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ery uneasy is what l’ve been almostvever since I saw this movie.

Initially, I was sanguine, but verysoon I came to realize that something strangeand sinister was afoot. Now. I am rmly con-vinced that demonic forces were unleashedand put to work for the benefit of Gnost-bttsters. There seems to be no other explana-tion for the odd things that have occurred.Take, as a prime and highly unsettling

example, the grosses. During its rst weekend

Reviewed by RON GOULARTgards Ghostbttsters. David Denby, of NewYork magazine, went on record as saying thepicture was “a convulsively funny classiccomedy.” Writing in the New York Post, theusually perceptive Rex Reed maintained that“Ghostbusters towers above most moderncomedies.” Siskel and Ebert raved that it was“a really funny movie that combines greatspecial effects with wonderfully sly dialogue 3’And take, as just one more of far too manyhorrifying examples, the frightful case of

watched it again the other night. Mostly, thismost recent viewing was to flush my mind ofthe after-effects of seeing the movie to whichthis essay is devoted. Ghostbnsters ’similarityto the earlier Hope work ends at the title. Afat-budgeted, technicolor opus, it is rarelyeither funny or scary. If Sigourney Weaverhadn't been aboard, I would have runscreaming from the theater long before thefinal reel.The plotline, which kept reminding me of

Have a poltergeist haunting your library? Who you gonna call? Ghostbusters! Here, the courageous trio (Dari Aykroyld elaroldFtamis and Bill Murray} tries to book a spooky suspect.

in release, the movie grossed $13.6 million,beating Gremtins by more than a millionbucks and causing Indiana Jones and StarTrek Hlto take a back seat. No other Colum-bia lm in the studio's history has ever doneas well in a single weekend as Ghostbusters.Not Tootsie, not such earlier hits as Gilda, ItHappened One Night, or Boston BtackieGoes Hollywood. Why would millions ofotherwise rational people ock to see it‘? Theanswer is obvious. They were hexed or co-erced in some other black magical way.Next, let's consider the critics and

reviewers. Usually an astute and cynicalbunch, they obviously went bonkers as re-

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3R STAR1.0Gt’November I984

Richard Schickel. A respected critic andhistorian, a student of comedy, a man whowrote an entire book about silent comedianHarold Lloyd, Schickel said the movie was“grandly comic. . . neatly timed and perfectlypackaged” right out in the open in the pagesof Time. Janet Maslin of the. New YorkTimes kept her head a bit better than most ofher colleagues, noting that “there is more at-tention to special effects than to humor.There are also far too many loose ends in thescreenplay.” Unfortunately, she also statesthat Bill Murray is a gifted comedian and thathe “would be even more welcome if histalents were used in the service of somethinggenuinely witty and coherent, rather than asan end in themselves." Mass hypnosis, evilspells, possibly even possession by demonsare the only rational explanations for thebehavior of the critics in this affair.One of the favorite films of my vanished

youth was Ghost Breakers. A modestlybudgeted 1940 black and white spook come-dy, it starred Bob I-lope, Paulette Goddardand Willie Best. Thanks to the magic ofvideotape, I own a copy of the movie and I

the story used in a I937 Disney short called“Lonesome Ghosts," deals with threefellows who, after getting bounced from theParapsychology Department of ColumbiaUniversity, set up in business as freelanceghost hunters and exorcists. Murray, DanAykroyd and I-Iarold Ramis play the trio ofghostbreakers; it was Mickey Mouse, DonaldDuck and Goofy in the Disney version. Aftercatching various special-PX ghosts andcreatures, they meet up with Miss Weaver, alady who has a gateway to another dimensioninside her refrigerator. We now switch todemonic possessions, evil gods of ancientdays unleashed upon the world and so on.There is considerable fun-loving destruction,as well as some interesting displays of MissWeaver’s esh, before all ends well.Although special effects abound in

Ghostbnsters, there’s little in the way ofwhat you might call non-special effects-everyday stuff like suspense, chills, laughs.The things that a good script and passableacting and directing traditionally supply.Aykroyd and Rarnis Provided the script.They seem to believe that gags and comic

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situations are not logically built up, butsimply stuck into a story like raisins in ricepudding. Firmly in the Animal Houseschool of comedy, they provide quite a lot ofbody function jokes, being especially fondof those that involve eating in gross ways.But their favorite source of fun and laughteris vandalism, a grand-scale and mindless de-struction of property. To guarantee a maxi-mum of this, they do their ghost huntingwith massive sci-fi weapons and manage todestroy hotel ballrooms, apartment housesand whole city blocks in the course of theirwork. Perhaps this rampant destruction wasmeant as satire on the traditional SFmonster movies or maybe the zaphappyghostbusters represent a sly parody of theUnited States‘ military attitude toward paci-fying smaller countries. l’m only guessinghere, since usually satire and parody are fun-ny and thereby provide a clue to the intent.Aykroyd gets my nomination for the

Sydney Carton Self-Sacrifice Award for co-authoring a script in which he has not onegood scene and few good lines. He‘s so no-ble he didn’t even write himself a romance.Nope, he lets Murray handle that. Bill Mur-ray ending up in a clinch with the exorcisedSigourney Weaver is one of the most fright-ening aspects ofGhostbusters. This triumphof the schmuck violates the basic rules ofcomedy, not to mention those of decorum.lt’s as though a Three Stooges short con-cluded with Moe getting the girl.Quite obviously, I haven’t, as yet, fallen

under Bill Murray's spell. He strikes me, atbest, as a moderately gifted second banana.What unsettles me is the way he, as to a lesserdegree do Aykroyd and Ramis, gets such akick out of playing a jerk. Murray's glorifi-cation of the jerk goes beyond anythingSteve Martin ever dreamed of. l-le is so de-terminedly cloddish that he makes that pio-neering jerk, Jerry Lewis, look as suave asCary Grant. He isn’t, on screen anyway, justyour typical misunderstood ugly duckling.I-le plays a chap with serious personalityproblems and Miss Weaver’s initial revul-sion seems completely justified. I supposethe awful truth is I am simply too old tosavor his sort of performing. For me, thespectacle of a grown man acting like a ninth-grade class clown is not the apex of comedy.Murray ’s smugness bothers me, too. Hera-diates a self-satisfaction I can see no basisfor, and I keep picking up subliminal mes-sages along the lines of “I'm a slob, butdon't you just love me?"The non-comedy aspects of Gtrostbusters

didn‘t impress me much either. Being firmlyrooted in the more-is-best camp, its director,Ivan Reitman, misses not an opportunity toshow us the horrible stuff. To rub our nosesin slime and grue, to let us see clearly everyawful monster and demon his large budgethas allowed him to buy and play with.Subtlety is nowhere in evidence, thetechnicolor ghosts and horrors just keeprushing at us like the monsters in a funhouse. In the aforementioned GhostBreakers, there are one ghost, one skeletonand one zombie, none on screen for more

Mayhem In the middle of Manhattan, as theGhostbusters bust up the Big Apple.

Sigourney Weaver is the mild-mannered,demon-possessed lady. And theGhostbusters must repossess her.

than a few moments. But the possibility ofscary stuff is hinted at, the camera shotshelp, as do the lighting and the sets. The no-tion that you can hint at a possible terror,that you can tease and scare by graduallyleading up to it is alien to Reitman andcompany. If he were staging a burlesqueshow, he would have all his ladies troop outon stage at once—jaybird naked.The profession of ghostbusting, how it

would actually be gone about, was given lit-tle careful thought. The logic is akin to thatfound on afternoon kid cartoon shows.There’s a dragonmonster on the loose andHe-Man just happens to have a dragon-monster-destroying sword handy. There arehardly any scenes in Ghostbusters where thetrio, all supposedly college professors, sitdown and discuss what they’re up to andwhy they’re going to try a certain approachto a certain problem. Murray’s nonchalantslob is so indifferent that he leaves MissWeaver alone in her apartment after she hasbeen taken over by an ancient god (I thinkthat’s what it was). Later, in returning tosave her, he pauses to clown around in frontof her apartment building and make wise-cracks to the gathering crowd. Good for acheap laugh maybe, but it doesn’t make hischaracter very appealing.Thanks to what I assume must be an in-

nate immunity to the type of hexing Colum-bia Pictures apparently used on reviewers, lam just about the only writer in the countryto get the real’ story of Ghostbusters intoprint.At least I think l’m immune. Or can it be

that Hollywood just doesn’t think I'm im-portant enough to waste expensive sorceryon? it

SIARLDG/November 1984 39

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