FILM: Ghostbusters

DIRECTOR: Ivan Reitman

YEAR: 1984

WATCHED ON: BBC iPlayer

DATE WATCHED: 21-April-2024

FIRST VIEWING: No

SPOILERS AHEAD: No

This is a film I have seen many times. Too many to possible count. Over 20 times, probably. Easily. I don’t even know where to start. With my own personal memories of it? Or is that too much. Ill briefly talk about myself, and then the film.
This was one of the first films I bought myself on DVD. That would have been around 2004, and I was in Glasgow. It had been my birthday not too distantly and I had some cash. We were in HMV and I bought this and The Sixth Sense. Two ghost films but very different in tone.

Buying the DVD was my first time actually seeing the movie. Some how I have completely avoided seeing the film for the first ten years of my life. That didn’t mean I was unaware of it. My parents had got me Ghostbusters 2 on video when I was very little - about 4 or 5 years old. And I had watched that repeatedly. I’ve seen that one more than this one. I also had videos from ‘Cinema Club’. Which was some kind of cinema based club, but I wasn’t in it. It was just a coincidence that these videos were released under that company. I think it was videos from the Co-op store in the town I lived in. My Ghostbusters 2, The Addams Family, and Bill and Ted’s Bogus Journey videos, there were all Cinema Club. And I watched those videos often. Before the film began there was an advert for Cinema Club and it showed little clips from Platoon, A League of Their Own, maybe some others that I cant remember, but then there was extended trailers for other films. Ghostbusters was one of those. It had a few clips from the film, and I can remember it now as I write this. Sigourney Weaver taking her handbag off and lifting her head up to look at the tv in her apartment was one of the clips. And the moment they walk into the hotel lobby, Bill Murray says, ‘Hey, has anyone seen a ghost?’. Funny how theres these little things just camping in our memories.

The movie itself. I love it. I’m just going to type and see what comes out so here we go.

The film starts in the New York public library and some poor old lady staff member gets her socks scared off by a ghost. The nearby university is called to go and check it out, so the parapsychology department goes along to do just that. Theres Dr Egon Spengler, Dr Ray Stantz, and Dr Peter Venkman. They go along and actually see the ghost - which is the first time they’ve ever seen one for real. When they get back to the uni, though, they discover that the funding for their paranormal investigates has been cut completely and that they are now out of a job.

With proof that ghosts exist they go into business as the Ghostbusters.

The plot is on Wikipedia and probably a thousand YouTube videos. I wont give you a scene by scene breakdown of it… but I probably could… from memory. Lets not go there.

If you haven’t seen this film; I implore you to. Please do. It is one of my favourites. The special effects aren’t 100% at every point - but its 40 years old this year! Its a fun film. It’s not overly childish. Theres jokes, but tension. Its not action packed but its not childishly simple. As painful as it is to say: It is a product of its time. I don't mean there’s cocaine in it (behind the scenes, who knows?) But there smoking… a little bit of sexual harassment at times thats played for laughs… there’s Reagan-era ‘pull yourself up by your bootstraps attitude’, but it all comes together so well.

An absolute gem of a film. If you haven’t seen it, please watch it. If you have seen it, please watch it again!