Ghostbusters II (1989), The Seventh Sign (1988)

I will eventually get to Ghostbusters (the 1984 original), but it really deserves its own post. Ghostbusters II (1989), sadly, does not. 

I expected to like this a lot more than I did. I saw it in the theaters as a nine-year-old, and had good memories of that experience. I remember being excited, thrilled, I laughed, and I almost immediately bought the horrible, horrible botch job of a game that came out for the original Nintendo. 

How disappointing, then, to see this pale imitation. While researching the movie for the blog, I read a quote from a dissatisfied Bill Murray that said "The movie was a lot of slime, but not much of us." How true, Bill. The movie is a lot of effects - some of them fantastic, others terrible - and very little ghost busting. 

The four ghostbusters themselves, in fact, pretty much phone in their rare appearances. The movie is much more interested with showcasing New York, paying attention to a surprisingly calm Sigourney Weaver (considering her infant is wildly imperiled for virtually the entire run of the movie, she is pretty laid back), and ogling the absolutely stupid and unscary new villain, Vigo Something or Other. He was so boring, voice by Max Von Sydow notwithstanding. A less scary villain would be hard to find. 

And the plot was nonsensical. Vigo was flooding New York with psychic goo that reacted to hatred, and in so doing gained power to once more take physical form as some kind of real-life Dracula? Huh?? HUH???? Who in hell wrote that?

Oh. Dan Ackroyd and Harold Ramis wrote it. Sigh. This movie feels mostly like a serious of discarded ideas from the first one, swept together into a jigsaw puzzle of mostly unfunny jokes and set pieces. There are a few fantastic ones: The rich woman whose mink coat comes back to life and runs down the street; the Titanic docking and ghosts streaming out, with a gaping Cheech Marin saying "well, better late than never"; the judge facing the two brothers he sentenced to death. 

But many duds. The "climax" of the movie is toothless and boring, especially when compared against the first movie with the ingenious Stay Puft Marshmallow Man ploughing down Fifth Avenue. 

All in all, maybe a C-. It's not a BAD movie, but it ain't great either. Strictly for fans and little kids. Incidentally, there are a LOT of nods to the then-popular cartoon, which may account for why it was even green-lighted in the first place. You can easily imagine a phone call coming through, "Ackroyd! Ramis! Take all the cutting room floor garbage from the first movie and put something together, quick, this cartoon is really taking off!!!"

Meanwhile, on the other end of the spectral spectrum, is the dreck that is The Seventh Sign (1988). It's awful. It features Demi Moore as a pregnant woman who discovers her child's birth will signal the apocalypse, and a listless underused Michael Biehn (The Terminator, Aliens, The Abyss) as her husband. It's awful. Have I said that already? 

The movie doesn't even deserve a lengthy run-down of the ways it sucks. Put briefly, it's too slow, it uses slow motion too much to make things "serious," the plot - simple as it is - is poorly explained. The actors don't seem to care. The film is shot poorly. It's too long. It's bland. 

More interesting are tangential factoids. For one, the director Carl Schultz is mostly known for directing the Young Indiana Jones series. For another, the thing I remember most about this movie is the cover to the VHS edition (a clock face with a beam of light coming from the number seven, as seen in the poster above) ... because for some reason EVERY video store in my town decided to prominently display this when I was about nine. It was total exposure. I actually saw the movie later, as a young teen, on TV ... and was so sorely disappointed, even then. 

I am actually pretty unimpressed by every "devil child" movie, except three. The Exorcist impressed me, Rosemary's Baby impressed me, and Let The Right One In impressed me. The rest are all dreck. Including this sad crap that gets shoved out onto the cable channels every so often, usually when yet another child-gets-possessed movie is released in theaters. It's too bad.