The Letdowns: Ghostbusters II (1989)

Nick Schager — Tue, 07 Apr 2009 15:00:00 GMT

In this recurring column, we revisit (and reconsider) eagerly anticipated films that didn’t seem to fulfill their pre-release promise.

It says something about Ghostbusters’ enduring popularity that, twenty-five years after its proton pack-wielding foursome first rid Manhattan of evil specters, news of a forthcoming video game and potential third cinematic installment – both of which plan to bring back most of the original cast – elicits near-breathless excitement. And yet the franchise’s twenty-year idleness since Ghostbusters II also speaks volumes about that 1989 sequel, which effectively slimed everyone’s fond memories of the original. Reuniting Bill Murray, Dan Aykroyd, Harold Ramis, Ernie Hudson, Sigourney Weaver, Rick Moranis and Annie Potts for another supernatural go-round, Ivan Reitman’s follow-up (co-written, as before, by Ramis and Aykroyd) seemed to have all the requisite pieces in place for another blockbuster, including a bigger budget that afforded all manner of special effects. Yet nearly two decades after it first disappointed fans, the film remains a lumpy mishmash of regurgitated elements and creatures, carelessly tossed-off one-liners and wannabe catchphrases (“Two in the box, ready to go, we be fast, and they be slow!”), and a plot made up of one good idea and many, many lousy ones.

Five years after they defeated Gozer and the Stay Puft Marshmallow Man, the Ghostbusters’ business has been disbanded by lawsuits and court orders, and Peter Venkman (Murray) has broken up with Dana (Weaver) – who, busy bee that she is, rebounded by getting married, having a baby boy named Oscar, and getting divorced. When Oscar’s baby carriage mysteriously speeds down the sidewalk and into traffic, she turns to her old friends, who discover that a river of slime is running beneath the city’s streets, and in the direction of the art museum where Dana works and an enormous, cartoonishly spooky painting of a 16th-century despot named Vigo resides. Ghostbusters II’s sole clever idea is to make the metropolis’ slime a manifestation of New Yorkers’ unpleasantness. It’s a bit of tongue-in-cheek mockery of the city’s notorious reputation that might have proved fruitful if the story wasn’t such a slapdash mess, lurching from a pitiful construction-worker bit (replete with Murray, Aykroyd and Ramis affecting overripe New Yawk accents), to a courtroom scene in which the goo goes nuclear once a judge screams that the Ghostbusters should “burn in hell,” to an FX-heavy finale that finds a way to make the appearance of the Titanic, a walking Statue of Liberty and the resurrected Vigo seem equally underwhelming.

Throughout, there’s the familiar-to-sequels impression that the filmmakers are merely trying to rehash what viewers liked about the first installment, including the Ghostbusters’ conflict with City Hall, a short, strange weirdo who gets possessed by the main villain (in this case, Peter MacNicol’s insufferable art restoration chief Janosz), and a cruddy, upfront soundtrack that desperately wants to make the same impact as its predecessor. This last issue is made even lamer by Reitman not only using Bobby Brown’s “On Our Own” at least three times during the film (including over the final credits), but actually providing the former New Edition singer with a cameo that, within the context of the action at hand, makes absolutely no sense. Then again, very little of Ghostbusters II seems guided by clear thinking, whether it’s the fact that – after getting clearance to resume business – the Ghostbusters’ uniforms feature the new spook-with-two-fingers logo (what, they know they’re in a sequel?), or the climactic shot of a painting that envisions the Ghostbusters as classical champions rather than the pitiable faded heroes this second saga turned them into.

Summerfest '08: "Corvette Summer"

Leonard Pierce — Wed, 20 Aug 2008 20:15:00 GMT

Regular Screengrab readers know that I am not one to go for cheap nostalgia. I don't view the world through rose-colored glasses, and I usuallly think that any line of reasoning that ends with 'things where better when I was a kid' come not from any real aesthetic position, but from an unwillingness to admit that one has gotten older and that the culture has moved along since we were teenagers. I'm especially not nostalgic about the 1970s; I spent most of that decade being pretty easy to please. If it came with a cape or a mask, and I could enjoy it while eating a bowl of Apple Jacks, it was okay with me. However, every once in a while, there's a piece of cultural driftwood that floats past that grips me with a strange sense of longing for the good old days, and today's Summerfest 2008 entry is one of them. Maybe I'm just becoming a softie because this is the penultimate installment of Summerfest '08 -- a feature in which I profile a movie with the word "summer" in the title that you can use to kill an hour and a half while you're waiting for your car to get detailed -- or maybe there's something deeper at work. It's hard to say: the big draws of this week's movie, Corvette Summer, are vintage cars and Mark Hammill, and I'm neither a gearhead nor a Star Wars fan. Maybe it's just my longtime crush on Annie Potts. But whatever the case, we're going to plunge head-first, for the second-to-the-last installment of Summerfest 2008, into a movie which represented the very last moment Mark Hamill was given any on-screen presence in anything but a Star Wars movie, and the very last moment Danny Bonaduce was even remotely taken seriously.

Summer's ending, as all things must. But with only two more Summerfest screenings to go, we're going to see it out with a bang! Join me for a look at 1978's Corvette Summer!

THE ACTION: It's 1978, and like every high school kid in 1978, Kenneth W. Dantley Jr. is obsessed with two things: hot girls and fast cars. Being an out-of-it chunkhead, he can't do much about obtaining the former, but in pursuit of the latter, he takes a shop class, and as his final project, instead of building a bird feeder or an ashtray, he comes up wih a custom-designed 1973 Chevrolet Corvette Stingray. Unfortunately, Kenny is in the habit of befriending ill-meaning douchebags like the weaselly Kootz, under whose care the tricked-out 'Vette is stolen. Kenny, anxious to get back the car which got him his first-ever A grade, heads off on an epic trip from Los Angeles to Las Vegas; along the way, he runs into mobsters, lowlifes, ne'er-do-wells, and Vanessa, who describes herself as a "prostitute-in-training" headed to Vegas to hit the major leagues of whoring. We're apparently meant to find this flattering. Once he actually arrives in Sin City, he falls in with a bunch of other head-in-the-clouds gearheads and the tone of the movie shifts and becomes less an outrageous teen comedy and more a deadly-dull weekend with the kind of fanatic auto enthusiasts that you find at car shows embarrassing their wives. It's a testament to the quality of the movie that the star who's lasted the longest is the car itself, which is still shown at classic auto shows all over the country.

THE PLAYERS: Aside form the Corvette, the big star of Corvette Summer is meant to be Mark Hamill. Coming off the huge success of Star Wars, producers were jumping all over him, offering him all sorts of heartthrob roles under the assumption that he was going to be Hollywood's next bankable young star. Our condolences to everyone who didn't know how that was going to end up. Ironically enough given that he was playing a kid totally obsessed with tricked-out sports cars, Hamill's career -- and life -- were almost brought to an end a few months before filming this movie, when he was involved in a serious and nearly fatal car accident. Hammill recovered quickly enough to put Corvette Summer in the can, and he sported the scars in the two Star Wars sequels, so he physically recovered, but his career never did. Elsewhere, the slimy goofball Kootz is played by a post-Partridge Danny Bonaduce, not yet in his transsexual prostitute/celebrity boxing phase, but well into his not-having-a-career phase. The biggest find of the movie -- or so it seemed at the time -- was the young, vivacious, and beautiful Annie Potts, who was nominated for a Golden Globe for best new find, and only five years later would be playing a semi-matronly role in Ghostbusters.

SUMMER FUN: The movie starts out with Hamill still toiling away in shop class, so it definitely makes you earn your summer fun as you have to put up with a good half of its runtime being set in his somewhat dreary southern California high school. As the movie progresses, though, it hits you with the good times one after another, as Hastar wars; ghostbusters; Hamill gets (and loses) his dream 'Vette, runs into a hooker with a heart of gold, takes a road trip to Las Vegas, and gets menaced by a chainsaw-wielding organized crime syndicate thug. You know, all that fun stuff that happened to everyone in high school.

HAWAIIAN SHIRTS: Not surprisingly for a movie that is set for half of its 105 minutes in southern California and the other half in Las Vegas, Hawaiian shirts abound, on big fat party animals and elsewhere. Everyone from shop teachers to parents rock the tropical look, and when the action shifts to Vegas and arriviste Mob thugs and classic car enthusiasts enter the picture, we actually begin to approach the tipping point where we hope that someone in a Brooks Brothers suit wanders on screen just for balance. Even Luke Skywalker himself, who wears a pseudo-Fonzie blue-jeans-and-white-tee combo for much of the movie, once or twice rocks this sort of goofy off-teal Hawaiian number that makes us mistake him for Ralph Malph. I wish he'd hung onto it for Return of the Jedi.

BIKINI PARTY TIME: Curiously enough for a movie that is set for half of its 105 minutes in southern California and the other half in Las Vegas, bikinis are very few and far between. We get a few shots of them in generic SoCal beach scenes, and there's also a few walk-ons by spangled showgirl two-pieces during the film's Vegas scenes, but for the most part, bikinis are nowhere to be found. However, Corvette Summer does feature a number of shots of a 25-year-old Annie Potts in a SCUBA wetsuit, which, for my entertainment dollar, is almost as good. Unless you're a total gearhead who likes watching 'Vette porn, Corvette Summer mostly serves as a cautionary tale of what could have been with the pretty young actors, but there are worse ways to spend a Wednesday afternoon in August.

The Screengrab : annie potts

The Letdowns: Ghostbusters II (1989)

Summerfest '08: "Corvette Summer"