Ghostbusters II Movie Review

No one has ever accused Ghostbusters II of being a great film, or even a good one, for that matter. But getting beyond its atrociously Up With People plot -- if that's possible -- reveals that, hey, we've still got the original cast and crew, and they're all still pretty funny on the whole.

The story's the thing that kills GB2 right from the get-go, which picks up five years after the original: Our boys in brown saved the city, but now they're reduced to hosting cheesy psychic TV shows and begging for work, as most of the spirit disturbances have been cleaned up. Even Venkman (Bill Murray) didn't end up with Dana (Sigourney Weaver), who's now divorced and has (gasp) a baby, one which will figure centrally in the plot machinations later on, involving (double gasp) Peter MacNicol as a vaguely Eastern European art expert. Good lord.

Though the boys are soon back in business, things get worse when we discover why New York is seeing new spirit activity: There's, ahem, a river of pink slime under the city which is being fueled by the bad feelings common to New York residents before the Giuliani administration. ("Being miserable and treating other people like dirt is every New Yorker's God-given right!" yells the mayor as he storms out of the room. Wow, that's called being "solution-oriented.")

The cure makes a mockery of the Sta-Puft Marshmallow Man: The Ghostbusters cover the Statue of Liberty in slime, then animate her, and get her to walk through the city to turn New Yorkers into happy people, thus eliminating the slime.

Er, whatever.

Still, there are some good one-liners, improved special effects, and enhanced roles for supporting players Annie Potts and Rick Moranis, enough so that you don't feel like you completely wasted your time when you ended up watching the 113th playing this month on Showtime. There's really little else to recommend about the movie -- though if you were a fan of the Real Ghostbusters cartoon, well, you get a couple of episodes on the new two-movie disc, along with the original movie.