Disney keep their favorite little toys alive with yet another short adventure, this time in the vein of Halloween. While, it’s not a full length narrative, it does present the same stakes and personal back story that the three feature films have, and is an entertaining look in to the lives of the toys with their new owner Bonnie. After watching a horror movie while on the road with Bonnie, her mom and she stop at a local motel where Mr. Pricklepants is convinced horror awaits them.
As usual, the way to conduct spoofs and satires these days is to base them around familiar material and deliver reliable jokes that anyone could really write. Most comedy is based around the formula and the “Scary Movie” series has made money off of familiarity. “Paranormal Activity” is popular, so that’s up for grabs. Charlie Sheen and Lindsay Lohan are headlines so they have to be included. Snoop Dogg is still notable, so why not throw him in there? Ashley Tisdale is still a very popular star, so she’s a natural replacement for Anna Faris. And hey, people still kind of, sort of remember “Black Swan” and “Inception” so why not throw those in there for filler?
Director Ivan Reitman’s eighties classic has the advantage of being a film that can be appreciated in the context of its decade, and by literally anyone else. There’s something very relatable to the broader audiences who visit New York to follow four workaday ghost hunters battle a real foe in the form of an inter-dimensional demon. It also helps that “Ghostbusters” stars an ensemble of brilliant character actors, all of whom are perspective heavyweights in their own right.
The heroes of “Ghostbusters” aren’t flawless brooding men, but average Joes with paunches and flaws that make them absolutely relatable. It’s rare we can have a horror film with heroes who look like every day New Yorkers rather than the fit and virile young men that dominate the genre today. The four heroes in Reitman’s horror comedy are scientists and talk show guests who discuss paranormal beings and aren’t afraid to milk it for all the money they can get. But when an actual demonic entity is released within a lonely single woman’s house, the team of scientists becomes “The Ghostbusters.”
When all hell breaks loose, they go from local pariahs to immediate heroes and decide they must take it down the omnipotent monsters whether they like it or not. Sigourney Weaver (post-“Alien”) stars as Dana Barrett, a woman who literally discovers an alternate ghostly universe brewing in her refrigerator, and is possessed by the entity “Gozer the Gozerian.” The being is vicious and relentless. Through her, it plans to topple New York City within itself, and eventually dominate the world. Bill Murray is at his utter finest, channeling Bugs Bunny as the wise-cracking and hilarious Peter Venkman.
He’s the ham within the group who wants the fame and glory but won’t work for it. Harold Ramis is the leader who examines ghosts and their material form alongside friend Raymond Stantz who manages to help invent much of the ghostbuster technology including the “Phantom Zone”-esque vortex where all the captured ghosts are stored. He along with Dan Akroyd’s Ray Stantz perfect the team’s most popular devices, the proton guns which stun the ghosts, and their storage pod which can suck the ghosts for quick transfer. In spite of the great devices, the beauty lies in the mixture of horror and comedy in to a perfectly eccentric mold.
I’d be remiss if I didn’t mention Ernie Hudson as Winston Zeddemore, probably the only religious member in a trio of pragmatists and scholars, who believes that the emergence of ghosts in New York is a sign of something very dire. While the group relish the increase in business, Wiston is hesitant to celebrate because he believes it to be an omen for a potential apocalypse. Hudson is an important member who also plays the role of the spectator for the audience, gazing at the awe inspiring but horrifying moments in the team’s battles, but standing alongside them courageously.
Director Reitman, along with crafty editing and top notch direction, is able to make magic off of the traditional green screen and puppetry effects. Case in point, the climax, which offers some of the best fantasy filmmaking ever, as the four finally face off against Gozer in the skyscraper, leading in to one the best filmed sequences of the genre. The writing, courtesy of Akroyd and Ramis really comes together with a perfect balance of terror and laughs that compile an exciting and fun genre hybrid rarely mastered.
I by no means would suggest “MST3K” the movie to anyone interested in getting in to the show. If you’ve never seen the cult series before, the movie surely will not win you over. When you take away the rabid fandom (I will watch the entire nine seasons in one sitting someday!), the movie itself is somewhat mediocre and disappointing. We deserved a fun, and epic movie, with some of the better jokes we’ve seen on the show. We even should have been allowed the privilege of a better movie. How fun would it have been to see the guys riff on “Plan Nine from Outer Space,” finally?
Though we may never get to see director Guillermo Del Toro’s vision of “At the Mountains of Madness,” that doesn’t mean “Pacific Rim” isn’t without its Lovecraftian influences. There’s the deep sea monsters, the beings from another dimension, giant tentacled beings, and the implications of something bigger to come. “Pacific Rim” is set in a world where kaiju are a natural phenomenon and the world is built around the constant threat of attacks from giant beasts that didn’t come from the sky, but instead the bottom of the sea through an inter dimensional rift.
If you want a pure unadulterated ride in to the middle of the eighties, “The Goonies” is an inadvertent trip in to the complete mindset of the decade. Cyndi Lauper, adventure, escapism, work out obsession, coming of age, nostalgia for the sixties, a humongous Steven Spielberg influenced narrative, Corey Feldman, Richard Donner, Jonathan Ke Quan, if it was in the eighties, it’s likely here. That doesn’t act as a caveat, thankfully, as “The Goonies” is a very decade relevant film that still manages to work as an excellent child oriented fantasy adventure in the vein of “The Hardy Boys.”
I think one of the reasons why the DCOM “Phantom of the Megaplex” has now gone on to basic obscurity is that it’s one of the weirder movies the Disney Channel ever produced. It’s not just an ode to the love of movies, but it’s a call back to “The Phantom of the Opera.” Not only does the film draw heavily from the original story, sans the violence and murder, but it actually influences its audience to check out the Lon Chaney masterpiece. “Phantom of the Megaplex” is a busy and often messy horror fantasy, but one that works, mainly because the writers of the film clearly love movies as much as we do.