My Review of "Ghostbusters (1984)"

Ghostbusters (1984) is a movie that holds a special place in my heart. I remember watching it when I was really young. My father never brought me to the movies or anything like that and one night he came home with this movie. We watched it that night and I'll forever remember that movie because it blew my mind.

Years later the movie is now close to 40 years old and I'm not sure if it can really hold up to today's standards. I want to see if I can still be entertained by this movie and if nostalgia will bite me in the butt again.

The movie starts off in a New York City library. Everything seems normal until we see some weird stuff happening. All of a sudden the library screams in fear as she sees something we can't as viewers. I liked the fact that they kept everything pretty quiet and secretive in the beginning of the movie. We start to question if these so called experts are hucksters or the real deal.

They even have in the next scene, one of the Ghostbusters, Peter experimenting on some students. He's creepily coming onto the female student while torturing the male student. The movie does this to help throw us off. We don't know if they're really legitimate scientists or not.

Pretty soon everything comes to a head when Peter is fired from his teaching position at the university. He, Egon and Ray have to use their own money to create a Ghostbusters business together. There they team up with two other characters named Janine and Winston. Together they fight off these spectral anomalies and make a pretty decent living out of it.

As that part of the story is established we get introduced to the big overall story that they'll get involved with. That's basically this apartment where Peter's love interest, Dana, lives in. It's the central part of why everything is happening around New York.

I like how they played around and throw us as the viewers all over the place trying to piece everything together. They keep us in the dark as they're also in the dark navigating this ghost business.

Special effects are very dated now with all the CGI that's happening nowadays. However I do remember when this movie first came out and I was blown away with the effects. Don't forget quality of video format has increased by a lot and has made a lot of older film effects really bad. Still this doesn't really destroy the movie for me. I wonder if it's partly because of my nostalgia for this movie.

Watching it again I also noticed a few things that were cool and weird. They do have a lot of Stay Puft Marshmallow product placement throughout the movie. I never noticed it before and it is a pretty big part of the movie. Certain relationships like Egon and Janine went way over my head when I was younger too.

Some of the weird stuff included the 80's attitude against environmental protection. It's pretty clear there is some sort of rejection of environmentalists back in the 80s with this film. Also right before this environmentalist comes to the building there is a weird timeline skip. It looks like Peter may have spent the night with Dana while she was not of the right mind. Also Ray and Winston went driving all night long. It's really weird how it went from night time to the middle of the afternoon so quickly.

Overall, I still liked this movie. Some of the rose colored glasses got a little foggy as I can see a lot of issues with this movie. At times the acting is kind of weird as well. Although Rick Moranis as Louis still steals a lot of the scenes. This is very much a product of its time but I think kids can still enjoy this movie. It's supposed to be a horror comedy but there really is no horror in it anymore. The effects don't warrant any scares. I have to give this movie a 7 out of 10. I think I would still rewatch this movie but I'd probably question myself when I have an itch to.