We Owe Ghostbusters II an Apology

Mike

It has never not been strange to me that, to this very day, in some critics’ circles, while wearing fedoras and way too tight for their body type pants, they consider Ghostbusters II a “bad movie”. Was it all the fighting and struggles behind the scenes to get the film made that unfairly had it painted as a corporate cash grab before it ever graced the screen? Was it the fact that it released during a golden age of film that featured classic after classic releasing on a seemingly weekly basis that made the movie world overlook and throw it away so quickly? What was with the joke about the fedoras and the critics’ tight pants? It was oddly specific.

We’ll try to answer all those questions and more in today’s deep dive love letter to Ghostbusters II. The struggle to get the movie made in the first place, the dinner that brought everyone back together and breathed life into a dead sequel, and finally…..why what was will be and what is will be no more. Why Ghostbusters II is actually a kick-ass sequel. And dare I say….in some ways even better than the original.

The Contentious Making of Ghostbusters II

The Ghostbusters symbol is one of the most recognizable entities in the history of movies for good reason. When it hit theaters in ‘84, it not only made a sh*t ton of money, but it also hit the hat trick with fans and critics both falling in love.There’s always a Walter Peck out there or two, as it is with any franchise. But it’s not a controversial statement to say that everyone loved Ghostbusters and wanted more. The plan at Columbia Pictures was to make that happen as soon as possible, despite the fact that the franchise creators in Dan Aykroyd, Harold Ramis, and Ivan Reitman never intended to make it a franchise.

It all starts with the suits….not those suits. The boring ones. Columbia back then was run by a man named David Puttnam, who was known for having more of an affinity for smaller pictures and foreign language films than he had for Ghostbusters type productions. Puttnam seemed to be the type of person who the Ghostbusters would butt heads with in the movies: the fancy pants hotel manager who tries to stiff them on the bill or the band guy who had Sigourney Weaver stolen from him by the game show host. Perhaps that explains why Puttnam at one point considered making the sequel with a brand new, cheaper cast (though he later denied this). Puttnam would eventually be reportedly “ushered out” of his job in part because he ruffled the wrong feathers surrounding Ghostbusters, including those of Bill Murray and his agent.

But Murray wasn’t chomping at the bit to make Ghostbusters II, either. The actor disappeared from Hollywood for four years after his film The Razor’s Edge tanked at the box office. And by the time he came back, he wanted to make Scrooged before Ghostbusters II. The key actors and the production schedules continued to cross beams. And whether as a grown man at a bar trough or carrying unlicensed nuclear accelerators….you never want to cross the beams.

Some unresolved grievances between the cast members and production had grown into festering issues over the years,which likely included money, as multiple cast members were requesting $10 million dollars as their price tag to return.Things looked bleak for a future sequel until the talent agent who represented several of the main actors, and Reitman,Michael Ovitz, got involved and planned a sit-down. Where? I’m talking about someplace warm. A place where the beer flows like wine. Where beautiful women instinctively flock like the salmon of Capistrano. I’m talking about a little place called Jimmy’s Restaurant in Beverly Hills.

According to Murray himself, with all the air that needed to be cleared, none of them sat down for that lunch thinking they were going to end up making Ghostbusters II by the time the check came. But they laughed, drank, and ate for four hours and had so much fun they finally hit f*** it and decided to work together again. To make the financials work,Reitman, Murray, Aykroyd, and Ramis negotiated for a salary that would give them a percentage of the box office profits on the back end in an attempt to keep the budget profitable.

You might wonder, “Well, what about Ernie Hudson?”. And you’d be right. The star was once again barely involved in the marketing of the film, nor was he paid nearly as much as the others. Which is horse sh*t indeed, but the actor has a good perspective on the situation when it involves anything nefarious, saying, “It’s very tempting, sometimes, to blame anything that doesn’t work in your life on racism. I think if Eddie Murphy had played the role I played…. he would have been paid very well. I think studios are in the business of making money, and they pay what they feel they have to”. Bill Murray at least was on his side, even refusing to do the movie himself if Hudson wasn’t given a bigger role than was being promised at the time.

The first draft of the script went way off the map, with Aykroyd writing a story that takes place in Scotland and features a fairy ring and an underground civilization. Eventually, they found their way home, and the script we now know as Ghostbusters II was complete by March of 1988, just under four years after the first film released. Quite the opposite of “Two in the box, ready to go, we be fast and they be slow”. But hey, it was happening. And the popularity of the Ghostbusters had only grown in the years that passed with the hit animated series The Real Ghostbusters becoming huge among kids (and toy sales) at the time. So much so that it influenced the return of Slimer to the film, and the movie script actually went out of its way not to contradict the storylines in the show too much.

The studio was on a bit of a losing streak at the time and had high hopes for the sequel, which they budgeted between $30 and $40 million dollars for. Then the test screenings happened, exposing some major issues. Reitman said the last twenty-five minutes had “died a horrible death,” and they replaced it with a new ending using reshoots focusing less on Ray’s possession and more on Viggo challenging the Ghostbusters, along with some other additions.

Release

When Ghostbusters II finally released in June of 1989, it more than doubled the original film’s opening weekend box office, pulling in $29 million as the number one movie of the weekend, breaking multiple box office opening day records.Likely in part because the first film was huge and created a massive fanbase going into this next step in what was looked to be a juggernaut of a franchise. It was hard to imagine what was going to happen next was going to Gone Girl-ing the franchise until it resurfaces decades later as a Melissa McCarthy project, am I right? Answer the call! No, f*** that call.That call goes to the machine with the bill collectors I’m pretending don’t exist.

Ghostbusters II contributed to the (at the time) highest-grossing box office weekend ever, back when movies were made proper. But this led to a LOT of box office competition and eventually to the film never regaining the top slot again after that fun first weekend. Unlike its predecessor, which had enjoyed a seven-week run on top of that mountain. By the end of September, the film left theaters after achieving less than half of the original film’s box office gross domestically, while it DID nearly double the original Ghostbusters haul internationally. In the end, the sequel came nearly $70 million short of its predecessor. It still made over $200 million dollars at the box office on the previously mentioned budget of between $30 and $40 million dollars. But with all these cast members to feed and all the effort put in…..it was still a disappointment depending on your disposition. Not to mention the fact that this was a sequel to, at that time, the highest-grossing comedy of all time. We didn’t know it yet, but the Ghostbusters we knew and loved were dead.

While being a kid at the time, I simply remembered it being awesome and more of something I really liked now featuring shinier things and new outfits and gadgets…..a lot of adults apparently didn’t and still don’t feel that way. The majority of the critical response was negative. Critics complained that Ghostbusters II was a carbon copy of the original’s structure and story, that the film felt corporate, un-energized, and even depressing (which I sure as sht don’t understand). Between the darker edges of Tim Burton’s Batman that released that year and rightfully captivated everyone, the letdown of this sequel being widely seen as, at the very least, not as good as the original, and the letdown at the box office….something strange happened. Ghostbusters II became locked in the memory of the movie world as some shtty and forgettable movie.And here’s where we get to the fun part: that assumption couldn’t BE more wrong.

The Case for Ghostbusters II

From top to bottom, Ghostbusters II matches the amazing first film in more ways than one. Starting with the story, one of my favorite parts of the original film was seeing our favorite parapsychology professors go through the perils of setting out on their own after being kicked out of their cushy positions at Columbia University. Getting the loan, finding the firehouse, hiring some help, and dealing with bureaucratical parasites like Walter Peck. We watched them struggle through all these things before hitting it big and going full-on Rocky IV montage style with the many ghosts they were busting before coming up against the biggest of all, saving the city, and becoming true heroes.

It would have been SO EASY for Ghostbusters II to pick up from there. Instead, we find our Ghostbusters five years later at their lowest, with a whole new hole to climb out of. After the events of the first film, the guys were sued by every state,county, and agency in New York, which is probably exactly what would happen in real life. People suck.

And so, we find Ray and Winston having to do one of the most degrading jobs for men of their stature just to keep the lights on: kids’ birthday parties. They show up and, in a nice meta touch, throw on the Ghostbusters theme song and dance in their proton packs while the kids boo them and ask for He-Man. Ray’s broken “come on, let’s go grab a beer” is a line you can feel deep down in your “holy sh*t today sucked” plums. They’re a joke to the kids and the entire city who are either too embarrassed to admit what they saw with their own eyes that day or just angry at everyone. And they did their jobs so well, there’s no longer any ghosts to wrangle anyway, feeding into the selective history that the Ghostbusters were the jerks in all this.

Speaking of everyone’s anger towards their fellow man….that leads us to another interesting plot point that the original Ghostbusters can’t even claim to have: the slime situation.

Arguments can and have been made that Ghostbusters II is a rebuilt copycat of the first film (which I have to be honest,would be fine with me….we just want to see the guys doing their thing…..you don’t have to reinvent the wheel here). But the best argument AGAINST that comes from the storyline surrounding the slime. Nowhere in Ghostbusters does anything even come close to resembling the thread throughout its sequel of the negativity of humankind having a powerful effect on its environment, supernatural or otherwise. Here, there is the discovery of the slime that grants us a scene in which we get to see the fellas pretend to be New York City Construction Workers. Things then get actually kinda freaky when you see that well-crafted and put-together river of pink slime permeating beneath the city. It’s a transfixing visual. I just wanted to play with it. I still do. Which is probably why it made for such great toy sales.

THEN, there is the process in which we discover and learn about the slime that offers us the chance to see the guys (mainly Egon and Ray) be the scientific research nerds they are. While a few of these scenes were cut for brevity,Ghostbusters II leans on that side of our leads, and it should be celebrated in the same way Batman fans celebrate when a movie shines a light on his detective skills. And who can forget the amazing toaster scene? Probably the first thing that pops in my head when I think of Ghostbusters II isn’t the Statue of Liberty scene….but a scene of the Ghostbusters hanging out and yelling at a toaster. Because A) It’s hilarious, and B) the camaraderie, at least in my opinion, is still just as alive and well here as it was in the first film. And that matters more to me than anything else.

It’s also nice to know we weren’t so far into corporate sequel territory that they couldn’t throw in a subtle disturbing possibility that, in all likelihood, Egon did sex stuff with the slime. You know, for science. All in all, Egon was such a weirdo in this one. Taking puppies away from kids and holding smiles for way too long. Whatever he’s doing, he seems happy. Good for him. Good for that big-haired weirdo and his large epididymis.

While this story focuses a bit too much on Peter and Dana finding their way back to each other……the same argument could be made for their romance in the first film. At least here we have the added addition of Oscar and both Peter and Dana realizing that he’d actually be a great dad after all. I wouldn’t call it necessary, but it’s touching. The greatest character arc of all, however, might just be Janine. In many, (cough) many ways.

Meanwhile, there is a subtle (and I can’t stretch the importance of that word enough here) SUBTLE theme of the way we treat one another, especially in big cities. Someone could easily use this plot line for a social media horror movie if they wanted. Imagine Egon pointing his emotional reading device at the X app. Thing will blow your head off, man. It didn’t take over the film in some finger-wagging or ham-fisted kumbaya sort of way (think Steven Spielberg’s Disclosure). It was an interesting thought left for the viewer to ponder while they were being entertained, if they felt like it. Well done.No notes. Long live the ‘80s.

Speaking of which….on the visual side of things, Ghostbusters II again kicks ass. Are the physics of the whole Statue of Liberty scene ridiculous, bordering on stupid? Sure. But there is just no way to top the Stay Puft Marshmallow Man. By the way, that’s a ridiculous idea too. But who cares. Shut up and dance. And I appreciate the sentiment of using a meaningful symbol to bring a good emotion to people while “Your Love Keeps Lifting Me Higher and Higher” blasts.

NOT TO MENTION, may I just say that the two soundtracks aren’t close. Ghostbusters II features not only an amped-up Run-DMC version of the Ray Parker Jr. classic, but nothing quite possibly in soundtrack history can top Bobby Brown’s “On Our Own”. Back when movies and artists weren’t afraid to make songs specifically for movies. I’m not here to push hard that Ghostbusters II is a better movie than the original. Just that it deserves to be called a good movie. But that is one point where I’d argue this film is better. Shout out to “Savin’ The Day” by the Alessi Brothers regardless. But Ghostbusters II has the best soundtrack.

Back to the visuals, the pink goo which required 100,000 gallons of slime for the film was yet another cool-as-f*** layer to Ghostbusters lore. From it raging under the streets to the way it oozed out of Dana’s bathtub. This also leads to the invention of the new proton packs. I don’t give a darn if they only did it to sell toys (because I was happy to ask for the toys for Christmas). These Slime Blower proton packs in all fairness don’t compare to the originals, but they integrated them nicely instead of replacing the classics.

The Ecto-1 gets a nice upgrade with the Ecto-1A, in which the now very shiny and waxed-up vehicle features more colorful branding, hazard stripes, and a sweet LED ticker board on the roof rack. Mixing nicely with the Christmas theme of Ghostbusters II that also goes overlooked. I mean, it was a choice to release a Christmas-themed movie in June, but whatever.

The new charcoal grey suits are pretty sweet as well. It’s a sequel after all, and it may be the consumer in me, but I thought it was cool how they added to the arsenal and updated a few things. Even if one of the new tools is quite literally an NES Advantage Controller used to pilot the Statue of Liberty throughout the city. Can confirm that us kids thought that was bad-ass, and many of us still do as adults. It’s not out of the realm of possibility that a scientist would do that in a movie about ghosts taking over the city on a wide scale for the second time. This is science make-believe, man. And it made science look awesome.

The Horror and the Villain

One area I proudly stand before you and argue that Ghostbusters II actually supersedes the original is in its horror and its villain. While still maintaining the gateway and “fun” side of horror with the ghost Titanic bits, Slimer’s reappearance,and the many Industrial Light & Magic ghosts and goblins taking over the city…..there are a few moments in Ghostbusters II that walk the line of full-on horror movie.

Starting with a sequence where Winston, Egon, and Ray venture into an old subway tunnel and are met with creepy sounds, a ghost train, and severed heads on pikes. Some real Game of Thrones sh*t, man. It’s a scene added in with the intention to really show the stakes they were up against (no pun intended) as well as the dark power of the villain: Vigo the Carpathian. Master of evil. The Scourge of Carpathia. The Sorrow of Moldavia. The Carpathians had more names for this guy than the kids in The Sandlot had for Babe Ruth. And rightfully so. As the film goes on, we learn that the man in this most-fed-up painting was actually a genocidal maniac who died at 105 years old after his own people had him poisoned, stabbed, shot, hung, stretched, disemboweled, drawn, and quartered. Somehow during all the stretching, his last words were “death is but a door, time is but a window, I’ll be back”. Like Vin Diesel and the Fast & Furious franchise. Haunting.

There’s a lore here that goes particularly well with that scary-ass face. Vigo was originally intended to be much more monster-oriented before Die Hard villain Wilhelm von Homburg was cast and they realized his face had so much personality that it was deemed unnecessary. And it’s true. There’s something about this guy that makes you think he’s probably actually the nicest individual on earth. Look at the way he’s smiling at that baby! But here, for this movie, and particularly that painting? He’s a goddamn fright. Vigo’s dread permeates through the movie as he sends his wacky henchman Janosz out to find him a baby to possess, which of course happens to be adorable baby Oscar. Meanwhile, as we learn more about his history from the occult records, Vigo inches closer and closer to our reality.

Including one particular moment that feels as if it could have been pulled from a classic R-rated ‘80s horror movie. As Ray and Egon develop some pictures and shoot the sh*t over what to eat for dinner that night, they realize the pictures they took of the painting of Vigo are transforming into some real freaky stuff. Right as an invisible entity locks the door,the demonic-looking pictures catch fire and leave them trapped inside to burn to death before Winston saves the day.

Vigo has the look, the lore, and the ability to make him a Class A kick-ass villain. And he’s legitimately scary when he goes full-on deadite and is able to possess Ray. Sure, at the end of the day he’s bested by a few insults and some happy songs, which is loose at best. I’ll give you that. But as much as I love the myriad of ghosts and goblins throughout this franchise, as far as interesting backstory and scares go? Vigo is the best villain of the franchise easily. Next to Paul Feig.

The Mentality Never Changed

While the music, the bad guys, and the horror elements of Ghostbusters II are the ones I truly believe surpass the original,other things simply needed to remain the same. The most important element of the Ghostbusters is about the friendship between the guys. And it remains as strong as ever in Ghostbusters II. There’s the previously mentioned slime gags,constant banter while in the middle of insane circumstances, and the feeling that even though they can separate both in life and in the chapters of the film…..they always come back together and it’s like nothing ever changed. Though Venkman was found hosting his TV show and fulfilling Dana’s prophecy for him, Egon was happy in his weird science experiments, and Ray had the occult bookstore when he wasn’t trying to keep Ghostbusters alive at kids’ parties alongside Winston…..they came back together like nothing ever happened. Just a bunch of weird dudes who compliment one another for better and worse. It’s a rare thing to find that in the movies and in real life. It’s to be appreciated.

One of my favorite scenes in the movie is after Ray and Winston get in an almost fistfight as the slime’s negative energy takes hold of them and they crash Dana and Peter’s fancy dinner. There’s something about the energy of this group of guys covered in slime yelling and carrying on in the middle of New York’s dining upper class that reminds me of being a teenager and having your friends show up when you’re hanging out with a girl and thinking “oh sh*t, this is going to go poorly”. It’s hard to tell, but there’s a good possibility Venkman was actually jealous about having missed out on the cockroaches, rats, and slime trip underneath the city. But the exact thing that the real-life cast had noticed during that dinner in California was on full display in Ghostbusters II. They had fun together, and it made for a lot of laughs.

I truly think that if you don’t let the box office or the reviews during a time when we were all truly spoiled infect your opinions about Ghostbusters II, you’ll realize that camaraderie had been the exact point of the movie. Who cares if some story points feel restructured from the first film or the Statue of Liberty scene is more insane than Kevin Spacey in Se7en?

You can even argue that the courtroom scene with the Scoleri Brothers is just a rehash of the hotel scene with Slimer from the original. I’m fine with that! That scene was awesome. This gave us a chance to watch the guys try and completely fail to defend themselves against a court of law—because deep down they are a bunch of hopeful weirdos who thought Louis Tully would have a chance at defending them in court because he got his degree at night school. The guys were all still just as funny in a room together, taking on not only ghosts, but the establishment of politicians across New York City.And that, my friends, is why I think Ghostbusters II is every bit as good as the first film. Or at the VERY least…..something that should have never been labeled a “bad movie” in any sense of the word.