It had to be done, I guess; I always feel guilty about dissing a film unless I've seen it within the past year or so and can actively remember why I disliked it. Don't get me wrong, I've never particularly disliked Ghostbusters, but neither have I ever held it in the same sort of rabid affection as most other people of my generation.
I blame it on my cousin, three or four years older than me and infinitely more urbane. He was always the cool one, the bad one, the one, not to put too fine a point on it, who wasn't shit-scared of everything. On one visit, shortly before the release of the movie, he gave me what I now realise was actually a pretty cool piece of movie memorabilia - an original ghost in a can. It was, of course, just a drinks can printed up with a bunch of logos and warnings, but as far as my seven-year-old self was concerned it was the most terrifying object in the known universe. I flat-out refused to keep it in my bedroom; my parents put it in the drinks cabinet. Occasionally, I wonder whether its presence there accounts for me having lived a largely teetotal life.
I'm actually not sure when I first saw the film, but I have to have been somewhere in my twenties, I think. I don't remember that much about it - only the bits that seeped into popular consciousness and took on a life of their own. Even now, I get the sneaking suspicion that yesterday may have been my first time watching (mostly) without my hands over my eyes.
Do you guys really not know what this one is about? There's a bunch of alleged scientists investigating paranormal activity. It's always been really minor stuff in the past; tremors and flutterings and nothing that couldn't easily be explained away, but when a mousy, frumpy librarian gets the fright of her life, it starts to become clear that shit just got real. I loved the library scenes, by the way. Index cards in those little wooden drawers. Must've been nice in the good old days when all a librarian had to worry about was stereotyping and enraged ghosts. Yeah.
Anyway, Bill Murray plays a sex pest dickhead, Harold Ramis plays a marginally charming geek, Ernie Hudson plays the token black guy and Dan Aykroyd plays the one who gets a spectral blow-job. Sigourney Weaver is wasted, Annie Potts is cute and Rick Moranis gets to play a guy who's been possessed by a latex dog. There's lots of bawdy humour for the grownups and lots of people getting drenched in slimy stuff for the kids - seriously, everyone wins here.
If I'm sounding as though I hated it, I honestly didn't. Hatred would have required more attentive viewing than I was able to offer. Some of the translucent spooky effects looked pretty cool, and I actually really liked the Ghostbusters' car. True, most of the characters sounded as though they were on their first-ever readthrough of the script, but I think the aim at the time was to produce such stunning visuals nobody would notice things like the acting or the wafer-thin plot.
Would I recommend Ghostbusters? Absolutely, irrefutably not, because there simply wasn't enough there to enjoy. If it's bad movie night and you're looking for an effects-driven family fantasy, why not give Super Mario Bros a shot instead? It pushes a lot of the same buttons, but, implausible as it might seem, it genuinely does so with a whole lot more class.
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