Ghostbusters II has one truly inspired, nearly iconic line of dialogue, when Dan Aykroyd’s character Ray refers to a bunch of bratty kids at a birthday party as “ungrateful little yuppie larvae.” I love that phrase and think of it often whenever I’m harassed by too many annoying children. (Ironically, most of the kids in that scene are well into middle-age by now.) To say the rest of the film has little else to recommend might seem unfair, but unfortunately, would not be inaccurate.
Watching Ghostbusters II is a deflating experience, especially if watched in too close a proximity to the first movie. Five years prior, Ghostbusters had taken the world by storm to become an instant classic. In the intervening time, The Real Ghostbusters animated series captured the imaginations of children for several seasons on television. By 1989, the world was primed for a live-action sequel, which blew up the box office with a record-setting opening weekend, only to promptly plummet in subsequent weeks as audiences realized they had no interest in going back to see this dud a second time.
| Title: | Ghostbusters II |
| Year of Release: | 1989 |
| Director: | Ivan Reitman |
| Watched On: | 4K Ultra HD Blu-ray |
| Also Available On: | Blu-ray Fubo Various VOD rental and purchase platforms |
Ghostbusters II shoots itself in the foot immediately by establishing a premise that, only five years later, the entire world has forgotten the events of the first movie and everyone believes the Ghostbusters are frauds. First, this officially knocks the cartoon series out of franchise canon – which probably upset kids in the audience more than their parents. More importantly, it’s just a dumb idea. A skyscraper-sized marshmallow man tromped through Manhattan in front of thousands of witnesses. How does no one remember that? Did not a single news camera catch a glimpse of it? If the screenplay, once again by Dan Aykroyd and Harold Ramis, had ever intended to work in a supernatural explanation for everyone’s memory loss, that part didn’t make the final cut. It just seems like the whole planet has turned stupid.
Their business failing, the Ghostbusters have mostly split up to pursue separate interests. Egon (Ramis) has returned to scientific research. Ray (Aykroyd) and Winston (Ernie Hudson) pay the bills by performing at parties for the aforementioned yuppie larvae. In what may be the film’s only other amusing bit, Peter (Bill Murray) is now the smarmy host of a corny cable talk show no one takes seriously. Of course, the boys will need to put the band back together when a new paranormal threat strikes – this time involving a river of mood-altering purple slime that’s flowing beneath the city and is somehow connected to an evil painting possessed by the spirit of a Dark Ages warlord. The specific details of how these things relate to one another are neither well-developed nor particularly interesting.
Frankly, not much in Ghostbusters II is all that interesting. Despite the same writers, director, and all the major cast players (even Sigourney Weaver, Annie Potts, and Rick Moranis) returning to duty, the film is terribly slow and meandering, and has a deadly lack of momentum between set-pieces. For an alleged comedy, jokes are sparse and rarely land. Peter MacNicol affects a really exaggerated yet ill-defined “foreign” accent (think Bronson Pinchot in Beverly Hills Cop) to play the villain’s human toady, and is mostly just annoying.
The Ghostbusters hardly battle any ghosts in this entry, and the few we do get look much goofier and less convincing than the last time. Main antagonist Vigo the Carpathian (German wrestler and boxer Wilhelm von Homburg) is straight-up lame, and the properties of the slime are inconsistent from scene to scene. In one, Ray describes it as “pure, concentrated evil,” but later it’s critical to saving the world.
Having run out of any other ideas, the film’s climax also essentially replays that from the first movie, only instead of a giant marshmallow man, we get the Statue of Liberty walking through New York. If you exert any effort trying to reason out how that could ever work (which the writers clearly did not), it’ll hurt your brain. Did Aykroyd and Ramis think the statue has actual legs under the gown that’d be capable of supporting it to walk? For that matter, the scale of the statue seems to change from shot to shot.
I have incredibly conflicted feelings about Ghostbusters II. I saw it in the theater opening weekend with my mother, who had also taken me to see the original Ghostbusters. We were both fans of the first one and were excited for the sequel, but as the movie played, my mom could barely restrain herself from expressing how bored she was by it. Being only 15 at the time, and not exactly having what you could call discerning taste yet, I was just happy to see all my favorite characters back together and found it way more enjoyable than she did. Afterward, I may have harangued her a bit for being a stick-in-the-mud. I even bought the soundtrack album (featuring the musical artistry of Bobby Brown, Run DMC, and Doug E. Fresh) on cassette and played it regularly in my Walkman.
By the time the movie came to home video, however, I had a different experience with it and started to see why it had gotten such poor word-of-mouth. Almost instantly, I felt shocked that the movie was so much worse than I remembered it. Was everyone else right all along?
Over the years, I’ve developed great fondness for many of what I view as underappreciated sequels. While none of them live up to their predecessors, I can find merit and real entertainment in movies like Predator 2, Mission: Impossible II, or Alien3. Every time I rewatch Ghostbusters II, I try to view it through that lens, looking for little moments that might make it worthwhile. Sadly, with each attempt, I grow more disinterested in it. By this point, the main association I make is a feeling of embarrassment for the memory of my initial reaction upon walking out of the theater that summer in 1989, much more pleased with what I’d just seen. I know I’ll never like this movie that much again. How did I ever like it in the first place?
The 4K Ultra HD Blu-ray
Ghostbusters II came to Blu-ray belatedly in 2014, and then to 4K Ultra HD Blu-ray in 2016. I own a copy on the latter format as part of a double-feature SteelBook package released in 2019. Much like the 4K edition of the first Ghostbusters, the sequel is mastered for a very hot HDR level that leaves the movie looking overly bright and washed-out on my screen unless I manually turn down my projector’s tone-map setting (something I rarely need to do for other titles). Thankfully, once that’s accomplished, the movie settles into a much more watchable appearance. Unlike Ghostbusters, I find the UHD for Ghostbusters II acceptable enough that I don’t feel compelled to revert to the standard Blu-ray edition.
It helps that the photography in Ghostbusters II is less grainy or hazy than that in the original. The 2.40:1 image is generally sharp and detailed, especially in close-ups. However, opticals and other visual effects shots noticeably drop in quality. In that regard, the 4K resolution may cause variances in clarity to stand out more, while the regular Blu-ray might look more stable.
The soundtrack (at least, the English-language option) is only available in a new Dolby Atmos remix with no representation for the original Dolby Stereo mix. The audio sounds dull and rolled-off. Dialogue is clear enough, but sound effects are weak and action scenes are muddy. Bass is either non-existent when you’d expect to hear some (such as a scene with jackhammers), or annoyingly boomy, with little compromise in-between. I’m not sure if these problems mostly come down to the remix, or are just the fault of the sequel having lazier sound design than the original. (Both may play a part.)
The SteelBook is a five-disc set in all: two feature 4K discs, two feature Blu-rays, and one disc dedicated to supplements. As I complained about in my prior review of the original Ghostbusters, the case has a frustrating configuration that requires stacking multiple discs on top of each other on the same hubs, three on one side and two on the other .
The 4K disc has an infuriatingly confusing menu system, and no supplements beyond some cast and crew notes that are definitely not worth the effort of navigating to find.
The corresponding Blu-ray adds one “Special Feature” (singular): an audio commentary recorded in 2014 with director Ivan Reitman, writer/star Dan Aykroyd, and producer Joe Medjuck. I have no idea why this couldn’t be included on the 4K disc as well. Reitman starts right off by admitting, “We took a lot of crap for this one, didn’t we?” and then proceeds to blame the movie’s poor reception on bad timing and the audience being too cynical to appreciate what he believes is the film’s optimism. After that, the track quickly devolves into the three men mostly just narrating the action we can see on screen.
The separate disc for extras is divided into sections devoted to Ghostbusters, Ghostbusters II, and The Real Ghostbusters animated series. Specific to the sequel are a 1989 episode of The Oprah Winfrey Show in which the stars plug their movie, a tedious 41-minute Electronic Press Kit promo, a handful of short deleted scenes, a retrospective interview with Reitman and Aykroyd filmed in 2014, a Bobby Brown music video, and some trailers. The music video is laden with celebrity cameos, including one from a certain narcissistic imbecile even more distasteful and cringeworthy today than Bobby Brown himself.
Related
- Ghostbusters
- Ivan Reitman (director)
- Dan Aykroyd
- Sigourney Weaver
- Ernie Hudson
- Peter MacNicol
Note: All screenshots on this page were taken from the standard Blu-ray edition of the film and are used for illustration purposes only.
The Video File Blog 
I don’t hate GB2 but I agree watching it immediately after the first is pretty disappointing. It’s an example of some of the worst 80’s sequel trappings.
I really hope you guys watch/review Ghostbusters:Afterlife next. I was surprised at how enjoyable I found it, plus it was filmed in my neck of the woods (Central Alberta).
Frozen Empire on the other hand? Yikes.
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I ‘m a gourmand (not a gourmet) – I even liked Answer the Call – with a ditzy Thor as their receptionist, dancing for several minutes in the closing credits. And the two latest revivals, with the kids, are great – but I do tend to skip this second film, though I’ve always enjoyed Bill Murray’s as the annoyed bachelor explaining his filing system for 1, 2, and 3 days’ worn underwear to Sigourney Weaver, who had cleaned up after him – that’s a truly classic scene. (I suspect it may have been a improv.)
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