My Review of Ghostbusters (1984)

Apparently Halloweens 4-6 form something of a trilogy, so before I tackle that, I decided on a nice palate cleanser in the form of rewatching Ghostbusters (1984).

I don't have anything to say about this movie that hasn't been said before. It's great. Dan Aykroyd and Harold Ramis are just phenomenally funny people, and their script remains one of the most quotable of all time. Bill Murray is Bill Murray (more on that in a second). I always appreciate seeing Sigourney Weaver, and her portrayal of Zuul Dana is delicious. The real stars of the film for me though are the excellent effects, both practical and special. There are so many cool set pieces, and every ghoulie that we see has a distinct design and characterization to them (admittedly there aren't that many, but it's still great, the zombie cab driver cracks me up every time).

The plot follows Peter Venkman (Bill Murray), disgraced parapsychologist, and his colleagues Ray Stantz (Dan Aykroyd) and Egon Spengler (Harold Ramis) as they address a growing wave of supernatural phenomena in the New York area. Venkman is an asshole. Like, full stop. He's a gross, condescending creep who abuses any position of authority given to him to harass women as his first priority, at all times. Maybe the only real flaw in this movie is that it treats Venkman's behavior as cute because it's Bill Murray, which is harder and harder to swallow as the general consensus on Murray continues to shift over the years. I enjoy Bill Murray the most when his characters are handled by the film with the understanding that he is being an asshole, as in The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou (2004), or Rushmore (1998), or really any Wes Anderson movie now that I think about it. He's very funny in Ghostbusters, in exactly the same way as he's funny in those movies, but this movie asks us to condone his behavior in a way that the others don't. That's all I'll say about the confluence of real-life Bill Murray and screen Bill Murray, because it's genuinely not that hard to enjoy this movie even if you know that he was probably a raging asshole the whole time they were making it.

Ray and Egon are true believers, and serious men of science in contrast to Venkman's lazy skepticism. After they collectively experience their first confirmed supernatural phenomenon they are all generally on the same page about the existence of the ghosts, though Venkman continues to offer sardonic one liners during each encounter because that is his primary function in the script. The three men go into business together after Venkman is expelled from the university where he works (presumably for all manner of unethical relations with students, given the ESP 'trial' we see him administering at the beginning of the film) and set up shop in an abandoned fire station. They hire a delightful receptionist played by Annie Potts, and eventually add Winston Zeddmore (Ernie Hudson, who I last saw in Leviathan) to help them run the place, and swiftly go about taking calls.

Sigourney Weaver plays Dana, a woman who's very apartment rests at the nexus of dark forces marshalled by Gozer the Gozerian, an ancient Sumerian demigod. Rick Moranis plays Louis, Dana's obnoxious chatterbox of a neghbor. He is so ridiculous, and one of the absolute funniest scenes in the movie depicts a party that he's hosting, in which he roams around obliviously airing out everyone's dirty laundry and essentially calling them rubes to their faces (before being chased out of the room by a gargoyle dog thing). Dana good-naturedly humors him throughout the film, and she is the client around whom the plot revolves. She initially seeks out the Ghostbusters after spectral activity in her apartment causes eggs to go flying and a bizarre portal to open in the back of her refrigerator (where she first hears the name 'Zuul'). Venkman agrees to investigate for purely prurient reasons, and snarks at her the entire time as though he doesn't actually believe in the supernatural, when he very much does.

Over a period of weeks or months, the Ghostbusters take on dozens of cases, and develop a level of fame and notoriety. We get to see some of these early jobs, and they are whirlwinds of physical comedy, great effects, and deadpan snark from everyone. I think this sequence is what paved the way for the cartoons, and I would have enjoyed a live-action Ghostbusters series that was played like an action-comedy X-Files, where they responded to different kinds of hauntings and apparitions each week. I'm aware that that's exactly what the cartoons were, but the movie has a level of slightly more adult comedy (and not just in crassness, some of the best jokes in this movie just flew over my head as a kid because I had no context for them) that I think would have been easier to sell to adults in live-action.

The excellently hateable William Atherton plays a stiff-necked EPA investigator with an axe to grind, and he serves as the closest thing to an antagonist in the film, at least until Gozer is released. It is his attempt to shut down the Ghostbusters that ends up releasing their vault of captured spectres, setting up the conditions for Gozer's return. Zuul Dana and Rick Moranis turn into gargoyles, and Gozer appears in the form of an adrogynous woman with kind of a David Bowie vibe going on. The boys in grey do battle with the Gozerian, but to no avail, and it demands to know what form it shall take to destroy them. We all know what happens next. Something I thought was neat is that in an earlier scene Dana has a bag of Stay-Puft marshmallows on the counter, next to the exploding eggs, so they are established as an in-universe brand prior to Ray summoning the 100-ft Stay-Puft Marshmallow Man to terrorize Central Park.

This is just a fun, hilarious movie. I wrote down like three pages of quotes to work into this write-up, but honestly you should just go watch it for yourself, even if you've seen it before (especially if you've seen it before, there are so many fun little details and I notice new ones every time). 4.5/5 stars, because Bill Murray can be a dick, but only if we acknowledge that he is one, and otherwise this is a perfect movie.