Although Ghostbusters looks like the cast was hand-picked, Aykroyd, a big fan of ghost-busting comedy-team movies, originally intended for the movie to star just him and John Belushi, but the latter's death in 1982 obviously precluded that. When Reitman became involved, he asked Ramis to work with Aykroyd on rewriting the script, and Ramis included a role for himself. Moranis' role was written for John Candy, and Hudson's for Eddie Murphy.

The script is long on catch phrases -- "he slimed me;" "...a game show host;" "so? she's a dog" -- but not on funny dialog. This, however, is not a drawback since the comedy is mostly situational (though it's not at all like a sitcom) and arises from the characters and their conflict with everything around them. It's really a farce, usually defined as funny characters in a serious situation, much like those Bowery Boys, Abbott & Costello and Martin & Lewis spook comedies that inspired Aykroyd in the first place.

What sets Ghostbusters apart from the older films isn't that it's funnier, but that it is immensely more spectacular, both in terms of the fabulous effects (directed by Richard Edlund) and the epic scale of the supernatural threat. Aykroyd also throws in a lot of parapsychological terminology which lends an odd aura of authenticity, while the menace he and Ramis invented is convincing in its own terms.

The humor arises from scenes like the Ghostbusters battling a frenetically gobbling ghost (who became a regular on the TV cartoon series that followed), and, at the end, Aykroyd accidentally conjuring up a 110-foot-tall Stay Puft Marshmallow Man (who looks absurd, but is treated as a real menace). The four Ghostbusters themselves get into funny situations; Aykroyd and Ramis are amusing for their utterly devoted seriousness; Murray is his usual smooth-talking, unscrupulous horndog, like a more assured version of Bob Hope's usual screen persona. The result is a very satisfying movie -- funny, a little scary, very exciting at times, admirably epic, and, despite its predecessors, refreshingly original.

The movie has been given a spectacular DVD treatment, one of those that's ideal to show off your system to skeptics. The sound is crisp and rich, and the climax full of explosions, wind screams, and other system-testing sounds. But the additional material is why this disc really shines. You can watch the film itself; you can watch it again with subtitles explaining the effects; you can watch it a third time listening to Ramis, Reitman and associate producer Joe Medjuk commenting on the action. I'm not sure that the "live" video commentary is a good idea, though: you see the silhouettes of the three commentators outlined against the film's image. This MST3K-inspired nonsense doesn't add anything, really; fortunately, you can switch off the image.

Furthermore, three effects-laden sequences are isolated in a way that allows you to use DVD's "angle" feature to switch between the rough and finished cut of the sequence. There are two "documentaries" on the making of the film, the one shot in 1984 as publicity, and another made in 1999 with Aykroyd, Ramis, Reitman and others talking about making the film, and how they regard it now.
Including a huge number of chalk production sketches of monsters and effects sequences was a great idea; showing these at an angle, as if the drawings are on an animation stand, was a bad idea. The inclusion of omitted scenes is always welcome, but it's easy to see why those from Ghostbusters were cut. The discussion by Edlund and his effects team is particularly interesting, though it looks to have been rather hastily shot.

This awesome DVD for Ghostbusters sets a very high mark; here's hoping that Columbia Home Video will give similar expansive treatment to other films in their library.

Write comment
Name:
Email:
Website:
Title:
	Please input the anti-spam code that you can read in the image.

3.26 Copyright (C) 2008 Compojoom.com / Copyright (C) 2007 Alain Georgette / Copyright (C) 2006 Frantisek Hliva. All rights reserved."