31 Days of Halloween Days 28-30 – Must See Halloween

October is Halloween movie month! Having been completely deprived of any kind of Halloween experience growing up, I now spend 31 days celebrating with film and TV. I like to shoot for a mix of old and new, horror and comedy, from the slightly spooky to the totally terrifying to the just plain weird. Each day of October I’ll reviewing one of these ventures in the realm of the creepy and supernatural. Some will be high quality cinema and some will require large amounts of alcohol to survive. Stock up on seasonal beer and Fireball-apple jello shots and join me! A warning, though – unless the review is of a very recent release, HERE BE SPOILERS.

Partially because I ran out of time, and partially because my penultimate three Halloween movies have been so well-written about that I doubt I can say anything new, I decided to do a quick, joint write-up about them. Tomorrow, I’ll post my final Halloween pick, the instant classic “Over the Garden Wall”. Happy Halloween, everyone!

Most-meta – Cabin in the Woods, Day 28

Synopsis: A group of college students go away for the weekend to a cabin, where unbeknownst to the them, they become part of an annual ritual to protect humanity from the Old Gods, which involves their suffering and deaths. Things don’t go quite as planned, as not just the “virgin” survives but one of the others as well. She refuses to kill her friend, the Old Gods rise, and the world ends.

Cabin in the Woods is Joss Whedon distilled into a single movie. A brilliant satire of horror tropes, a take-down of the torture porn genre, and stuffed full of references, it’s hilarious, scary, and everything you might expect from Whedon. The concept is brilliant – what if this cliched scenario of hunted teens was really run by a high tech group of normal guys, tasked with protecting the world by making sure the regular sacrifices take place on schedule. They’re detached from the pain they are causing, running an office pool on what monster the teens will self-select and casually celebrating while our Final Girl fights for her life because “the virgin’s death is optional, as long as she suffers”.  The redundency built in around the world is also interesting, the idea that this goes on in multiple places just to be sure nothing goes awry. Although I do wonder if all the rituals have the same requirements – the one we see in Japan seems to abandon the slut/jock/nerd/loser/virgin set up in favor of a bunch of school girls.

The movie surprised a lot of people when it opened, as it was marketed as a straight-up horror movie of exactly the kind it was mocking. A lot of Whedon’s favorite themes are evident here. His fixation on the Final Girl, who is the ultimate Final Girl this time when the world is destroyed by her actions. The idea that the ultimate evil can be caused by regular folks, just doing their jobs, and the concept of a larger group pulling the strings and ordering the lives and deaths of young folks for some kind of twisted greater good (see most notably the origin of the Slayers in Buffy). The main concept Whedon wants to hammer home, though, is that there are some lines that shouldn’t be crossed. If a yearly sacrifice is what it takes to keep humanity alive, then we don’t deserve to be. And then he kills everyone. But he has a lot of fun along the way, with an all-out slaughter of everyone working in the bunker that involves all the monsters they’ve been keeping. Stabby unicorns, tentacle monsters, werewolves, creepy girls, cannibals. It’s a horror fan’s wet dream, gruesome, bonkers, and funny.

Rating: 8 out 10 – You couldn’t wish for a better commentary on horror, our love of horror, and human nature, while still having a good time.

Runner-up: Tucker and Dale vs. Evil

Funniest – Young Frankenstein (Day 29)

Synopsis: The grandson of the rather more infamous Doctor Frankenstein, returns reluctantly to Transylvania to take care of his family’s estate and finds himself overtaken by the family obsession, creating his own monster who then escapes and must be recaptured and healed of his abnormal brain.

This Mel Brooks classic is easily the funniest Halloween movie ever made, if not quite the funniest Mel Brooks movie ever made. Not so much a parody of but a tribute to the early Universal horror movies, particularly the 1940’s Frankenstein and its sequels, it lovingly recreates the setting and feeling of these classics (Brooks even went so far to retrieve the original laboratory props to use, which had been languishing in the propmaster’s garage for decades) and then uses it as a springboard for ridiculous, corny, slapstick humor. Young Frankenstein has the highest gag-per-minute rate of any movie I’ve every seen. They throw everything – puns, sight gags, innuendo – at the wall and sees what sticks. Most of it does. Young Frankenstein is one of the few movies that gets funnier the more times you watch it.

The cast is superb, with more comedy geniuses than you can shake a stick at. I honestly can’t imagine this movie being nearly as good with even the smallest casting changes. Gene Wilder wrote the script with Brooks, and as such perfectly inhabits the character of Fredrick Frankenstein, hesitant mad scientist. The cast was clearly having a blast during filming (so much so that Mel Brooks added more scenes to film because everyone was having so much fun) and it shows. Some movies are magically perfect, with not a hair out of place, and will stand the test of time forever. Young Frankenstein is timeless, feeling forever old and new at the same time. There are lots of funny horror movies, but few that rely on classic comedy techniques instead of splatter.

Rating: 10 out of 10 – Wouldn’t change a thing, will rewatch at least once a year till I die.

Runner-up: A distant second, but in a similar (if less sophisticated) vein is Ernest Scared Stupid

Kinkiest – The Rocky Horror Picture Show

Synopsis: An innocent, newly engaged couple stumble into the castle of mad-scientist/transsexual/alien Dr. Frank N. Furter and find themselves tangled in a web of sexual escapades and alien invasion plots.

Rocky Horror is one of those movies that has to be seen to believed. It’s more than a horror movie. It’s more than a sex comedy. It’s more than the self-billed science fiction double-feature it claims. It’s more than a cult musical hit. It’s about desire, particularly the kind we sublimate, and the dangers both of denying those desires and of letting them get out of control. And it’s also a crazy, sort-of drag show whose purpose is titillate, confuse, and entertain. Rocky Horror taps into something deep in all our psyches we might not totally understand, but are fascinated by. And the movie suggests to us that it’s okay to explore these urges – provided we don’t over-do it.  The longest running theatrical release (40 years), it’s more than a movie, it’s a phenomenon and a deep part of our culture.

Rating: ? out of ? – There’s no way to rate a movie like this, it must be seen to be believed.

Runner-up: None.

Grizzly 2 – 31 Days of Halloween, Day 27

October is Halloween movie month! Having been completely deprived of any kind of Halloween experience growing up, I now spend 31 days celebrating with film and TV. I like to shoot for a mix of old and new, horror and comedy, from the slightly spooky to the totally terrifying to the just plain weird. Each day of October I’ll reviewing one of these ventures in the realm of the creepy and supernatural. Some will be high quality cinema and some will require large amounts of alcohol to survive. Stock up on seasonal beer and Fireball-apple jello shots and join me! A warning, though – unless the review is of a very recent release, HERE BE SPOILERS.

So, this isn’t so much an actual review as a notice of a future one. I watched Grizzly 2 for the premiere episode of a new podcast, Monster Mixtape, and instead of writing about it here, I’m going to let that episode stand in for a blog post. Because really, there’s nothing else to say. Except that it truly is the worst movie I’ve ever seen.

If you don’t know the history of this movie, here’s some background. No, it was never released. Yes, you can find it easily on the internet (YouTube). Yes, that is George Clooney (talk about a guy who improves with age). You should watch it, and then look for for the first episode of Monster Mixtape coming soon!

Hellboy – 31 Days of Halloween, Day 26

October is Halloween movie month! Having been completely deprived of any kind of Halloween experience growing up, I now spend 31 days celebrating with film and TV. I like to shoot for a mix of old and new, horror and comedy, from the slightly spooky to the totally terrifying to the just plain weird. Each day of October I’ll reviewing one of these ventures in the realm of the creepy and supernatural. Some will be high quality cinema and some will require large amounts of alcohol to survive. Stock up on seasonal beer and Fireball-apple jello shots and join me! A warning, though – unless the review is of a very recent release, HERE BE SPOILERS.

Hellboy (2004)

Starring: Ron Perlman, Selma Blair, John Hurt.

I’m not going to try to write a full synopsis for this movie, because, frankly, I’ve seen it twenty times and I’m still not sure I really understand the plot. If you have seen it, this review will make sense to you. If you haven’t, no synopsis can help you. Trying to explain all the plot threads of Hellboy is not a rabbit hole I want to go down.

The truth of it is, Hellboy’s plot is convoluted, confusing, and ridiculous. Some things will not make sense if you haven’t read the comic it’s based on, and other things will not make a whole lot of sense even if you have. But for a movie like Hellboy, that is all entirely beside the point. There are hellhounds. There are strange and dubious prophecies. There is a cat loving, cigar smoking, big red antihero who is in love with a mentally unstable pyrokenetic. There is the reanimated corpse of Rasputin and there are massive ancient beings frozen in space/another dimension. And all that is wrapped up in a ball of action and tied with a bow of Guillermo Del Toro.

It’s. Awesome.

ParaNorman – 31 Days of Halloween, Day 25

October is Halloween movie month! Having been completely deprived of any kind of Halloween experience growing up, I now spend 31 days celebrating with film and TV. I like to shoot for a mix of old and new, horror and comedy, from the slightly spooky to the totally terrifying to the just plain weird. Each day of October I’ll reviewing one of these ventures in the realm of the creepy and supernatural. Some will be high quality cinema and some will require large amounts of alcohol to survive. Stock up on seasonal beer and Fireball-apple jello shots and join me! A warning, though – unless the review is of a very recent release, HERE BE SPOILERS.

ParaNorman (2012)

Starring: Kodi Smit-McPhee, Anna Kendrick, Christopher Mintz-Plasse

Synopsis: Norman is an 11-year-old boy who lives in the Salem-analogue town of Blithe Hollow, which which has made an industry of its’ own witch hunting history. Norman is obsessed with zombies and the dead, largely because he can see and talk them. Unfortunately, this also makes him an outcast and no one understands, not even his own family. He meets one boy, Neil, who insists on being his friend even though Norman tries to reject his invitations. One day, after Norman has experienced even stranger than usual visions, a crazed old man comes up to him and tells Norman he’s his uncle, and that Norman will have to follow in his footsteps by performing a ritual every yeah on the anniversary of the famed Blithe Hollow witch’s death to keep her from rising and destroying the town. Shortly thereafter, Norman’s uncle dies. Norman reluctantly retrieves the book (which turns out to be fairy tales) and goes to the graveyard to read it as instructed, but is interrupted by the school bully before he can finish. The men and women who sentenced the witch so long ago rise from their graves as zombies, and the spirit of the witch begins to grow and exert power over the town, causing a huge lightning storm. Norman ends up teaming up with his sister, Neil, Neil’s older brother Mitch, and the bully to try and escape the zombies and find out what to do next. After a lot of chasing and the town getting up in arms over the threat, they find out that the zombies only wanted to talk to Norman to make sure he was going to perform the ritual correctly, because they were sorry for what they had done to the witch and didn’t want to make it any worse. It turns out the witch was just a little girl with strange powers named Agatha Penderghast, a distant relative of Norman’s. She was killed by the town council because they were afraid of her, and the ritual each year was to read her a bedtime story so she would stay asleep and not take vengeance on the town. Norman seeks out her grave and talks to her angry ghost, explaning that he understands what it’s like to have people afraid of you, but it’s not okay to hurt others just because you were hurt. He helps her to think about her mother who loved her, and she finds peace. She releases her hold on the town and sleeps, and the zombies return to their graves as well. In the end, Norman’s family accepts his abilities and they all hang out together – with his dead grandmother.

ParaNorman, from the makers of Coraline, is one hell of a sweet movie, particular given that it’s all about death and dead people, and faces some historical ugliness head-on (although the reality is that far more of the witches killed in the 1600s were old women than young girls). Aside from being an incredible feat of stop motion and CGI animation with fun character designs and a well-realized mythology, it’s is just bursting with humor and the exact kinds of messages both kids and adults need to hear. It doesn’t shy away from some of the more gruesome aspects of its plot, nor does it try to sanitize them. Although it does make death less scary – there’s even a scene where Norman has to pry the book out of the rigor mortised hands of his dead uncle which is both funny and disturbing.

The notion that a parent might be afraid for their child, and that this might cause them to take it out on the kid, is not one that is often addressed in kids movies so directly, but one I feel is hugely beneficial. I think it’s great for kids to see examples of loving parents who get it wrong, because they all do at some point, and to try to see things from their parents perspective. When you’re young, you don’t quite get that your parents are just people. Norman’s relationship with his parents is imperfect, and they may never totally understand him, but by the end they’ve moved to a place of mutual acceptance and love, which all any of us can hope for from our families, really.

Bloodsucking Bastards – 31 Days of Halloween, Day 24

October is Halloween movie month! Having been completely deprived of any kind of Halloween experience growing up, I now spend 31 days celebrating with film and TV. I like to shoot for a mix of old and new, horror and comedy, from the slightly spooky to the totally terrifying to the just plain weird. Each day of October I’ll reviewing one of these ventures in the realm of the creepy and supernatural. Some will be high quality cinema and some will require large amounts of alcohol to survive. Stock up on seasonal beer and Fireball-apple jello shots and join me! A warning, though – unless the review is of a very recent release, HERE BE SPOILERS.

Bloodsucking Bastards (2015)

Starring: Fran Kranz, Pedro Pascal, Joey Kern

Synopsis: Evan works a at sales company selling male enhancement products over the phone, along with his ex-girlfriend Amanda and his best friend, Tim. Evan has been working towards becoming sales manager but is disappointed when his old rival, Max, is brought in instead and he’s relegated back to the sales pool. Things start changing around the office, with some people disappearing and others undergoing a change of personality that makes them work harder than ever. Evan remains largely oblivious to the very clear fact that everyone is being turned into a vampire, which is at first only noticed by Tim and a security guard, Frank. He’s more concerned with Max putting the movies on Amanda. Eventually, however Tim and Evan, along with Frank and Amanda, set out to fight the vampires and take the office back from Max. After a long bloody battle they eventually defeat Max and Evan and Amanda get back together.

This movie is Office Space meets Shaun of the Dead meets 30 Days of Night – a middle management comedy with vampires and buckets of blood. The metaphor of a charismatic vampire who turns the company’s performance around by transforming the employees into mindless subservient drones is neither subtle nor revolutionary, but it is very appealing for those of us who have worked in offices with this sort of management structure (ie, most people). Max’s explanation that this is the perfect place for vampires, since it’s a windowless office full of pale people who already work late into the night, rings unfortunately true for my own cubicle based existence (hey, if I stand on my tippy-toes I can see a window sometimes).

Halloween – 31 Days of Halloween, Day 23

October is Halloween movie month! Having been completely deprived of any kind of Halloween experience growing up, I now spend 31 days celebrating with film and TV. I like to shoot for a mix of old and new, horror and comedy, from the slightly spooky to the totally terrifying to the just plain weird. Each day of October I’ll reviewing one of these ventures in the realm of the creepy and supernatural. Some will be high quality cinema and some will require large amounts of alcohol to survive. Stock up on seasonal beer and Fireball-apple jello shots and join me! A warning, though – unless the review is of a very recent release, HERE BE SPOILERS.

Halloween (1978)

Starring: Jamie Lee Curtis, Donald Pleasance

Synopsis: The story begins in 1963, when 6 year-old Michael Myers murders his sister while wearing a Halloween mask, in some kind of weird psychosexual fantasy. After fifteen years in an insane asylum he escapes and returns to his hometown, where he begins stalking high school student Laurie. On Halloween night, she and some friends are babysitting and/or messing around with their boyfriends, when Michael begins to pick them off one by one. First Annie is killed after she drops her young charge off with Laurie and the boy she is watching, Tommy, in order to go pick up her boyfriend. Then Lynda and her boyfriend are killed after having sex in the house where Annie was babysitting. Laurie goes over to check on them after receiving an alarming call from Lynda and discovers their bodies, staged dramatically, before Michael attacks her. He chases her back the house she was babysitting at and she manages to hide the children and then fight Michael off with a knitting needle. He’s not easily killed and is about to overcome her, when his psychiatrist, who has been tracking him all this time, comes in and shoots Michael multiple times. He falls off the balcony, but when they look down his body is gone.

Going back and watching the original Halloween now is like going through a time warp. Although hardly the first slasher film and owing much to Psycho and other of its ilk from the 50’s and 60’s, Halloween is definitely the origin of the modern slasher flick and kicked off a flurry of them in the 80’s and 90’s (with the 2000’s we got the torture porn genre, which is its hillybilly cousin on steroids). Frankly, it’s not scary. Maybe it was, watching in a dark theater for the first time, or maybe I’m so inured to terror and violence that it seems almost quaint. There’s little blood or gore, and really very little real tension until the last third. I mean you know Michael is stalking Laurie and her friends, but most of the movie is them chatting, getting high, and arranging their social lives. Even at the climax, the level of fear is nothing compared to modern day horror.

Edward Scissorhands – 31 Days of Halloween, Day 22

October is Halloween movie month! Having been completely deprived of any kind of Halloween experience growing up, I now spend 31 days celebrating with film and TV. I like to shoot for a mix of old and new, horror and comedy, from the slightly spooky to the totally terrifying to the just plain weird. Each day of October I’ll reviewing one of these ventures in the realm of the creepy and supernatural. Some will be high quality cinema and some will require large amounts of alcohol to survive. Stock up on seasonal beer and Fireball-apple jello shots and join me! A warning, though – unless the review is of a very recent release, HERE BE SPOILERS.

Edward Scissorhands (1990)

Starring: Johnny Depp, Wynona Ryder, Dianne Wiest

Synopsis: An old woman tells her granddaughter a story about where the snow comes from. A long time, an inventor created an artificial boy, Edward, but died just as about he was about to give him human hands. Edward is stuck alone in the old mansion on the hill, with blades and scissors for hands instead. One day, an Avon saleswoman named Peg visits the mansion and finds him. She takes pity on him and bring him home to her family. Edward is immediately smitten by her daughter, Kim. After some initial distrust, Edward becomes popular in the neighborhood due to his polite innocence and his talents for cutting hair and making topiaries. He becomes somewhat of a star, but not everyone loves him – Kim’s boyfriend is jealous of her attention to Edward and tries to get him in trouble, and one of the neighbor ladies comes on to him and then accuses him of attempted rape when he refuses her. It doesn’t take much for the neighborhood to turn against him, and when he accidentally cuts Kim’s brother trying to save him from being run over, a mob forms and chases Edward back up to the mansion. Kim follows him, but Jim interrupts and threatens them both. Jim tries to goad Edward into fighting him but only succeeds when he hits Kim for interfering. Edward stabs Jim and he dies, falling out of a high window. Kim kisses Edward goodbye and returns to tell the neighborhood that both boys are dead after roof caved in on them, bringing a spare scissor hand for proof. Back in the present, Kim tells her granddaughter than she never saw Edward again but she the snow is really ice shavings from Edward making beautiful ice sculptures up in the mansion, drifting down on the town.

Edward Scissorhands, an early Burton film and his first collaboration with Johnny Depp, is a beautiful tragic fairy tale. It’s a story about being an outcast, about celebrating those who are different, about love and loss, and most of all about the fickleness of humanity. People are afraid of the strange and different yes, but they also love a novelty. Edward is new and shiny and thrilling and provides entertainment, but everyone is quick to turn on him once the novelty wear off because, except for the Boggs family, they never saw him as person in the first place.

Tremors – 31 Days of Halloween, Day 20

October is Halloween movie month! Having been completely deprived of any kind of Halloween experience growing up, I now spend 31 days celebrating with film and TV. I like to shoot for a mix of old and new, horror and comedy, from the slightly spooky to the totally terrifying to the just plain weird. Each day of October I’ll reviewing one of these ventures in the realm of the creepy and supernatural. Some will be high quality cinema and some will require large amounts of alcohol to survive. Stock up on seasonal beer and Fireball-apple jello shots and join me! A warning, though – unless the review is of a very recent release, HERE BE SPOILERS.

Tremors (1990)

Starring: Kevin Bacon, Fred Ward, and and Finn Carter

Synopsis: Two feckless handymen, Val and Earl, work in around the tiny town of Perfection, Nevada. One day, they begin to notice strange happenings, including people disappearing. They find the body of a local man dead of dehydration at the top of an electrical tower, still holding his rifle. When their truck is attacked by a snake like creature coming up from under the ground, they realize everything is connected. On their way to get help, they encounter the creature again, which they name the graboid, and discover that the snake like things are just the tongues. The graboid is much larger than they thought. They manage to defeat it by running it into a concrete wall, but Rhonda, a local grad student doing seismology research in the area, tells them her equipment indicates there are three more of the things on the loose. They narrowly escape one of these by using the erratic boulders present in the landscape and pole vaulting between them to get to their truck, as the graboids can only move through loose soil. The three return to warn the town, but there’s no time to escape and although they are able to kill one graboid, the remaining two corner the townspeople and eventually drive them out of the buildings and onto a boulder. They manage to kill one of the graboids with homemade explosives but the final one is too smart. Finally, Val gets the idea to lure the graboid to the edge of a cliff and set the explosive behind it. The graboid bursts the cliff edge and plummets to its death.

I’ll be honest, Tremors isn’t really my kind of movie. I mean, I love a good monster movie (think The Host). And I love a really, really bad monster movie (think Lake Placid). But Tremors is not quite either of those things. It’s a straight-up monster movie, not intentionally bad, not fantastically great, but definitely all about the monster. Tremors is the classic 50’s monster-attacks-small-town movie (think Night of the Lepus or Kingdom of Spiders) remade for the 90’s, with a funnier script and better creature effects. Unfortunately for Tremors, I’ve never been truly in love with that genre, although I’m not entirely unappreciative of it. I can recognize that the movie does a great job of playing tribute to and freshening up the mid-century B monster classic, even if it’s not that enchanting to me personally. 

What We Do In Shadows – 31 Days of Halloween, Day 19

October is Halloween movie month! Having been completely deprived of any kind of Halloween experience growing up, I now spend 31 days celebrating with film and TV. I like to shoot for a mix of old and new, horror and comedy, from the slightly spooky to the totally terrifying to the just plain weird. Each day of October I’ll reviewing one of these ventures in the realm of the creepy and supernatural. Some will be high quality cinema and some will require large amounts of alcohol to survive. Stock up on seasonal beer and Fireball-apple jello shots and join me! A warning, though – unless the review is of a very recent release, HERE BE SPOILERS.

What We Do in the Shadows (2014)

Starring: Jemaine Clement, Taika Waititi, Johnny Brugh, Cori Gonzalez-Macuer

Synopsis: Set up in mockumentary style, What We Do in the Shadows follows four vampires (Viago, Vlad, Deacon, and Petyr) who are flatmates in a New Zealand suburb. The first part of the film largely shows their daily lives and routines and explains their histories. The plot gets going when one of the vampires, Deacon, enlists his human servant, Jackie, to procure some victims for them. One of the victims, her ex-boyfriend, Nick, ends up being turned into a vampire instead of simply being drained of blood. He begins to hang around with them, and is kind of a drag. He often brings his still-human friend, Stu. At first the other vampires want to eat to Stu, but eventually they become friends with him and he helps them learn how to use modern technology. Unfortunately, Nick’s loose lips about his vampire secret attract the attention of a vampire hunter, who follows him to the house and kills Petyr, the oldest of them. Nick is shunned from the group and takes Stu with him. After several months, they all reunite at the undead masquerade ball. They also discover the ball is being hosted by Vlad’s ex, “The Beast” and that Jackie has gotten Nick to finally turn her into a vampire. A fight breaks out over the fact that Nick brought Stu, as pretty much everyone there wants to eat him. The group escape the ball but run into a pack of werewolves. It’s a full moon, so the werewolves attack and Stu is turned into a werewolf. In the end, Nick makes up with the other vampires and they decide they like Stu enough to still hang out with him. They even agree to be friends with the other werewolves. Viago, using the internet with Stu’s help, reunites with his lost love (who is 90 years old now) and turns her into a vampire, Vlad gets back together with The Beast, and everyone is generally happy with how things have turned out.

What We Do in the Shadows is a pitch perfect, Christopher Guest-style mockumentary. Made in New Zealand by Taika Waititi and one half of Flight of the Conchords (Jemaine Clement) and using all local actors, it had a tiny budget and an even tinier initial release. Pretty much every scene was almost entirely improvised, with the actors told only the basic structure of the scene they were to be performing. Somehow, these conditions all combine to produce a hilarious, critically-acclaimed vampire satire that has finally managed to get the world-wide distribution it deserves. It’s a movie that sneaks up on you and makes you happy to be caught.

Ghostbusters – 31 Days of Halloween, Day 18

October is Halloween movie month! Having been completely deprived of any kind of Halloween experience growing up, I now spend 31 days celebrating with film and TV. I like to shoot for a mix of old and new, horror and comedy, from the slightly spooky to the totally terrifying to the just plain weird. Each day of October I’ll reviewing one of these ventures in the realm of the creepy and supernatural. Some will be high quality cinema and some will require large amounts of alcohol to survive. Stock up on seasonal beer and Fireball-apple jello shots and join me! A warning, though – unless the review is of a very recent release, HERE BE SPOILERS.

Ghostbusters (1984)

Starring: Bill Murray, Dan Aykroyd, Harold Ramis, and Sigourney Weaver

Synopsis: After three parapsychologists, Venkman, Stantz, and Spangler, are fired from Columbia University for their questionable research methods, they set up shop in NYC as “Ghostbusters”, promising to investigate and dispose of any haunting spirits that might be troubling the public and containing them at their offices. They have some early successes and soon their services are in such high demand they need to hire a fourth team member, Zeddemore. One of their clients, who Venkman immediately begins to pursue romantically, is a cellist named Dana who has been experiencing hauntings in her building. Dana becomes possessed by a spirit called Zuul, the Gatekeeper, and her annoying but well-intentioned neighbor by a spirit known as the Keymaster. If the two come together, it would open a portal and summon the ancient Sumerian god, Gozer the Gozerian to wreak destruction on the world. The Ghostbusters work to prevent this, but unfortunately their celebrity has attracted the notice of the EPA, who arrests them for disposing of waste (the ghosts) improperly and accidentally sets all the captured spirits free to haunt the city. The team talk themselves out of trouble, but Gozer has already been summoned, along with the Destructor, who takes the form of a giant Stay Puft Marshmallow Man. The team manages to defeat Gozer and destroy the portal by crossing the streams of their proton packs, which is dangerous but causes the burst of power they need. The spirits are banished, the marshmallow man explodes, Dana and her neighbor are rescued, and the team is hailed as heroes by the very sticky city.

Ghostbusters was originally a summer blockbuster. It was a fairly (for the time) big budget film with big special effects that was actually a really funny comedy. Such a beast was rare at the time and even rarer now. Even though the ghosts look a little hokey today and the gender politics are a mess, Ghostbusters holds up surprisingly well after over thirty years. It’s well paced, tightly plotted, and the comedic dynamics between the main characters are unsurpassed. The original script, written with John Belushi in mind for the role of Venkman, was much darker, much weirder, and would have cost up to ten times as much to film. Although I’m sure Belushi would have been fantastic, this movie manages to hit a very particular sweet spot while a move massive budget endeavor would likely have collapsed under its own weight.