RCBH928 wrote:I was a little angry to see Ghostbusters II get 6.6/10 on IMDB. After watching the movie, I thought this was too biased towards the franchise. The whole movie story is a structural goop. Without special effects, star actors, or the Ghostbusters IP this movie might score less than a B-Movie. Its like a bad piece of meat marinated with expensive herbs.
Did you like the first movie? If so, I'd say give it some time and then rewatch the sequel. It might grow on you. It's a different tone than the first film.
I always thought of the Ghostbusters movies as action/supernatural thriller with some comedy peppered into it, the way comedy is peppered into a James Bond movie without the movie being a straight up comedy. I guess I've felt that way mostly because the lore is really deep. The supernatural element is done with a very serious tone, the comedy all comes from the characters (and if you watch interviews with Dan Aykroyd, he's very serious about it himself). But, apparently I am wrong. Anywhere you look, this movie is classified as a comedy. Maybe an action-comedy or a supernatural-comedy, but always a comedy.
If you watch the bonus materials to the first film, someone form the production team (director, producer, I forget who it was) explains that a lot of people questioned how the Ghostbusters could have survived the explosion at the top of the apartment building at the end of the movie. And if you watch that scene, yeah, there's no way. His reply is... THAT'S the joke. So yeah, these are comedies. Maybe not in the same way that Stripes or Caddyshack is, but in the way that the Back to the Future trilogy isn't just a comedy, it's a SciFi-comedy. You have to go into it with that frame of mind.
So with that, I think you should think of Ghostbusters II as a comedy and then you might enjoy it better. You're suppose to laugh a little and be entertained for a couple hours, and there's plenty of hilarious things in this movie. The character Janosz Poha (Yan-Osh) rivals Rick Moranis' Louis Tully, which are two of the funniest and best-played roles I know of. The first film had a slightly darker and a little more serious feel to it. Most people say it's because The Real Ghostbusters series came out in between the two movies, which was massively popular, so they made the sequel a little more friendly to a younger audience.
