones is simply going to be screaming all of her lines. The whole trailer makes the movie look like a sledgehammer to the head, and it's a sledgehammer that's nowhere near as much fun as one that Triple H would wield (/tomatoes).
Enough about that. Since fans are so upset about the way that this movie looks, it clearly must mean that the original movie is beloved. Well, it is, and for good reason. 1984, a prime original cast Saturday Night Live group of cutups, fantastic handmade special effects, enough quotable lines to choke a donkey, it's awesome. See that poster above? Simple, classic, and utterly effective, as the hype that this movie had in the buildup to its release built to a fever pitch. The result? A $250 million box office gross on a $30 million budget, a place in the National Film Registry, and getting the 2016 Paul Feig bastardized remake treatment. So what works so well in this movie? Let's take a look.
Meet misfit parapsychologists Peter Venkman (Murray), Ray Stantz (Aykroyd) and Egon Spengler (Ramis). Each of them has an instantly recognizable personality that fit their actors like a glove. You'd guess that Murray would be the wiseass, Aykroyd is the deadpan scientist, and Ramis is the eccentric nerd, and you would be correct on all counts. Each of the main three is awesome here, but Murray particularly devastes, especially in that classic opening scene with his character where he conducts an ESP experiment that consists of him shocking the hell out of a poor sap while doing his best to weasel a date out of the other test subject. It's one of at least 10 classic comedic sequences contained in Ghostbusters, and it's all built around the characters and their intelligence. If you're in the mood to laugh, look no further than this flick.
After capturing video (and some ectoplasmic slime, which Venkman eloquently states is like blowing your nose and keeping it) of a ghost at the New York Public Library, the guys summarily lose their University grants and are forced to take their knowledge and skills into the real world. But Venkman has a plan - they've collected enough data to be able to actually trap ghosts. His idea - professional ghost eliminations, and a potential massive franchising opportunity.
The movie turns into loads of fun in a hurry. Staking their headquarters in an abandoned firehouse, the movie starts hitting its marks fast and furious. The first elimination is an ungodly sequence in an expensive hotel with a legendary ghost based on John Belushi himself. They use weaponized nuclear blasters to stun and trap the ghosts, traveling around town in a beat-up hearse vehicle complete with an overloud siren. Kids in particular just seemed to really connect with this aspect of the film, as this job looked like all kinds of fun to...well, pretty much anyone in my age bracket. Yeah, I had the toys. More than a few of them, in fact.
That's the basics, but it's in the particulars where Ghostbusters really shines. Underneath the frenetic action and comedy stuff with the Ghostbusters going about their job, there's also a fantastic overarching plot. Dana Barrett (Sigourney Weaver, aces here as always) is experiencing all kinds of trouble in her Central Park West apartment. It starts out showing us very little - brief glimpses of bizarre dog-like demons in her refrigerator of all places. Dana becomes the team's first client and a romantic interest for Venkman, and also the beneficiary of the movie's most scary sequences.
Now, the ghost librarian in the intro scenes scared me enough as a kid, but those demon dogs...yikes. They haunted my nightmares. Watching this flick today is a wistful experience for that reason, as it hearkens back to the times when a big-budget action-comedy like this also wasn't afraid to do things that might, you know, scare people. Especially kids. Despite my own frightened states, I popped this VHS tape in the VCR something like 100 times as a kid. As the incidents pile up, Ray and Egon are able to research Dana's building and find out that it was built as a vortex to summon an evil deity known as Gozer into the modern world. The purpose? The end of the world, and it all goes down soon. Along with recent recruit Winston Zeddemore (Ernie Hudson, who does a great job as the guy who explains the Ghostbusters' techno-jargon to the layman audience), it all builds to a final showdown at the top of this Gothic skyscraper with the scariest androgynous demon chick in cinematic history.
There's so many classic touches in this flick that it's hard to list them all. Dana has a nerdy neighbor played by Rick Moranis who might be one of the five or six funniest characters in movie history, an accountant named Louis Tully who blathers on endlessly about the money that he saves by inviting strictly clients to a party and using it as a tax write-off. We get a fantastic little story of misplaced identity when Gozer's demonic minions possess both Dana and Louis, leading to stuff that's simultaneously disturbing and comedic. And then there's the slimy human villain, an EPA bureaucrat played by the pest-like William Atherton. This dude is like WWE's Hornswoggle times a thousand; he's oh-so-hateable, and it's great.
Really, the whole movie is great. At the end of the day, it's also a textbook example of classic three-act structure, with the added bonus of having immensely likable characters, funny jokes and thrilling action stuff. Oh, and it's got stuff that will scare the bejeebers out of kids, but do it in a way that keeps them coming back for more. There were a ton of really talented people involved in the making of this movie, and director Ivan Reitman claims that roughly halfway through filming, he realized they were in the midst of something special. That confidence is apparent throughout the entire running time, because Ghostbusters devastates like an unlicensed nuclear accelerator.
**** out of ****. One of my ten favorite movies of all time, and a certified classic with loads of soul and edge. Check this one out.
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