Ghostbusters 1984
Ghostbusters was a favorite of mine from the 80’s. I remember seeing it the first time in theaters and just dying laughing at all of Bill Murray’s one-liners and the brilliant clowning of Rick Moranis. I never bought the DVD and never really had to since it is on TV all the time, but for some reason, I decided to go ahead and get the Blu-ray, lured by the inclusion of the sequel, digital versions of both, and the digibook case. While AFI ranked this one of the greatest comedies of all time, this movie has not aged well. The special effects are incredibly uneven, sometimes quite good, but often absolutely horrible (it turns out that Industrial Light and Magic wasn’t available, so they brought in less experienced companies to do that work). And the movie is just filled with special effects. Dan Akyroyd is just terrible in this. Bill Murray is still good, but his lines were so memorable and so often repeated in my youth that they are pretty worn out and probably weren’t as good as I remembered anyway. Filmed on location in New York City, the extras in the crowds really, really look like extras. The ridiculously catchy Ray Parker song is still catchy, but so dated, along with some of the other eighties riffs, while there is also a more classic orchestral score that works a lot better.
I still like the story, some of the special effects are good, and the Stay Puft man still cracks me up as he gets angry or horrified. I respect the movie for what it was, kind of a low budget comedy pretending to be high budget sci-fi flick, but I think they missed the mark a little so I have to give this one a B.
Written: 24 Sep 2017
Owned on: Blu-ray, Digital