Ghostbusters – Blu-Ray Review

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Dr Peter Venkman (Bill Murray), Dr Ray Stantz (Dan Aykroyd) and Dr Egon Spengler (Harold Ramis) are parapsychologists at New York University. It is quickly established that Stantz and Spengler are at least semi serious about their work whereas Venkman is just using it to hit on women. Everything however is about to change as they get kicked out of the University. Venkman explains that it was their destiny so that they can go into business together, and so Ghostbusters was born; a company created to rid normal people of the ghosts and spectres that haunt their daily lives.

Business is initially very slow but after a couple of high profile jobs they find that they are being inundated with calls about spooky spectres, in fact business is so good that they have to take on a fourth person and employ Winston Zeddmore (Ernie Hudson). Across town Dana Barrett notices that her eggs are cooking themselves on kitchen worktop and she has an entity lurking in her fridge. Louis Tulley (Rick Moranis) is her health conscious, geeky neighbour discovers large devil dogs in his apartment.

It would seem that Barrett and Tulley live in a building which is a conduit to another world and the team must rush over there to protect Dana and the stop the mighty Zuul from taking over the city. Will they get there in time? Will they save Dana and Louis? Will they have funny one liners to drop? You will have to watch it to find out.

I think Ghostbusters is one of those films that just ingrains itself into your brain, A true icon of 80s movie making it has pretty much everything that a good family film should have and what’s even better is that it doesn’t ever get dull even all these years later as my teenage son is a fan.

The script is fun too; written by Aykroyd and Ramis it is a great selection of witty comments, one liners and quips. Bill Murray does seem to get the lion’s share of these and so it could be argued that this is a Bill Murray film, but I disagree with that, sure he is prominent in the film but not to the detriment of the other actors although I would say this film is probably one of Murrays best outdone only by Groundhog Day.

In fact that is one of the big plus points of the film in that a little time is taken to build the characters, we like and we care about them all but each has their own way, their own personality which provides us with different types of comedy; from Moranis’ geeky accountant, to Murrays dead pan they all will make us laugh.

Another thing which I think is appealing is that even though it is a family comedy movie they haven’t dumbed it down, they all come out with these large complicated scientific explanations and the great thing is that we as the audience all get it, to a certain degree we do anyway and that is half the charm of the film as well as the special effects which although some look a bit dated these days were top class in 1984.

Overall I think Ramis and and Aykroyd did a wonderful job with the script and Ivan Reitman did a wonderful job of directing the proceedings. This is a great classic movie and one that every movie lover should own.

9/10

Audio:

Mine played out in Dolby Digital 5.1 and it is a pretty decent track. Dialogue and soundtrack are mainly front based and are well balanced. The surrounds are used on occasion but I would have liked to see them utilised more, the few times that I noticed them I thought that my rear speakers had blown and were producing a rasping sound

6/10

Visual:

The picture on this blu-ray release has been cleaned up and it is a pretty good transfer. I didn’t noticed any damage or serious flaws although the colours sometimes seemed a bit muted on occasion.

For the most part the Special effects stand up well to a High Def release, the only real let down was whenever the “devil dogs” were involved, especially in the apartments, but then this movie is very old and all the other special effects seem to have stood up a little better.

7/10

Special Features:

There is a wealth of extras on this blu-ray disc

Cinechat: This is like MSN but for use when watching a film, you will of course need an internet connection for this feature, personally I don’t know if I want to chat to people whilst watching a film, and if I did I would want an external keyboard rather than the PS3 remote in order to input text.

Commentary with Ivan Reitman (Director), Harold Ramis (Egon Spengler) and Joe Medjuck (Associate Producer): The three guys sit down to talk about the film.

Blu-wizard: According to the blurb this feature allows you to customise the way you view the special features, it allows you to create a playlist of extras that you want to see.

Slimer mode: This is a picture in picture commentary with some graphics running the top and bottom of the screen which would normally be the black lines of a widescreen picture. The volume of this feature seems quite low.

Ecto-1: Resurrecting the classic car (15.37): as the titles hints at, this is all about the Ghostbusters car, how they chose it and its restoration of it when they wanted to release the game. An enjoyable little extra and I think everyone would agree that the restoration work was top drawer.

Making of Ghostbusters video game (11.18): Another self explanatory special feature.

Ghostbusters Garage, ECTO-1 Gallery (5.27): A bunch of still photographs showing the famous car before and after restoration. There is a little moving footage to and it is displayed to us as a rolling gallery.

Ghostbusters the video game preview (1.43): This is basically the trailer for the video game. I’ve never played the game but it doesn’t look to bad.

Scene cemetery: Scenes that were killed off or shortened in the released film, the quality of the clips is quite poor.

1984 Featurette (9.45): This is a making of feature made a the time of the movie, the audio is quite low, the presenter seems to be lacking a little personality too, but an interesting document from the period, this is all un-restored footage.

Cast and Crew Featurette (10.53): A good 10 minute chat with most of the guys about the film and their feelings about it, Bill Murray isn’t in any of the modern extras though. Although I have to say that I watched all of these extras in order and I have to say the Dan Aykroyd seems to go off on one dropping scientific explanations wherever he can, he is obviously really interested in the entire paranormal thing.

SFX Featurette (15.22): The setup for this feature was quite bland. They had a bunch of people that has worked on the film all sitting in the same room and they each spoke about the SFX and how the bits and pieces were filmed, with the occasional movie clip thrown in.

Multi Angle Featurette: there are three multi angle features here; Spook central exploding, she’s a dog and crossing the streams. I must say that I don’t get the feature, 1st you get a bad quality version then a better quality version that plays.

Storyboard comparisons: compare the story board to the actual movie.

10/10

Overall:

A great family movie that I never tire of seeing.

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