AntiMovies

IMDb: Ghostbusters II (1989)

What the hell happened? Ghostbusters was one of the biggest movies ever, and they followed it up 5 years later with this crap?

This movie reeks of cheesy sequel pitfalls such as: shameless and unnecessary reference to the original, rehashing, and destruction of character integrity. Now, I have to admit, the first one is a hard act to follow. There was magic there. Ghostbusters II suffers from sibling rivalry and is constantly trying to leap out of the looming shadow of it’s older brother and into the spotlight through imitation. This is less of a sequel and more of a warped parody of the original. Instead of a giant Stay-Puft marshmallow man, we bring the Statue of Liberty to life. Instead of streams of angry ghosts spilling out of the containment system to reek havoc on New York City, we get a subterranean river of hate-slime. (Doesn’t that already really exist in New York?) The Ghostbusters get committed and its up to the mayor to turn them loose. The relationship between Bill Murray and Sigourney Weaver isn’t the same—in fact Bill Murray just isn’t the same. Everything seems to happen in a wooden, rehearsed way and a lot of the real New York we got in the original film seems to have been replaced with obvious sets.

Or maybe I was just disappointed that the main bad guy was a creepy painting. Can’t we do better? There are a lot scarier things than paintings. And when the kooky lawyer from Ally McBeal steals the baby and flies through the air pushing the carriage, doesn’t that cancel out any credibility that might have been earned by the movie up to that point?

I walked out of the theatre as a kid feeling let down by this movie, and that feeling never went away.