Ghostbusters (1984)
I haven’t watched this for a while and it was surprising how little I enjoyed it this time. The characters (Egon, Janine and Tully would have been a better focus for me) are rather bland. The effects go from brilliant (like the devil dog puppets) and the awful (like the devil dog stop motion). The dialogue is the best bit. The few sight gags are beautifully mounted by wit.
Sigourney is so much more fun as Zuul then Dana where she just delivers her default Sigourney performance.
When I was a kid Peter Venkman seemed cool. Now he seems kind of creepy. The most impressive thing about the film for me is how despite wasting much of the movie with shots of religious stereotypes excitedly jumping up and down and celebrity journalist cameos they get some interesting world building in there. I’m tempted to watch Ghostbusters 2 now just to see if it’s anywhere near as bad as I remember.
37 Balls.You’re knocking some of the FX because they’re thirty years old? I don’t know of any other way they could have made the Terror Dogs run convincingly back then.
The tv and radio personalities helped root the movie in the real world. (As do the magazine and newspapers.) Larry King is secretly a immortal supernatural being, and would have figured prominently in GB 2, but his agent wanted more money. 😉
I hated the stop motion devil dogs when I was 14. The vintage isn’t the issue. The quality is. Willis O’Brien’s work still looks interesting, Ray Harryhausen rarely had a bad shot. This is a year after the last great stop motion gig in Hollywood (Jedi used go-motion but it’s basically stop motion). The problem is mostly the compositing. The rod puppet in Alien 3 is let down to similar effect. While it’s kind of cool to have the voice of Shaggy in a goofy ghost comedy it does reduce a large chunk of the film to a clip show. I never noticed how creepy Bill Murray is in this film. Predatory, the sort of person who brings large doses of sedative to a date. Sure he resists temptation when Zuul is in Dana but it’s still weird. As is Tully and Dana being raped by demons inside each others bodies. I guess I’m really getting old to notice these things. As for my use of the balls system any long term reader of my reviews on here will note I rarely state what the score is out of, the balls are often replaced by even more bizarre counters, it’s just a number it’s not meant to make sense.