Category: rule of three

For three weeks each year, beginning April 1, I take a look at three related comedy films. These could be films from the same series, films with the same actor, films with a common theme…any connection, really. This year I decided to look at three films based on novelty songs.

I’ll come clean with you up front: I expected to see three terrible movies. To come even more clean, that’s exactly what happened. What I didn’t expect is that Harper Valley PTA would be the one that came closest to doing something like this exactly right.

Let me state clearly that Harper Valley PTA is not a great film. At least, the version we got is not a great film. I strongly suspect it went through several iterations, and the ghost of a really strong one peeks through just often enough that it becomes instructive.

“Harper Valley PTA” was the claim to fame for one-hit-wonder Jeannie C. Riley. If you haven’t heard it before, it might be worth listening before reading on.

The idea of taking a three-minute song and adapting it into a 90-minute film is fascinating to me. I know decisions like this are made for financial reasons rather than creative ones — Harper Valley PTA was essentially tie-in merchandise — but it’s still interesting to explore the process of adaptation. Or, possibly, translation.

Riley didn’t write “Harper Valley PTA” and was not the first to perform it, but it’s her version, released in 1968, that made the song famous, and it’s the one that inspired the film. It’s a song that feels like both a perfect and terrible choice for cinematic adaptation.

On the positive side of the ledger, there’s the fact that it contains a litany of named characters with distinguishing traits, meaning all a filmmaker really needs to do is write a story around them. On the negative side, there’s the fact that that story was already told in the song.

“Harper Valley PTA” is about Ms. Johnson, a widow with a teenage daughter. The titular organization disapproves of Ms. Johnson’s behavior / personality / fashion, and sends her daughter home with a letter to that effect. Ms. Johnson turns up at the next meeting of the Harper Valley PTA to air their dirty laundry in return.

And…that’s it, right?

In a sense, yes, and if that’s all a listener pulls from the song, that’s fine. But there are a few other layers at play.

For starters, Ms. Johnson correctly identifies the letter as a personal attack masquerading as concern for her daughter. The Harper Valley PTA isn’t truly worried that Ms. Johnson’s behavior will negatively impact her child’s future; they just don’t like that a young, attractive, single mother is living the life she wants to live and dressing the way she wants to dress.

Admittedly, this was a fairly quaint perspective even by 1968; the culture clash between the generation that came of age in the mid-50s and the one that came of age in the mid-60s was obviously still unfolding, but “Harper Valley PTA” was far from the first piece of popular media to make note of the conflict.

And it doesn’t do much more than make note of the conflict. Ms. Johnson likes her miniskirts, and the members of the Harper Valley PTA don’t. Ms. Johnson likes casual dating, and the members of the Harper Valley PTA don’t. Ms. Johnson refuses to behave the way they think a widow should, but the Harper Valley PTA insists that she conform.

That’s about as insightful as the song gets. Hearing Ms. Johnson unload on the individual members of the Harper Valley PTA, dragging their secret shames out of the shadows for all to see and then telling them all to get stuffed, is cathartic and all, but it’s also superficial. She draws attention to their alcoholism and flirtatiousness and illegitimate children, calls them hypocrites, and leaves. The singer — revealing herself to be Ms. Johnson’s daughter — celebrates “the day my mama socked it to the Harper Valley PTA,” and we’re left to imagine a group of hypocrites left speechless, clutching their pearls.

It’s easy to picture this serving as the climax of a film, and therefore the easy way to turn “Harper Valley PTA” into one would be to build toward this with long stretches of Ms. Johnson learning of their hypocrisies, turning the same blind eye to them that (presumably) the rest of the townspeople do, until that letter comes, she stops playing nice, and she launches into her big speech.

That could have worked fine, but the film’s first unexpectedly wise decision is that it doesn’t close with this big moment; it opens with it. The bulk of the movie, cleverly, is the fallout from Ms. Johnson’s theatrics, and not the gradually building catalyst for them.

This is smart for a number of reasons, not least the fact that it front-loads the familiarity. Anyone who had heard the song in the 10 years between its release and the release of this film knew the lyrics, so ending the movie there wouldn’t be all that interesting. Beginning the story there, though, and suggesting that there’s an entire movie’s worth of development to follow, is, frankly, a better idea than Harper Valley PTA knows what to do with.

Ultimately, the movie we ended up with is one in almost constant conflict with itself. It’s both an insightful drama with minor comic elements, and a broad, idiotic farce.

It feels as though an early draft of the film had a grounded satirical tone, a later draft relied almost exclusively on slapstick, and these drafts were merged inelegantly for shooting. Or, perhaps, one version of the film was shot and early feedback encouraged them to retool the film significantly. There are a few things that point to this being a possibility, but I’ll get to those later.

For now, let’s talk about the more serious elements of the film, as they work quite well and illustrate the potential for a great movie being made from a frivolous song.

The serious draft of the film would have focused on Dee, Ms. Johnson’s daughter. There’s enough reason to believe this to have been an early intention; the song itself was sung from the daughter’s perspective. We learn quickly in the film that her perspective is by far the more interesting one.

What we learn from the time we spend with Dee is that…well, it kind of sucks to have a mom like Stella Johnson.

Our first glimpse of her home life sees Dee returning from school to a locked door. Inside, her mother drinks and sings noisily with friends, having lost all track of time. Dee hammers on the door and rings the doorbell, unheard.

It’s upsetting to her, and when her mother finally remembers she exists and opens the door, Dee blows immediately past her and into her own bedroom. Stella picks up on her obvious disapproval and rather than apologize or comfort her, she sarcastically promises that she’ll start sipping tea with church ladies instead.

In other words, she turns her own daughter’s complaint against her, and it’s easy to imagine how this makes Dee feel. She’s been given a letter to take home about her mother’s shitty behavior, and then returns home to be surrounded by it and reminded that, yeah, it actually is kind of shitty.

The clash between her mother and the Harper Valley PTA may well be a fiery one, but neither side — no matter what they say — really cares about how Dee feels about this. Each side in the fight has their own feelings about how life in a small town is to be lived, and neither of them are focused on the impact any of this has on the young girl at the center of it.

I say it’s easy to imagine how Dee feels, and that’s mainly due to Susan Swift’s performance as the girl. She’s not an especially good child actor when it comes to delivering her lines — though, trust me, I’ve seen far worse — but she is an absolutely fantastic physical actor.

Everything from the way she walks to the way she sits to the expressions on her face sells Dee’s embarrassment and frustration on impressively deep levels. It’s difficult to watch her and not feel protective. This is a girl who is getting hurt, in the middle of a conflict that both sides are about to knowingly escalate.

The most brutal part comes soon afterward, when Stella goes to the next PTA meeting to deliver her speech. She takes a clearly uncomfortable Dee with her, and the girl’s body language is exquisite. Whether this was Swift’s insightful interpretation of the character or some extremely well-considered direction, I can’t know. I suspect it’s the former, though, as none of the other actors seem to have received direction this good.

Dee squirms and tries to detach emotionally as Stella stands up, interrupts the meeting, speaks over objections, and ultimately takes the stage, where she delivers her calculated takedown of (nearly) every member of the PTA. When Stella finishes she steps down off the stage and tells Dee they’re leaving.

Dee takes a long time to process this, either completely numbed by the experience or mortified that the attention her mother kicked up is now on her as well. Stella walks away. Dee sits. Is it more embarrassing to leave with all of these eyes on her, or to sit quietly until the end of the meeting and pretend, somehow, that she’s not related to that woman who just commanded her to follow?

In the song, Ms. Johnson’s daughter sounds triumphant, the entire thing a paean to her mother’s theatrical bravery. And maybe Dee, at some later point, will sing about this in similar celebration.

But how did it feel to be there, then, in that seat, knowing you’d be the one who had to be at school tomorrow with these people’s kids? How did it feel to watch this conflict explode when you’d wished it would just go away? How did it feel to know that yesterday about a dozen people were talking about what a piece of shit your mother was, and tomorrow everyone else will be talking about it as well?

In the song, it’s fair to assume Ms. Johnson’s daughter is enough like her that she shares her mother’s opinion on and reaction to the matter. In the film, we’re given explicit indications otherwise. And that’s where “Harper Valley PTA” could, and nearly does, find its mileage as a full-length motion picture.

I started to suspect that the film had gone through multiple conflicting versions during a short scene that quickly follows the speech. In it, Dee writes in her diary and we hear her thoughts; she was proud of and amused by her mother. And those things are fine, but they don’t accurately reflect what we saw of Dee’s own response in the moment, or what we’ll see soon after this.

The scene, with narration that could easily have been added well after the fact and which isn’t employed anywhere else in the film, seems like a corrective action, as though a test audience or the studio found it difficult to stay on Stella’s side if her actions were upsetting her daughter. This “it’s okay really it is” moment feels far more like a decision made in the editing booth than a natural development of the narrative.

In fact, it’s followed by a number of scenes in which Dee is clearly not okay, such as when she comes home from school to find that vandals have toilet-papered her house, or when she pretends to be sick to avoid mockery from her classmates, or when she avoids eye contact and conversation with her mother over dinner.

All of this is the direct fallout from her mother’s decidedly over-the-top display. Stella kicked the hornet’s nest, and it’s Dee that ends up getting stung. It’s a life crisis manufactured by the woman she relies on to protect her.

I think it was pretty likely that Dee would have ended the film in support of her mother, but audiences needed that promise well before it was earned by the narrative. As such we have an understandably mopey Dee followed by a bizarrely reassured and happy one and then our understandably mopey Dee again, in manic succession. Tear out that brief moment with the diary and we have a pretty effective character sketch of a child who doesn’t feel at home with her own mother.

Sadly, that’s not all we’d have to change to make Harper Valley PTA a better film on the whole. Because while Dee’s perspective gives her fraction of the movie a relatable emotional journey, Stella’s gives us a half-assed sitcom.

I’m not using “sitcom” here to be dismissive (that’s why I used “half-assed”), but because that’s genuinely what the movie often feels like. Sometimes that’s down to things like the film’s low budget, its generic sets, and its uninspired blocking, but it’s also down to specific creative decisions made at almost every turn.

For starters, there’s the cast. Stella is played by Barbara Eden, best known for playing the title role in I Dream of Jeannie. Her best friend Alice is played by Nanette Fabray, a character actor who appeared in many television comedies before this, including The Carol Burnett Show. Other cast members include Louis Nye (The Steve Allen Show), Paul Paulsen (The Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour), and Bob Hastings (McHale’s Navy).

It was a cast with more notable TV chops than film experience, and a number of scenes even end with a comical freeze frame and music sting as though it’s a sitcom going to commercial.

In fact, if it weren’t for the more grounded Dee material, the film would be indistinguishable from one of those “movies” created by stitching together several sequential episodes of a sitcom. Each version of the film has to elbow the other out of the way to get any attention.

I might as well bring up here that Harper Valley PTA actually did briefly become a sitcom in 1981, but that’s far enough removed from the movie and shares only one actor (Eden), so as much as I’d love to see the zany aspects of the film as a deliberate dry run for the TV show, I think the structural similarities are coincidental.

Stella’s share of the story is not only a more overtly comical one; it’s an outright wacky one full of slapstick hijinx. It even unfolds in a decidedly episodic manner.

One by one, Stella sets about taking revenge on each member of the Harper Valley PTA, with no narrative overlap or connection between these sequences at all. Stella selects a victim, Stella makes and executes a plan, the victim makes a funny face. Then we put all of those toys away and move on to the next victim. These sequences all feel like miniature sitcom episodes that could be scrambled up and aired in whatever sequence the network likes.

My main issue with Stella’s string of revenge plots is that it robs the movie of any kind of longform pacing. The action needs to rise, rise, rise, climax, and fall, after which the cycle repeats. Again and again and again. It gets exhausting to watch very quickly, as the movie keeps feeling like it’s ending. Not in a narrative sense of course, but in a structural sense, and Harper Valley PTA begins to feel like a skipping record, building to the same thing over and over again without ever getting anywhere.

Compared to the direct simplicity of the song, in which Stella’s “revenge” is summarized in a single line (“This is just a little Peyton Place, and you’re all Harper Valley hypocrites,” which indeed made it into the film), this feels loose and padded. I of course understand that expanding the content of the song to something like 2,900% of its original runtime requires additional material, but Dee’s story — and an element of Stella’s I’ll get to later — could have easily filled the space for the better.

Instead, Stella plays increasingly cartoonish and impossible pranks. The film is a comedy, of course, and comedy is welcome to occupy any plane of reality it likes, but we can’t keep one foot in the real world and the other in Wacky Land, shifting back and forth from scene to scene.

A perfect illustration of the film’s conflicting sensibilities comes in one prank that involves Stella setting a bunch of elephants loose to stampede through someone’s house, demolishing it with him and his wife inside.

It’s played for laughs, and that’s okay; destruction can be funny. But compared to the earlier scene in which a rock through Stella’s window is played with realistic, sincere concern, this represents massive tonal whiplash.

A rock through the window indicates serious familial worry in the same film that elephants smashing someone’s entire house to pieces represents light comedy.

I’d wager that if you showed someone unfamiliar with the film both of those scenes in complete isolation, they’d conclude that they came from two different movies. What’s more, I’m not sure they’d believe otherwise, no matter how hard you tried to convince them.

The truly frustrating thing about the pranks, though, is that they start out quite well.

As in the original song, Stella calls out PTA member Bobby Taylor for repeatedly hitting on her after she’s made it clear it isn’t welcome. The fact that she calls him out in front of Mrs. Taylor at the meeting is understandable; it’s a matter she tried to address with him directly, he didn’t listen, and she’s pushing back harder. It’s difficult to feel sympathy for Bobby Taylor because he was already given his chance to back off, and he decided not to.

In the film, she runs into him at Kelly’s Bar, after calling him out at the PTA meeting. And, of course, he hits on her again.

He’s actively demonstrating to her that he’s learned nothing and does not intend to take no for an answer, so it’s nearly impossible to hold it against Stella when she humiliates him. It is, after all, just a louder way of her saying “no.”

Bobby Taylor plies her with alcohol while ordering ginger ale for himself. His motives are clear. She offers to get a hotel room with him for the night, and he excitedly accepts. No sooner are they in the room together than he strips naked, ready to fuck a drunk woman while his wife wonders where he is.

He’s a pretty shitty guy, and we’re safely on Stella’s side when she kicks him out of the room and locks the door.

That’s totally fair, and the film has every right to reach for the fun sight gag of Bobby Taylor wrapping a firehose around himself to hide his nakedness. It’s a fair escalation of the comedy, with Bobby Taylor’s predicament compounding itself in ways Stella couldn’t have planned.

A cop nabs Bobby Taylor for strutting around in the nude (“Where’s the fire?” being a genuinely funny line), and the movie seems like it might find an interesting groove.

From there, though, Stella deliberately targets the PTA members and manufactures embarrassments for them. That’s a very different thing from rebuffing unwelcome advances. She actively interferes with their lives while they are not interfering with her or anyone else.

In some cases, it’s just irrelevant, as when she makes Flora Simpson-Reilly’s hair fall out at a formal engagement. Other times it’s clear entrapment, as when she sends a judo expert to Kirby Baker, the real estate agent, to flirt with him, beat the tar out of him, and then pretend he tried to rape her.

Then there are just utterly awful things it’s hard to imagine Stella doing. Yes, even more awful than demolishing somebody’s home in the middle of the night.

The Widow Jones gets off pretty easily in the original song, with Ms. Johnson suggesting only that she should “keep her window shades pulled completely down.” We could read into that a number of things, but that’s all we’re actually told.

In the film, the Widow Jones is a teacher. Stella borrows a video camera and secretly videotapes her having sex with someone. Then she splices the footage, somehow, into a sexual education filmstrip that the Widow Jones shows her class. Which Dee is in, but, frankly, secretly videotaping a teacher getting fucked and showing it to her underage students is a bizarre enough setup for comedy before the fact that she’s showing this to her daughter even enters into things.

It’s a profoundly misjudged gag, and it’s hard to imagine what anyone is meant to find amusing here. Unless secretly videotaping your neighbors having sex and then circulating the footage was somehow more acceptable in 1978, and it’s just those damned liberal snowflakes who ruined it for everyone.

There are a few sparks of inspiration throughout Stella’s antics, mainly involving her hairdresser friend, Alice. The fact that Stella would go to her for the town’s juicy gossip — thereby learning of the hypocrisies of the Harper Valley PTA — makes sense, and it at least theoretically grounds Stella in a recognizable social dynamic.

I also like Willis, the decent guy on the Harper Valley PTA who takes Stella’s side after she stands up to the group. He tells her that he was out of town when the PTA wrote her that letter and he never would have signed such a thing.

They, of course, start a budding romance, and it’s nice, but it also leads to what is certainly an unnecessary plot strand in an already bloated movie in which Stella runs for president of the Harper Valley PTA, which itself involves Bobby Taylor hiring goons to kidnap the town’s notary public and builds to a car chase in which everyone is dressed like a nun.

All of this is not even to mention the embezzling subplot in which Dee’s friend Mavis is framed for stealing the PTA proceeds and chased out of a malt shop by police officers.

The more I talk about Harper Valley PTA, the more amazed I am that it did such a good job with Dee.

…at least, it did at first. Dee being so much unlike her mother — regimented as opposed to free-spirited, studious as opposed to gossipy, restrained as opposed to unbridled — should have fueled both the film’s comedy and conflict. After all, making Dee more like the Harper Valley PTA than she is like Stella could have taken the story in a thousand different directions.

Instead (and it actually kind of hurts to write this) Dee becomes more like her mother, and that’s presented as a good thing. She gets her braces removed. Her mother treats her to a makeover. She gets a new wardrobe. Stella even tears up because her daughter isn’t frumpy anymore.

And while some lip service is paid to the fact that she’s still the same old Dee underneath the makeup, it’s only lip service and it’s insane to me that this isn’t challenged in any way.

It’s a bit like a hypothetical episode of The Simpsons in which Lisa is depressed, so her parents babe her up and buy her more flattering clothing and that’s presented as a genuine solution to her problem. It’s strange for the film not to have anything like an “I love you just the way you are” moment between Stella and Dee. Instead we have a “See? I told you you’d get prettier one day” moment, and it isn’t one played for laughs.

There’s even a scene early in the film in which Stella confides to Dee that she herself was once plain and therefore worthless, but she grew into sex personified, and so will Dee. The message here, deliberate or not, isn’t that it’s okay to be different; it’s that you shouldn’t worry if you’re different, because you might turn out to be hot at some point.

When Doris Day asked her mother if she’d be pretty one day, the woman sang back, “Que será, será, whatever will be will be.” When Dee asks her mother the same question, Stella Johnson replies, “Oh, you are going to be spitting dick out of your mouth day and night, I assure you.”

Harper Valley PTA tries to do far too much. The story needed to be fleshed out beyond the lyrics of the song, of course, but it seems almost like nobody making the movie could agree on how to do that.

It’s frustrating that it hits on a genuinely interesting story in Dee, but doesn’t seem committed to it and ends it on a sour note. It’s frustrating that it introduces cool-headed, big-hearted Willis into Stella’s life, but he never becomes the sobering influence she needs after she starts demolishing homes and distributing spycam pornography. It’s frustrating that a story about generational culture clash never gets more interesting than that extraordinarily vague premise itself.

But here’s the thing: it says something — perhaps quite a lot — that Harper Valley PTA gets to be frustrating at all.

I didn’t expect any movie based on a novelty song to have much to recommend it, but I can easily make a list of things I liked about Harper Valley PTA, and it would be longer than similar lists I could make for most movies.

Anyone going to see Harper Valley PTA in 1978 was going because they liked the song, and certainly anyone working on the movie knew that would be the case. They didn’t need to give their audience anything more than basic competency.

The fact that anything beyond basic competency shined through is practically miraculous. Somebody could take the key components of Harper Valley PTA and make a genuinely good film without having to discard or substantially change many of them.

It needs some tonal consistency. It needs better pacing. It needs to better understand the story it’s telling and be more aware of where it needs to go.

That’s not a complete overhaul; that’s a few extra drafts before shooting, and it represents the difference between this too-late, throwaway tie-in product and a film that people might actually remember and care about.

…or, failing that, they could have trimmed all of the serious stuff and just gone completely bonkers. That would have also worked. I think it’s clear which approach I would prefer, but the movie could succeed either way. It could be a droll social satire, or a thoroughly silly madcap farce.

But it can’t be both. Airport and Airplane! are both completely functional movies, but you can’t cut back and forth between them and expect it to work as a singular viewing experience.

There is a decent film buried here, but it occupies about 30 minutes of the runtime. I’d never, ever recommend it to another human being, but if you were forced to watch it you’d likely find bits to enjoy.

I know I didn’t have much to say about Barbara Eden, but she’s a fine Ms. Johnson. In looks alone I’m sure she fit the mental image fans of the song already had in mind, and her moments with Dee, Willis, and Alice all feel genuine. It’s when she morphs into Woody Woodpecker for the sitcom sequences that she flounders, and I can’t blame her. Maybe she couldn’t wrap her mind around the transition any more than I can.

But Barbara Eden did what she was paid to do. She looked a certain way, she brought a known degree of acting ability, and she was likeable enough to keep audiences on her side. It would be great to say that her performance here was revelatory, but it isn’t. Eden hits her marks and does the material the exact justice it deserves, neither elevating nor sinking it at any point.

The real crime is the complete waste of Susan Swift as Dee. This was her second film, and her performance was far and away the most impressive. She only did a handful of films after this — many of them TV movies — and then retired from acting.

Somewhere, in another universe, Susan Swift played the main character in a great coming-of-age film. Maybe it made her a star; maybe it didn’t.

But the kids out there who needed to see it learned a lot about who they were. They learned it was okay to be a little different. They learned there’s value in moderation. They learned that while it may be fun to gallivant around without a care in the world, somebody still has to keep that world from falling apart.

If you do end up having to watch Harper Valley PTA at some point — maybe in a fallout shelter that only contains six VHS tapes — watch her face. Watch her body language. Watch her performance.

There’s a character there that Susan Swift brought to life in spite of the script, in spite of the film, in spite of anything going on around her.

Watch her. Because that’s exactly where the real movie is buried.

Stella gets up in front of the town and tells them exactly what’s on her mind. That’s the movie we got to see.

Dee sits in silence, processing, mentally searching for her place in the world. That’s the movie I wish we could watch instead.

I ended the last review promising to discuss the most idiotic controversy in modern history. By that I mean there is no “correct” side by any stretch of the imagination. Whoever you align yourself with, you’re aligning yourself with a pack of idiots saying idiotic things for idiotic reasons. More ink has been spilled on 2016’s Ghostbusters than has been spilled on most films, and only a small fraction of that ink has been used to say anything remotely intelligent.

Sometimes I find it useful to provide a history lesson in these features. This time around, it probably would be…but I don’t know that I can stomach doing so. It’s a tiresome situation that should collectively embarrass us all to think back on.

So, hey, forgive me if I’m just hitting the highlights here. God knows you can read enough horseshit about this movie elsewhere; my own pile doesn’t need to be that big.

For the sake of ease and readability, I’m going to refer to this film as Ghostbusters ’16. Because I have to. Because I’ll have a lot to say about this movie in relation to the one it reboots and/or remakes, which has exactly the same title. Right. Now that we’ve gotten the only rational thing to say about this movie out of the way, let’s dive in.

I don’t remember when I started hearing proper rumors of Ghostbusters 3. I know it was well before the 2009 video game came out, as Dan Aykroyd referred to that at the time as the closest thing we were going to get to a third film.

And that was okay. The game wasn’t too great (it was far more of an interactive movie than it was anything that allowed much expression or experimentation), but the fact that Aykroyd and Harold Ramis helped write it lent it an air of legitimacy. What’s more, nearly all of the main cast members voiced their characters. Notably missing were Sigourney Weaver and Rick Moranis, but all four Ghostbusters were played by the same actors, Annie Potts voiced Janine, William Atherton played a returning Walter Peck, and Max von Sydow, who voiced Vigo in the second film, brought the Carpathian back to life once more.

So, fine. I wish the game were great and worth replaying (or any fun whatsoever), but really the main duty it fulfilled, so far as I was concerned, is that it was the final nail in the coffin of Ghostbusters 3. Elements of Aykroyd’s script for a third film even made it into the game, but I personally can’t give any indication as to how true it was to his vision.

And I like that the game killed Ghostbusters 3. I like that because I didn’t want Ghostbusters 3.

Whenever those rumors were circulating — around 2005, let’s say — the idea was already that Bill Murray, Ernie Hudson, Aykroyd, and Ramis were too old to play their parts. The aging Ghostbusters would take on younger apprentices, who would then lead the franchise forward on their own.

This didn’t sound especially appealing. After a masterpiece and a good film — and a fondly remembered cartoon with a stellar voice cast — was it really worth a late-game third installment just to wave goodbye?

The original Ghostbusters was the textbook illustration of lightning in a bottle. Indeed, to continue with metaphors of electrostatic discharge, the second film proved that lightning wasn’t going to strike twice.

I didn’t really want a third movie. Not for the sake of passing a torch nobody was asking to be passed. Not for the sake of rubbing our faces in how old and fat and bald the actors were now just to joke about it.

In other words, when the prospect of Ghostbusters 3 was realistically floated, starring the original cast, written by the original scribes, and taking place in the same universe, I wasn’t interested. I didn’t want it. I was glad that the project died. So was Bill Murray, who was so reluctant to sign up for the project that Aykroyd toyed with the idea of killing off Venkman.

What a great movie this could have been! The best character is dead and we get to watch the others slowly die. What a treat!

I’m saying all of this to make clear that when I tell you I wasn’t excited about Ghostbusters ’16, it wasn’t due to sexism or gatekeeping or anything to that effect. Faced with the prospect of a third film by the original crew, I said, “No, thank you.” It shouldn’t be at all surprising or controversial, then, that I also turned down a cheaper, less interesting substitute.

Ghostbusters 3 was dead. The video game gave us our canonical third story, and nobody was asking for anything more.

Nobody except, of course, Columbia Pictures, which twenty-odd years after the release of the first film for some reason still liked money. More scripts for a potential Ghostbusters 3 were written, rewritten, punched up, and discarded. New writers were brought on and let go repeatedly. Bill Murray made it clear he wasn’t interested. That stopped nothing. Harold Ramis died in 2014. That finally did.

The creative team was faced with the prospect of having only two of the original Ghostbusters on board, and one of them was Winston. The project was canned, finally, for good.

Kind of.

That same year, it was decided that the third Ghostbusters film would be a reboot/remake. If you’re wondering why I’m using both of those terms, it’s complicated. I say “reboot” because it was intended to serve as the first film of a new series under the Ghostbusters banner. (The cast signed contracts committing them for three films.) I say “remake” because Ghostbusters ’16 claims in its own credits that it’s based on the original Ghostbusters. And, frankly, the confusion about what the fuck this movie even is carries right on through the experience of watching it.

But we’ll get to that.

There were plenty of Ghostbusters fans who were already disinterested in the project. I was absolutely one of them. Maybe it would be for somebody else what the original film was for me. That would indeed be fantastic, but I wasn’t holding my breath. As a point of comparison, I wasn’t interested in Pee-wee’s third movie, either, and I waited a long time to even give that a shot, equally convinced it would be a disappointing return. This was nothing personal; I’m just rarely keen on modern cash-ins on old properties.

The true backlash to Ghostbusters ’16 didn’t come until we started getting details, though. It would be directed by Paul Feig, whose recent film Bridesmaids had been a major hit. Coincidentally enough, that film had a very similar financial return to the original Ghostbusters. Bridesmaids cost $32.5 million and made $288.4 million; Ghostbusters cost $30 million and made $295.2 million. In terms of raw figures, they’re damned near equal.

The problem wasn’t that Bridesmaids was a bad film or that Feig was a bad director; the movie was massively popular and a critical success. The problem was that the style of humor in Bridesmaids was almost diametrically opposite the style of humor we’d expect from Ghostbusters. Feig did not feel like a natural fit for the material. But, hey, so far, who cares?

People cared the moment it became clear that Ghostbusters ’16 would have an all-female cast.

Feig cast his frequent star Melissa McCarthy as well as Kristen Wiig, Kate McKinnon, and Leslie Jones from Saturday Night Live to serve as his team of paranormal investigators. My level of disinterest remained the same. I came very quickly to feel as though that put me in the minority.

The backlash to this casting was swift, fierce, and appalling.

While there were unquestionably plenty of Ghostbusters fans who simply weren’t interested in another film — perhaps they disliked Feig, perhaps they wanted the original cast, perhaps they outgrew the franchise — the overall tone of resistance came from a place of overt, clear misogyny.

I’m certainly willing to believe that actual misogynists were in the minority. In fact, that’s what I deeply hope is the case. But their voices were loudest, strongest, and more sensational (therefore more media friendly) than whatever tepid criticisms might have been levied by more even-keeled individuals.

Hate spread and festered in the usual hotbeds. Reddit. 4chan. Breitbart. I will not repeat the kinds of things that were said. You are free to look them up. If you’d prefer to imagine them, know that they’re worse than whatever’s already in your mind.

Deliberate, organized assaults were made against the film’s YouTube trailers and IMDB page to artificially tank its ranking. The director and actors were trolled and threatened constantly online, to the point that the eventual movie attempted to capture this as a series of meta jokes. Reality was no joke, though, as Leslie Jones certainly knew. As the female Ghostbuster who was also black, she was specifically targeted, with her accounts hacked, her personal information circulated, and nude photos of her leaked.

The response and behavior on the side of the film’s detractors was abhorrent.

Then, of course, you had the defenders.

By sheer virtue of taking sides, defenders legitimized the detractors. Oh, so the detractors gave the trailer one star? I’ll give it five. The detractors won’t go see it in theaters? I’ll go twice. What I still believe was a vocal minority spat venom at a film they hadn’t seen, but it was no better to see the other side heaping praise upon a film they also hadn’t seen.

Granted, if I had to go to dinner with one of these groups of people I think you can guess which I’d choose. But, y’know, maybe we could all just let a movie be a fucking movie and not worry that you can’t see it or that you have to see it based on the fact that there are women on the god damned poster.

I remember a friend of mine, whose opinion I normally value, saying that he was going to see it as many times as he could in theaters, just to spite people. (And he probably did. He’s the kind of person who exclusively follows through on meaningless gestures.) Bear in mind, the film wasn’t even out yet. He committed to seeing a film multiple times before he had any idea whether or not he’d like it. For a personal comparison here, Wes Anderson is far and away my favorite director. Isle of Dogs, his latest film, is in theaters as I write this. History suggests that I’ll watch it multiple times, but I’m sure as shit not going to commit to that. What if it’s terrible? Yes, I’d like to support Anderson, but why on God’s green Earth would I repeatedly trade my money and time for something I don’t even like? Who would that possibly benefit?

Granted, blindly forcing yourself to enjoy something is exponentially better behavior than hacking and leaking celebrity nudes, but that bar isn’t very high in itself. And as a critic — and a writer, and a not-a-moron — I can’t possibly respect somebody who forces themselves to have a positive opinion of a work of art any more than I can respect somebody who forces themselves to have a negative one.

“I’m going to see it because there are women in it” is exactly as constructive a mindset as “I’m not going to see it because there are women in it.”

I didn’t see Ghostbusters ’16 in theaters. Part of me did want to see it, just to know if it managed to live either up or down to expectations, but for much of its release, I was in Germany. I could have seen it when I got back, but I had better things to do than to rush out and spend $20 on a movie I never wanted to see in the first place.

So I didn’t watch it. Until now. Until I started this series.

And, honestly, I’m glad that’s what happened. Because it means I get to experience it removed from both sides of that idiotically vocal response. I’m no longer a sexist if I dislike it, nor am I a feminist champion if I do like it.

I just get to watch a fucking movie.

I just get to laugh at some fucking jokes.

I just get to enjoy it or not enjoy it according to my own personal fucking preferences, and I don’t have to worry that half the fucking planet will tear me down wherever I land.

And now I’ve seen it.

And holy hell is Ghostbusters ’16 a pile of garbage.

This has nothing to do with whatever dumbass “women can’t be funny” mentality is at the root of so many criticisms. They can. It’s moronic to suggest otherwise, as though “humor” were some point of biological difference between the sexes.

It isn’t, and to prove it, we need look no further than the breeding ground for many Ghostbusters cast members throughout the three films: Saturday Night Live.

That show — over the course of its admittedly long tenure — has given us Gilda Radner, Jane Curtin, Julia Louis-Dreyfus, Joan Cusack, Nora Dunn, Jan Hooks, Sarah Silverman, Cheri Oteri, Maya Rudolph, Tina Fey, Amy Poehler, and a hell of a lot more. I’m listing only the ones that stood out to me, personally, as a viewer. Your list may be longer. Your list may even consist entirely of different funny women, just as our lists of favorite Saturday Night Live men would probably differ.

That’s because Saturday Night Live has often done a great job of providing its women with a similar visibility to what it provides its men. I wish I could say “always” instead of “often” and “the same” instead of “similar,” but we have to take what we can get. Part of this is due to the nature of the show, of course; women in real life make news, so they need a cadre of females in the cast to play them. And, much of the time, that’s what Saturday Night Live seems to view its female cast members as: a logistical necessity.

In the early 2000s, though, that began to change. Tina Fey joined the cast in Season 26, Amy Poehler joined in Season 27, and gradually, perfectly, naturally, the show began spotlighting its massive female talent in a way it never truly had before. This may certainly have something to do with Fey taking the reins as head writer, but I think it’s safe to say that it had more to do with the sheer volume of talented females the show now had at once. It says something that such sketch comedy naturals as Bill Hader, Jason Sudeikis, Fred Armisen, Will Forte, and Chris Parnell were commonly relegated to supporting roles and utilitarian impersonations. You know. The kind of material many female cast members had been given in the past.

And so the stage was set for Ghostbusters ’16 to draw from Saturday Night Live, just as the original film had. That’s a good thing. Wiig, McKinnon, and Jones are funny people. They have a tremendous amount of talent. Period.

You may not enjoy their particular talents, and that’s fine. I’m by no means a guy that will tell you all comedy must be appreciated. But these actors know what they’re good at, and, in the right hands, within the right contexts, they are unquestionably funny enough to carry a full-length comedy film.

Just…not this one.

As nitpicky as it may sound, the biggest problem with Ghostbusters ’16 is its title. Had it been called anything else, it wouldn’t have brought with it a mountain of what turned out to be unreachable expectations. It would have been a movie that audiences could anticipate, engage with, and remember on its own merits.

That doesn’t necessarily mean it would have been a better film. In fact, I’m pretty damned sure it wouldn’t have been. But it would at least be a film that was free of controversy, ire, and stigma. It would prevent it from inviting active, inevitable comparison with the beloved — and genuinely fantastic — original.

It handed itself a legacy that the original had to earn. That is always unlikely to end well.

Ghostbusters ’16 does itself no favors by feeling messy, aimless, and incompetent by turns. Wiig, McKinnon, McCarthy, and Jones all do their best to make the film entertaining, but there’s a pervasive lack of focus that prevents anything from actually sticking together.

A funny movie isn’t funny just because the people in it try to do funny things. Funny movies are funny because they’re sharply written. Because they’re carefully paced. Because anything that distracts from the joke it’s trying to make is left on the cutting room floor. Because it knows when to quit.

None of that applies to Ghostbusters ’16. Not even slightly. Part of me even wonders if there was a script. Was this shot like Curb Your Enthusiasm, with Feig telling the actors the two or three things that needed to happen in each scene and leaving the rest up to chance?

The lack of focus and confusion about what the movie is really shouldn’t be a factor here. After all, it’s about another team of Ghostbusters coming together, starting a business, and fighting some supernatural evil. As the first movie proved, you don’t need to have much focus at all; touch on the important bits, make some great jokes, and give us characters worth spending time with.

The original Ghostbusters worked because, as I stated in that review, the characters interacted in identifiable ways. With the exception of Winston, who joins the team later, these are three men who have known each other and worked together for quite some time. They know each other’s strengths, weaknesses, and quirks. They know who to rely on at which time. They know how to handle each other. They know how to both accomplish things and enjoy the time they spend together.

You know. Like colleagues. And also like friends.

The four Ghostbusters in this movie, by contrast, don’t even seem to like each other.

They say they do, don’t get me wrong, but I never felt it. One of them tells a joke, the next one tells a joke, the third one tells a joke, the last one tells a joke. That’s not interaction; that’s four characters reciting their lines. We’re expressly told that two of these characters have a history, but never once does the film feel compelled to make us believe it.

Part of the reason this doesn’t work is that the characters are never defined to begin with. It’s difficult to invest in a relationship without knowing who either party is even meant to be.

Again, let’s dive back into my review of the first film. Egon was the brains, Ray was the heart, Peter was the swagger, and Winston was the hired gun. For two films and a cartoon series, those descriptions were the cores of each character, and they easily defined both their roles on the team and their roles in the film.

Now let’s try to break down the characters in Ghostbusters ’16 in a similar way.

Who is the brains? Well, that’s an easy one. It’s obviously Holtzmann, played by Kate McKinnon. She develops and builds the team’s equipment, after all, and seems to perform the majority of the experiments, so, there. Simple.

Except that McCarthy’s character Abby seems to know the most about what’s actually going on and has the responsibility of expositing it at regular intervals, so maybe she’s the brains of the operation. She also started investigating paranormal activity before the team even existed, which reinforces that idea. Okay. So maybe she’s the brains. Or she’s also the brains.

But then there’s Wiig as Erin, a respected professor at Columbia on the verge of earning her tenure. She also assisted Abby in writing a book about the supernatural, which kicks the entire plot into gear. What’s more, she serves as a skeptic who demands evidence and refuses to believe anything blindly, which is certainly a mark of intelligence whether or not skepticism leads her in the right direction so, okay, she’s the brains, too. Three of them are the brains.

…but Jones plays Patty who is explicitly hired onto the team because of her deep and extensive knowledge of New York City’s history, which allows the Ghostbusters to piece together the clues that will explain what is happening meaning all four of them are the brains and…

Ugh. Okay. Maybe we shouldn’t have started with brains. Bad example, right?

Let’s move onto the heart. Who on the team is the impulsive one who dives headlong into things without fully thinking them through, but who ultimately means well?

That’s clearly Abby, who published an old manuscript without considering what impact it might have on the career of her coauthor and dove excitedly into paranormal investigation without any of the proper equipment, experience, or ability to protect herself. Easy.

Except that Patty qualifies as well, readily launching into loud tirades at passers by, finagling herself a spot on the team without actually knowing who the Ghostbusters are or what they do, and borrowing her uncle’s hearse without consideration for the damage it may sustain before he needs it back. Okay. So that’s two of them sharing that role.

…but really it’s three of them, because Wiig confusingly sheds her professional demeanor almost as soon as she links back up with Abby and becomes a totally different character, fawning moronically over their new secretary and freeing a dangerous ghost just for the sake of proving a nebulous point to somebody she’d never met before.

Oh, and, whoops, actually it’s Holtzmann, too, who gets so caught up in an impromptu dance routine that she starts a fire and then hesitates to put it out, and who sings for some reason when their receptionist is in mortal danger, and who licks the equipment and who puts her feet up on the mayor’s desk and who and who and who.

You get the picture. There are also clear examples of each of them acting the part of the swagger, and of each of them acting the part of the hired gun. I’ll spare you another few hundred words with the assurance that watching the film with this in mind will make it abundantly clear that every one of these characters plays every one of these roles at once.

And then…well…what’s the point? Ramis in the original film demonstrated not only the importance of having a great straight man, but of the appeal of having one. He was my favorite character as a kid, and it isn’t because he made me laugh the most. It’s because I understood who he was. On some level, sure, I identified with the guy, but largely it was his role in the film that I appreciated most. He’s who I wanted to be on the schoolyard.

Others, of course, wanted to be Peter. My brother, I remember well, always wanted to be Ray. And there were little Winstons and Janines out there as well. In some cases, the casting was logistical. In other cases, it was because we knew who these characters were, we knew how they’d act and react in certain situations (as well as with each other), and we knew what we enjoyed about them.

Of these four new characters, who would I have been? Who would anybody be? They’re each always everything. We don’t have four characters to choose from, we have an omnicharacter operating four mouths.

This is a crisis of comedy. They can’t all deliver the same kinds of jokes, and yet they do. “Do-Re-Egon” works only because of Egon’s character. “The flowers are still standing” works only because of Peter’s. “No offense, guys, but I gotta get my own lawyer” works only because of Winston’s. “You’ve got to try this pole!” works only because of Ray’s.

Across the previous two films, I’d have a very long list of jokes that are specific to the characters, and a very short list of those that are interchangeable. In Ghostbusters ’16, I can’t think of a single joke that could only have been made by one character.

And that’s because they aren’t characters. They’re funny women who are being crammed into a format without any regard for their specific talents or potential for characterization. They’re all the same vague all-purpose comedybot with traits and motivations that shift from scene to scene and from line to line so that they can all draw from the same pool of gags. The characters don’t gibe; they jostle.

There’s not a single natural fit in the movie because the actors aren’t allowed to behave naturally.

Never is this more evident than when anybody tries to deliver the kind of specialized technobabble (paranormobabble?) that Ramis and Aykroyd deployed regularly in the first two films. Listen to Abby say something like “a full-torso transmogrification with corporeal aggression,” and it’s impossible to see anything but McCarthy struggling through a line she can’t imagine anyone would ever say, let alone her own character. She delivers it and many others the same way I try to work mucus up out of my throat when I’m feeling congested. Egon and Ray speak this way because that’s who they are. Abby speaks this way because the script says she has to.

There’s also a really weird and out-of-place reliance on pop-culture references. The other two films may have mentioned Twinkies and Slinkies and Parcheesi, but I don’t think there were many moments that expected you to laugh just because you recognized the name of something.

Ghostbusters ’16, by contrast, has a scene in which the characters completely demolish the flow of the narrative so that they can list Patrick Swayze movies to each other. Not because it has any bearing on anything that’s happening, sheds light on anything that will happen, or relates to the film itself in any larger way, but rather because people might hear the titles Road House and Point Break and chuckle faintly with recognition, I guess. Surely that isn’t worth derailing your own movie, but what do I know.

Then there’s a pointless exchange about the mayor from Jaws, a character reciting the one line from Scarface that all shitty comedies feel legally obligated to recite, ghosts referred to as Casper, characters visiting Reddit, YouTube, and Amazon, people talking about emojis, Patty reenacting Oprah’s “you get a car” bit, Holtzmann singing tunes from The Wizard of Oz, Abby doing an Exorcist impression…it’s just too much.

Ghostbusters stands up today in large part because it doesn’t feel of its time. An audience coming to it now does not need a particular frame of reference to enjoy or understand it. Here, even if these jokes were funny, they rely on the audience recognizing things that either will be forgotten in a few years or that are, quite simply, far superior productions.

Speaking of far superior productions, Ghostbusters ’16 can’t seem to stop itself from referencing the original films. I’m not referring to the general concept or the ghost-busting equipment or anything like that; I’m referring to specific lines and callbacks that only serve to remind the audience that they’re watching a notably lesser shadow of those movies instead of the real thing.

In the original film, Janine answered the phone by saying, “Ghostbusters, what do you want?” because that’s who she was and what she would say when she was in that particular mood. Here, Chris Hemsworth’s character says it on an answering machine because it’s a line from the other movie.

In the original film, the Ghostbusters rant to the mayor and his staff, getting louder and more desperate as they appeal to him to cooperate. Each character delivers a dire warning of what to expect if Gozer isn’t stopped, culminating in Peter floundering with, “Human sacrifice. Dogs and cats living together. Mass hysteria!” It was true to his character, the context, and the building rhythm and tension of the scene. Here, two characters say “mass hysteria” to each other because it’s a line from the other movie.

In the original film, Egon uses a Twinkie as a relatable metaphor so that Ray and Winston can understand the amount of psychokinetic energy in the New York area. In Ghostbusters ’16, a billboard says “That’s a big Twinkie,” because it’s a line from the other movie. And which also makes no sense in this new context because “big Twinkies” don’t exist. They’re all the same size.

That already seems like a lot of unnecessary callbacks, stripped of their humor and appeal because they’re used in a way that shows no regard for what made them funny in the first place, but there are at least a dozen more throughout Ghostbusters ’16, none of them funnier than these. And that’s without counting all of the cameos.

So, hey! Let’s talk about the cameos.

The cameos are pointless but, like the callbacks, they at least remind us that if we ever feel compelled to watch this horse shit again, we can pop in a much better movie instead.

All of the main actors from the first two films return in some capacity, barring Rick Moranis, who retired from acting almost 20 years earlier. Annie Potts plays a receptionist again, because, hey, girl power, right? Sigourney Weaver plays Holtzmann’s mentor. Ernie Hudson plays Patty’s uncle. Dan Aykroyd plays a cab driver. They all get about as much to do as the bust of Harold Ramis, which sits in a hallway.

The only cameo that gets any room to stretch his legs is Bill Murray, appearing in a whopping two scenes.

Murray is probably the highlight of the film, and even he couldn’t make me laugh. He plays Dr. Martin Heiss, “a famed debunker of the paranormal.” He says “hell no” on a news broadcast and if you bother paying Bill Murray to appear in your movie and deliver a joke, it really should be something better than that.

Later he shows up at the Ghostbusters’ office and asks to see the ghost they caught. Fair enough. This makes sense within the context of the film and in terms of what little we know about their characters. (That is to say, their jobs.) Against the extreme cautioning of her colleagues, Erin releases the ghost from the trap, and it immediately murders Dr. Heiss.

Funny shit!

But, whatever, who cares. Bill Murray got paid to sit on a chair and a stuntman got paid to fall out of a window. What makes this moment interesting, though, is the instructive contrast it offers to the original films.

Because, y’know, the first group of Ghostbusters didn’t go around killing people.

Granted, yes, it’s accidental. But it’s an accident born of gross negligence. The ghost they release is one that took them an extremely long time to capture. (I know. I watched the scene and it felt like an eternity.) It was difficult. Trapping it came only after a lot of damage was caused and one of their teammates was even held in its claws.

Dr. Heiss is in his mid-60s, at least. He walks with a cane. He’s so frail he can’t even stand up for extended periods. And when Erin releases the ghost, she knowingly and deliberately does so when the rest of her team isn’t ready. To be clear: Erin unleashes a powerful ghost on an elderly man, actively preventing anyone from being prepared to handle it.

This is murder. Or, I guess, manslaughter. Either way, it’s homicide.

This is William S. Burroughs killing his wife while drunkenly trying to shoot an apple off her head. No, the intention in either case was not to harm anybody. But, in both cases, the setup was willfully constructed in a way that death is as good as a given.

Dr. Heiss is killed by the ghost and his corpse is ejected from the building. (Or he dies from the fall after being shoved out by the ghost. It’s academic at this point.) The ghost flies away to kill dozens or hundreds more people and nobody even tries chasing it.

The police come and the Ghostbusters are questioned. This isn’t very productive, because the Ghostbusters can hardly speak. They are overcome with remorse. Erin can’t believe her grandstanding directly led to the death of an innocent man.

The rest of the Ghostbusters start to question the wisdom of what they’re doing. Don’t they exist to help and protect people? Aren’t they now responsible for taking a life? If they didn’t exist, Dr. Heiss would still be alive. How many others will die as they bumble around the city with barely tested equipment? The Ghostbusters are speechless.

Oh, whoops, no, this is the part where they list Patrick Swayze movies to each other. Fuck the dead guy, right?

Compare this to the scene in which the original batch of Ghostbusters almost shoot the maid in the first film. An important distinction is the fact that what they do is totally accidental. Nobody, for instance, is trying to prove to the maid that the proton pack is real. They simply get spooked and fire at her cart.

They’re sorry. In fact, all three of them apologize. They take a moment to calm down. That was a close one. They’re here to catch a ghost, but they can’t let that get to them. If they do, as they’ve just learned, they are endangering the lives of the staff and guests. As a direct response to this moment, they change their tactics and split up. Why? Because they’d prefer not to murder innocent people.

How does the new team stack up? Well, in response to directly causing the death of an innocent man, they recite Swayze’s IMDB page.

Can callous response to death be funny? Of course. But is that part of who these characters are, or is it just another example of Feig (and his cowriter Katie Dippold) cramming in jokes for the sake of having them without regard for where they are in the film, what they mean, or what they’ll say about the characters?

Of course, that’s a rhetorical question. No thought is given to the characters elsewhere in the film, and Feig sure as hell isn’t about to start now.

I’m blaming Feig, but I can’t say for sure that it’s his fault. At the very least, though, he’s guilty for not reining his actors in, and not letting them know that every scene can’t play like it stars a gaggle of honking geese.

These characters never shut up. They’re exaggerated. They think going big is the only way to get a laugh, despite the fact that the previous two films rarely resorted to that. They think acting like cartoon characters — all bug-eyes and gesticulations and shouts — is the best way to sell the material, when all it does is make the movie even more tiresome.

This even affects the supporting characters, who each have their own unnecessary quirks and punchlines, further undercutting any sense of reality Ghostbusters ’16 could have possibly established.

Remember the librarian in the first film? Her equivalent here shits himself and tells jokes about animal enslavement and the repression of New York’s early Irish. Remember the hotel manager trying to keep his guests from knowing what the Ghostbusters were doing in the first film? Remember the way we’d cut from the Ghostbusters wrecking the ballroom to him in a state of escalating panic? His equivalent here has a high-pitched scream, which is not quite as worth cutting away to, in my humble opinion, and which says nothing about who he is, his role in the film, or anything that’s actually happening.

What Ghostbusters ’16 does best is shine a light on why the original film wouldn’t have worked as well with any other approach. If the first film takes itself seriously, this one refuses to. If the first film had strong characterization, this one relies entirely on gags to keep things moving. If the first film took place against a recognizable, realistic version of New York City, this one takes place in Wacky Land, where every character, no matter how minor, gets a chance to tell a few jokes and make funny faces and remind you that you’re watching a gigantic heap of shit.

It also proves, time and again, that the reason Ghostbusters ’16 fails has nothing to do with the gender of its stars; it fails because of its basic comic philosophy. (This obviously does not excuse those who wrote it off the moment they heard about the film, of course. Their apoplexy has and had nothing to do with the actual quality of the film.)

When Erin meets up with Abby and Holtzmann the first time, they make her listen to a recording of a fart. (“Is it more or less disgusting if I tell you it came from the front?” asks Holtzmann, and it’s a perfect opportunity to eject the disc before wasting another hour and a half of your day.) This is an early, establishing joke. This occurs while the film is still telling the audience what to expect. This is the foundation upon which the rest of the film will build.

Now please list for me every time the first two movies resorted to a fart joke.

Boy, that was easy, huh?

Would the original films have been improved by the addition of fart jokes? This movie sees the Ghostbusters shooting a big ghost in his genitals. Would the original film have been improved if those Ghostbusters stood around slugging the Marshmallow Man in the balls? This movie sees Erin complaining that slime got inside “every crack.” Would the original film have been improved if Peter told Ray that slime got in his dick hole?

It’s nothing to do with gender. It’s everything to do with the original film being intelligently crafted at all levels, and this one positively leaping for the cheapest, easiest laugh at every juncture.

I will give it credit for one thing, though: it brushes up against a genuinely interesting villain.

The first film’s Gozer had a plan I still, to this day, don’t entirely understand. It was a force of evil, though, and that’s all we had to know in order to enjoy the movie. The second film’s Vigo was far clearer about his intentions, but when all is said and done he doesn’t amount to much more than a guy in a haunted painting. If there’s anywhere a film can easily improve on the originals, it’s here.

And, hey, maybe Ghostbusters ’16 does. It could do a hell of a lot better, but I actually mean that as a compliment, because there’s so much here that could have worked perfectly.

Our villain is Rowan, a misfit who we see get both mistreated and outright bullied throughout the course of the film. It’s important that we see this, I think, because it helps us to understand where he’s coming from as he plots revenge. I don’t think we’re ever truly aligned with his perspective, which is fine, but we at least understand that he’s not doing bad things simply because we need a bad guy.

Rowan is an outcast. He’s emotionally damaged. He doesn’t want to be treated poorly, and yet he is indeed treated poorly. Constantly. By nearly everyone.

His plot involves activating ley lines throughout New York City. Why? Well, toward the end of the movie we see that the city has somehow been sucked back in time, or something? I don’t know; that doesn’t seem to follow logically from anything else, so I can’t say much about it. Does Rowan think New York was nicer back then? He’d fit in better back then? It’s never clear and I don’t know how this resolves his concerns with being bullied any more than I know why the past version of New York seems to differ only in terms of what the billboards are advertising, but let’s get back on track.

Rowan is releasing these ghosts as a sort of general punishment for the city that mocks and ridicules him. Okay. Then at one point, he kills himself and becomes a ghost. Within the reality of the film, fine. We never understood the mechanics of his devices or what they were truly capable of, so if the big machine in the basement turns him into a ghost, I’m okay with that.

Here’s where things get interesting: Rowan possesses Kevin, the Ghostbusters’ hunky, braindead receptionist.

Immediately, people start treating Rowan differently. He’s no longer unwelcome. Men joke with him as opposed to teasing him. Women notice him. His experience of being alive is entirely different not because he’s a different person, but because he looks different. Rowan even says to himself during this experience, “I definitely should have worked out more.”

Possessing Kevin seems to be teaching him something about his own role in the miserable existence he led. No, he couldn’t have snapped his fingers and looked like Chris Hemsworth, but maybe if he’d exercised a bit. Maybe if he saw a therapist who helped him through his hangups. Maybe if he surrounded himself with supportive friends and found a collection of people who would treat him better.

Instead of spending his time plotting revenge, he could have taken any step at all toward bettering himself.

I realize I’m getting dangerously close to victim blaming here, and I don’t intend to do that. I do intend to point out that within this specific movie, this specific character experiences life in another body and finds it more pleasant, happier, and more fulfilling by a factor of thousands.

It seems as though we’re building toward some kind of awakening. Perhaps Rowan would realize that his behavior, his mindset, his slovenly appearance contributed to his own mistreatment. He was mistreating himself, after all, both physically and emotionally…all the rest of the city did was join in. Maybe he feels remorseful after it’s too late, after he’s already released the contents of Hell itself into New York. Maybe he helps the Ghostbusters stop the ghosts, since he’s “crossed over” and can do things that they can’t. There is (forgive this) the ghost of a great idea there.

But no. That entire theme is abandoned, just like Rowan tosses Kevin’s body aside. That’s it. We establish an interesting idea that seems like it’s on the verge of saying something…and then we ditch it.

Rowan could have been and should have been the best thing about the film. Maybe he still is. But if I ever think about the character in the future, it won’t be anything I actually saw on the screen.

Hemsworth as Kevin is probably the worst thing about the film. The joke is that he’s stupid, I guess, in combination with being good looking. That’s fine, but his stupidity borders on retardation. He’s confused by telephones, speaks nonsensically, doesn’t know where he works or what the Ghostbusters do, and keeps drinking coffee and spitting it out all over himself because he doesn’t like it. The guy isn’t dumb; he’s brain damaged.

I’ve seen people suggest that this is some kind of subversive comment on the way women are often objectified in film and on television. They’re dumb but pretty, I suppose is their point. But I think that’s either a reach, or Feig massively bungled the execution.

For starters, having a male character be good looking and stupid isn’t subversive at all. We’ve seen good looking male dopes in media as long as media has been around. Just thinking of relatively recent examples, Zapp Brannigan, GOB Bluth, and John Hamm’s character on 30 Rock. I’m sure you can think of reams more. “Stupid” is the default comic character trait; people misunderstanding things is funny, so our comedies are populated with complete fucking imbeciles. Many of them are good looking, because they’re stars. A number of them are women. A number of them are men. To believe that your stupid male character comments on the trope in a way that every other stupid male character fails to is a pretty pompous mindset.

Where it mainly falls down here, though, is the fact that Ghostbusters never did that. What, exactly, are you undercutting? All that appalling sexualization of Janine?

You have every right to find Annie Potts attractive. (Annie, call me.) In the second film, I would definitely say she’s at least cute. But she’s never portrayed as dumb, and certainly is not portrayed as eye candy. She flirts a bit with Egon in the first film and gets ignored, and there’s an off-camera makeout session with Louis in the second film.

That’s it. Because she’s a character. She gets to be Janine Melnitz. She has so much to do and say that she never gets around to bending over desks and pressing her breasts together.

I’m being completely honest here. If anybody can truly make an argument for Janine being sexualized (inappropriately or otherwise), I’d love to hear it.

Nor is Dana sexualized. Zuul is, and it’s Dana’s body that Zuul possesses, but even that is scarier than it is sexy. Zuul grumbles and growls and levitates to keep the scene in which she tries to seduce Peter from being sexy at all.

And the actual Dana is portrayed in an even less sexy way. She’s lonely. She avoids human contact. She dresses in unflattering, frumpy ways with an emphasis on sweatclothes. She subsists on junk food. (“You actually eat this stuff?” asks an appalled Peter.) She’s also not in any sense of the word portrayed as an idiot. She’s cultured, she’s an accomplished classical musician, and she sees almost immediately through Peter’s posturing bullshit.

What is even remotely problematic in the original films? Where are the hypersexualized bimbos Ghostbusters ’16 feels obligated to undercut? If that’s the kind of comment it would like to make, it’s making it under the wrong banner. Remake an Adam Sandler movie, or something.

For a film crammed with toilet jokes, cheap gags, pop culture references, a complete disregard for narrative or characterization, jokes that were never funny to begin with being dragged out far longer than they should be, and, yes, active objectification of its own, Ghostbusters ’16 really has no right to try to “intelligently” comment on the medium as a whole.

I could go on. Shit, I haven’t even mentioned Lady Slimer.

So hey, let’s talk about Lady Slimer. Doesn’t it seem strangely counterproductive for a film interested in smashing gender barriers to create a female character by sticking a bow and some lipstick on an existing male one? Boy, it’s almost like this movie doesn’t know what the fuck it’s doing.

When the initial backlash to Ghostbusters ’16 hit, Paul Feig said that people should wait and see it before passing judgment. That’s a fair perspective, of course. The suggestion was that it might be a much better movie than people suspected. Folks could sit around behind their keyboards and mock it, or they could head to the movies one weekend and find themselves pleasantly surprised.

But then the movie actually came out.

It well and truly sucked. And I hope my 8,000-word complaint proves that the extensive problems this movie has have nothing to do with anybody’s gender.

“Wait and see” was the correct way to shut up the detractors. Unfortunately, releasing a shitty movie was also the correct way to shut up the defenders.

People don’t speak much about Ghostbusters ’16 anymore. Compared to the original movie — which had at least a decade of profound pop-culture resonance, and arguably still resonates — this one barely merits a footnote.

I’m sure there are many people who enjoy it. (It received a number of positive reviews, at the very least.) I’m happy for them. But there are people who enjoy all kinds of bad movies. And, culturally, Ghostbusters ’16 has failed to catch much momentum. Those who do enjoy it must enjoy it quietly, because while I still see people bitching about it, I no longer see anybody coming to its defense.

Ghostbusters ’16 was intended to revitalize the franchise. And it could have. It could have even done so with exactly same actors we have here. But just as the characters are interchangeable, so is the film. For such a unique and beloved concept, this version of Ghostbusters is indistinguishable from any other brainless comedy that’s been released in the past 30 years.

It doesn’t know what it’s doing, it doesn’t know what it wants to be, and it doesn’t know what should set it apart. The first Ghostbusters was the perfect storm of every aspect working correctly and in tandem with each other. Ghostbusters ’16 is its perverse opposite. It’s a version of the film that crossed over from a universe in which nobody cared about making it any good.

Girl power, yes, fine, of course. Female artists across all forms of media have done incredible work throughout the course of creative history. Literally nobody with more than half a brain would ever argue otherwise. Hold up almost anything other than this soulless garbage if you feel the need to prove it.

Little girls deserve the kinds of movies little boys are given all the time, and by that I mean they deserve good ones. Ones that know what they’re doing. Ones that are genuinely, for any number of reasons, worth watching.

Age and gender aside, we all deserved better than Ghostbusters ’16.

In the case of Ghostbusters II, there’s no debating whether or not it’s better than the original. Of course it isn’t; Ghostbusters was a once-in-a-lifetime bolt of comic perfection. Whatever followed it up would have been at least a step down. The more salient question here is, is Ghostbusters II any good at all?

My answer to that is fairly complex.

At some point in college I began to reappraise the things I loved as a child. In many cases, what I loved held up, or seemed even better as an adult. For an example of that, see Ghostbusters. In other cases, of course, I felt disappointed or embarrassed by something I used to love. For an example of that, see Ghostbusters II.

As a child, I believed fully that Ghostbusters II was better than the original. Looking back, it’s fairly easy to see why. It’s sillier. There’s more action in it. There are more ghosts. My critical faculties weren’t developed at age eight, when I saw Ghostbusters II in theaters.

I loved it. I vividly remember coming home from the movie and spending the rest of that weekend drawing a comic book version, so that I could remember everything that happened. (I’m sure it was deeply inaccurate, and I wish I still had it.)

We got a copy of the VHS when that was released, and it was in constant rotation. Perhaps even moreso than the original. Then, of course, I grew up. Time passed. I read some great books. I wrote some bad ones. I began to see the difference between films that worked and films that didn’t quite. When I cycled my way back around to Ghostbusters II, it didn’t quite.

I had a similar experience with Back to the Future II. As a kid, it was unanimous among my friends that Back to the Future II was far superior to the original. (Nobody — repeat, nobody — liked Back to the Future III.) Again, it makes sense. It’s sillier. There are more special effects. And certainly more children dreamed of a thrilling, science fiction future than yearned for the quaint, small-town America of the 1950s.

The sequels to Ghostbusters and Back to the Future gave us more of what we wanted and, probably, gave our parents less of what they wanted. Therefore, they were better.

Rewatching Ghostbusters II as an adult was difficult. It was nowhere near as clever or interesting as the first film. It wasn’t as funny, though it had its moments. The big setpieces seemed cheap and obligatory as opposed to fresh and exciting. The improvisational feel of the original was replaced by performances that felt static and over-rehearsed.

I didn’t like it. I felt ashamed that I had ever liked it, and that I hadn’t recognized what an appalling drop in quality it represented when compared to the first.

So I filed that away, and didn’t watch Ghostbusters II again. Ever.

Until now, for this series, around 15 years later.

And, you know what? My opinion has changed again. It’s actually not a bad film. Not nearly. It’s certainly no Ghostbusters, but it’s also no Back to the Future III.

The fact that this film is so much weaker than the original isn’t easy to explain. All of the major characters return, played by the same actors. Director Ivan Reitman returns. Dan Aykroyd and Harold Ramis wrote the script again. (Though, this time, Ramis is credited first.) Even editor Sheldon Kahn returned. The ingredients were all there, so why does it fall so obviously short?

Ultimately, I think it’s just the fact that a sequel wasn’t planned. There was no story to tell, and therefore no compelling desire to tell it.

In the years since Ghostbusters won over global audiences, the brand only continued to grow. We talked last time about the merchandise, the cartoon, the toys, the foodstuffs…Ghostbusters was making a lot of money for everyone who had a stake in it.

And so, inevitably, Columbia Pictures wanted more. Aykroyd, Ramis, and Reitman were reluctant. They evidently felt that the first film was self-contained and there was nowhere left to go from there. That surprises me, as Ghostbusters‘ ending just sort of happens without any real feeling of closure. Again, this suggests to me that the creative team felt that Gozer actually was the important thing about that film.

I’d disagree. The film was about the Ghostbusters — those specific characters, who they were, what they wanted — and you could theoretically do any number of films about them. Introduce a different threat each time to spice things up, get some talented folks in to dream up new ghost designs, invent some new gizmos for the boys to play with, and off you go. I’m not saying that that would have been a wise thing to do, but it was certainly possible, and to believe Ghostbusters was impossible to follow up…well, that’s very strange to me.

I don’t know precisely why the team decided to cave to Columbia’s wishes, or rather I don’t know how many zeroes the reason had. But, of course, they did. They didn’t make another film because they had an idea they were desperate to get on screen; they made another film because that would make all of them a lot more money.

And so they wrote a new script and made a new film, and while it’s unquestionably the lesser one, it’s also not half bad. This time I not only went in expecting to dislike it; I wanted to dislike it, so that I could write a bunch of catty jokes for myself in this review. Sadly, you’ll have to deal with me engaging with the film respectfully and with a moderate degree of intelligence.

The opening of Ghostbusters II works damned well as an immediate followup to the end of the first film. There’s a 5 YEARS LATER caption, which strikes me as unnecessary, but otherwise the point at which the film opens lands as its own kind of joke.

Toward the end of the first film, there was an incredibly funny juxtaposition. We see the Ghostbusters arriving at Dana’s building to eliminate the nefarious Gozer and rid New York City of supernatural infestation once and for all. The streets are filled with adoring fans who cheer them on, who throng against police barricades to get as close as possible, who scream and cry with love. Peter works the crowd. The boys are heroes. The music swells…

…then we cut immediately to four out-of-breath men climbing twenty-one flights of stairs. They’re groaning and sweating. Peter says he’s going to throw up.

It’s perfect. It’s an absolutely perfect joke told in the absolute perfect way.

Ghostbusters II represents the same kind of cut. The first film ends with universal Ghostbuster adoration…then we cut to four aging, washed up men who will do whatever they need to do to make a buck. The illusion is shattered. They may or may not be heroes, but they’re certainly human.

That joke lands, too. But, you know, with a five-year gap between films, it’s not going to feel nearly as punchy.

We catch up with the guys more or less individually. They no longer work together, thanks to a judicial restraining order that “strictly forbids them from performing services as paranormal investigators or eliminators.” According to Peter, the city also stiffed them on the bill for their services in the first film. Though the Ghostbusters keep in touch, they all work to stay afloat in their own ways.

Egon seems to be doing the best of them. He conducts experiments at the Institute for Advanced Theoretical Research, where he has a well-stocked lab, a capable staff, and sweet, sweet funding. Peter embraces his inner gameshow host by headlining World of the Psychic, an interview show that provides a platform for frauds and lunatics to promote their books. (We only see one scene from the show, but I have it on reliable authority that it’s just about as good as Bass Masters.)

Ray has an occult bookstore, which may or may not be keeping him in groceries as he also performs at birthday parties with Winston for whatever desperate parents are willing to pay. Winston ceases to exist when the camera is off him.

The birthday party sequence is one of my favorites, and I love how deliberately it misrepresents the actual popularity of the Ghostbusters. In the real world, Ghostbusters as a brand was still very popular five years after the initial film, with the cartoon spinoff and tie-in products keeping children interested. Parents may certainly have been tired of the Ghostbusters — everything between the first and second film was pitched directly at their kids — but youngsters weren’t.

This sequence shows us a surprising inverse of their popularity in our world, as the kids here can’t stand them. They aren’t interested in the Ghostbusters, and they call out for He-Man instead. (In fairness, He-Man was also riding high at the time in reality.) They roll their eyes when Ray and Winston try to get the kids to sing along to their theme song. Eventually they are ridiculed into shutting down their performance altogether.

Ramis and Aykroyd can’t have been ignorant of the fact that kids could not get enough of the Ghostbusters. (Peter’s desperate claim, “The kids love us!” in the first film was remarkably prescient.) And I have distinct memories of Ghostbuster impersonators showing up to my friends’ actual birthday parties. We thought it was great. Why wouldn’t we? We recognized the uniform and the props, and though the guy dancing around was only pretending to be a Ghostbuster, well, that’s all we ever did, so what was the problem?

The film plays with the franchise’s own popularity and mocks it. This isn’t a world that got sick of Ghostbusters impersonators and toys and cartoons; this is a world that got sick of the actual Ghostbusters. Even now, though, in my 30s, I have to admit I’m jealous of the kids in this scene. I can’t imagine how excited they must have been not only to meet at least two actual Ghostbusters — in full regalia! — but to appear in the sequel. They do a fine job pretending to hate every second of it, but clearly we know better.

In fact, Ghostbusters II butts up against the idea of serving as an elaborate meta joke throughout, and I wish they did more with it, whether turning it into a proper runner or working it somehow into the plot. We’ll talk more about it in a while, but since it doesn’t make sense for anyone in New York City to not believe in ghosts, maybe the plot should instead involve the city giving its attention to a different set of fraudulent ghost hunters. Ones who claim they can do the job better and for less money than our heroes. Maybe they’re younger and more attractive. Toward the end, the real Ghostbusters have to show up and bail everyone out of trouble.

Much of the film could even play out the same way. Instead of the mayor and company knowingly ignoring the signs of coming trouble, as they do here, they instead ignore the Ghostbusters and their warnings because they have a new group of specialists working on it. You could even have the kids at the party call out for them instead of the irrelevant He-Man.

The meta joke is far from sustained, but we do get some fun with the original film’s legacy and merchandising. In the latest incarnation of the Ghostbusters commercial, Egon hawks a Ghostbusters “hot beverage thermal mug, and free balloons for the kids.” The theme song by Ray Parker Jr. — a number-one Billboard hit in real life — is revealed to exist in this universe as well, presumably written in response to their Gozer-stomping exploits. Janine steps on the franchise’s tagline with a stilted, “Who are you going to call?”

It’s fun, but it doesn’t really go anywhere. Instead, the film’s plot is an extraordinarily straightforward one. Vigo the Carpathian, a demonic sixteenth century ruler, wants a child so that he can be reincarnated. He convinces someone to help him get that child, and the Ghostbusters stop Vigo before he can reincarnate.

I’m not skipping plot points there. I’m glossing over details, but I’m not leaving anything major out. This represents a heck of a change from the complex, meandering backstory of the first film, which included important events across several centuries and a number of crucial characters we never meet or hear much about. Here, it really is as simple as I put it. A bad guy wants to be reborn and needs a baby. The Ghostbusters beat him and save the kid.

I like that. I don’t necessarily think it’s an improvement on the first film in itself, but I’m certainly a fan of plots that can actually be understood by a general audience. What you do with that plot is up to you, but there’s a definite appeal to a story that’s simple at its core. I do, however, think that’s another sign that this isn’t exactly a story the team was eager to tell. We’ve seen how deep and complicated a story like that would be. This is a story that gets whipped together out of necessity. Pick a bad guy, pick a motivation, and go beat him up.

As I said last week, though, I don’t care much about the plot. It’s not what keeps me watching or what resonates with me. It doesn’t even interest me. What I care about is the interaction between the characters. The dialogue. The writing and delivery.

And, honestly, that’s where Ghostbusters II is at its weakest. The original film had a shaggy, improvisational feel. From what I understand, Bill Murray actually did improvise a number of his lines and reactions, but the entire movie feels that way. The characters aren’t just saying what the script tells them to say; they’re saying what they should say in the moment. It makes them feel real. Their quips are clever, Peter’s especially, but they don’t feel like they’re coming from cue cards held by a production crew just out of frame.

Ghostbusters II feels exactly that way. Everybody does seem to be repeating lines they’ve memorized. They feel too rehearsed. Too practiced. Perhaps part of the reason for that is that Ghostbusters came together piece by piece, without anyone really knowing what the movie would look like or be like (or who it would even star) until they were making it. They really did have to fly by the seat of their pants, and that bled into the performances in a thrilling way. Ghostbusters II, by contrast, would have had all of those questions answered before it was even a concept. The template was laid down, and now it was just a matter of filling it in.

This film has a number of funny lines and moments, but nothing that even comes close to a throwaway in the first film like, “You’re right; no human being would stack books like this.” “You’re named after a hot dog, you poor man” is simply no substitute. In that movie, Peter said what came to mind. In this one, Murray says what Ramis and Aykroyd told him to say.

In one clear parallel, there’s a line from Ray that appears in both films. In the first one, he finds Peter after the latter has been slimed in a hotel corridor. Ray exclaims, “That’s great!” Then, several moments later, he actually checks to see whether or not his friend is okay. In the second film, Ray exclaims, “That’s great!” again, this time when learning that Dana’s bathtub tried to eat her. He catches himself and explains what he means by that. Same line in the same context of the same basic joke. But the first feels natural and organic to the situation. The second feels manufactured. The seams are showing.

And, of course, the performances aren’t the only place we can see the seams. There’s also the basic premise of the film, which relies on a massive cheat only so that the template established by the original film could work again.

See, in that movie, the Ghostbusters performed their paranormal investigations, getting closer and closer to understanding an immediate and massive threat to humanity, centralized in New York City. Skeptical Peck, seemingly just for the sake of being an asshole, interferes with their work and has them arrested, which allows the danger to grow unchecked. The mayor, in the throes of desperation, frees the Ghostbusters and our heroes stomp out the threat.

That’s also exactly the way Ghostbusters II plays out. Just substitute Hardemeyer for Peck and “committed” for “arrested.” Again, fill in the blanks.

I’m not thrilled that they stole their own template for the sequel, but I can understand the appeal (or maybe even necessity) of doing so. What I can’t understand is why they didn’t seem to realize the massive logistical hole at the center.

See, here, five years after the close of the first film, disbelief in ghosts is no longer an option. There can be no skeptics. Folks have every right to doubt specific reports of sightings, or something, and to have their own theories about where ghosts come from or what they want, but people can’t outright reject the existence of ghosts as they were able to at the start of the first film.

Winston explains this in Ghostbusters. “I’ve only been with the company for a couple of weeks,” he said, “but I’ve got to tell you, these things are real. Since I joined these men, I’ve seen shit that’ll turn you white.” Seeing is believing. He joined the team for a paycheck, but once he sees ghosts with his own two eyes, he’s a convert.

By the end of that film, the entire City of New York — as well as the larger media, which we see has been following the Ghostbusters’ exploits — must also convert.

Period. End of story.

There may be some crackpots who conjure up a conspiracy theory instead, or somebody on a remote island without television service who refuses to believe written accounts, but, on the whole, the existence of ghosts has been proven beyond the shadow of a doubt.

There can no longer be skeptics. You don’t get to witness ghosts pouring through the city and interacting with people and objects and then go home and wonder if ghosts even exist. You don’t get to watch a 100-foot marshmallow man waddle through city streets, crushing buildings, climbing a skyscraper and leaving behind gallons of fluff and then question the existence of the supernatural. Everybody may have their own perspective on these events, but that perspective must necessarily include the existence of ghosts.

It would be like meeting Bigfoot. You have every right to not believe in him until the moment you meet him face to face. You see him. You interact with him. Maybe you fight him or become friends with him. It doesn’t matter, but the point is, you have a direct, first-hand account of the existence of Bigfoot.

What’s more, that encounter was witnessed by tens of thousands of spectators. It was covered extensively by the media. There is unquestionably video footage and photographs of the event. And, what’s more, if you went back to that site the next day, you’d find physical evidence everywhere. Mountains of Bigfoot hair, or maybe your initials and Bigfoot’s in a heart that you watched him carve into a tree.

You can’t have been dreaming. It’s impossible. There were too many witnesses and there’s too much evidence. You don’t get to say you don’t believe in Bigfoot. It would require so much in the way of mental gymnastics that, without trying to be offensive in the slightest, I believe continuing disbelief would qualify as mental illness.

Ghostbusters II, however, is full of skeptics. The most overt one is the judge who presides over the Ghostbusters’ case near the beginning of the film. He opens with this monologue: “The law does not recognize the existence of ghosts. I don’t believe in them either. I don’t want to hear a lot of malarkey about goblins and spooks and demons. We’re going to stick to the facts in this case and leave the ghost stories to the kiddies. Understood?”

And, frankly, he doesn’t get to do that. He was here for Gozer. We aren’t explicitly told how old the judge is, but I think it’s safe to say he’s older than five. It’s possible he moved to New York City within the past couple of years and wasn’t around for the fireworks, but surely he’s seen the stories in the press. Or he’s spoken to somebody who was there. Or he’s seen the repair work and cleanup crews.

Instead he, like many other characters in the film, doesn’t believe in ghosts. And that’s not okay. Anyone who expresses that opinion should clearly be confronted about it. They are wrong. Demonstrably, provably wrong.

It’s doubly frustrating in this scene, because the judge doesn’t have to be a supernatural skeptic to condemn the Ghostbusters. Ramis and Aykroyd rely on his disbelief in ghosts to get him fired up against the boys, but he already has a serious criminal charge to focus on: the Ghostbusters illegally drilled a hole in the middle of First Avenue and unintentionally cased a massive blackout. The judge can believe in ghosts — as he must — and still find the Ghostbusters guilty for the actual crime they committed. So why make him a skeptic?

It’s jarring and unnecessary. He has every right to be pissed at them for the crime they actually committed, but instead he gets upset because they believe in ghosts and he doesn’t. It makes no sense.

I’ve danced something a few times, but I might as well bring it up directly.

In the years since Ghostbusters II, New York City experienced an enormous, unexpected tragedy in the form of 9/11. As in Ghostbusters, the skyline was forever changed. As in Ghostbusters, throngs of spectators watched the carnage unfold. As in Ghostbusters, there was extensive press coverage that continued for years. In fact, the topic is still a common one, and understandably so.

I realize it might seem disrespectful to compare a real-life tragedy to the events of a sci-fi comedy. However, Ghostbusters II aims to show us the aftermath of New York tragedy, and reality has just so happened to show us exactly how it would go. In fact, if Ghostbusters II were released any time after 2001, with no changes whatsoever, and especially with its “come together in fellowship to defeat the negativity” ending, it would be impossible to read the film as anything except an allegory for 9/11.

And so you have fringe lunatics who may believe that 9/11 didn’t happen, sure, but they aren’t judges and assistants to the mayor. Can you even imagine someone holding public office in New York who was vocal about his belief that the tragedy at the World Trade Center never happened?

Those towers coming down affected everybody. There were those who were directly involved, whether as responders or victims. There were others who knew those involved, who panicked deeply because there was no way of knowing whether or not they were alive. There were others who were another degree removed…knowing somebody who knew somebody who was in the area. To this day we are screened more and more thoroughly in airports, to the point that a genuine argument can be made for the screening being invasive. (I have no criminal record whatsoever and have followed the rules at airports exactly the same way as I do everywhere else: to the letter. I’ve also been selected more than once to disrobe for a thorough search. I’ve had my genitals patted by gate agents. Why? They don’t have to tell me. And in my case, I can say for sure that it’s only because they decided to. If that is not invasive, I don’t know what is.)

Things changed. For a while, everything changed. For a while, it’s all anybody could talk about, and understandably so. For a while, it redefined the way we saw the world, our fears, our reactions to benign stimuli, such as the sound of a plane overhead.

That was 9/11. A real-life event committed by human beings.

Now imagine how much more it would be discussed, and for how much longer a period, if 9/11 were provably committed by ghosts. Think of how much more we would have to process the event. How much more would be thrown open to redefinition. How much more the world would have to change.

Ghostbusters II, coming long before 9/11, doesn’t realize this. It thinks that five years — or less — is plenty of time for an entire city to forget its common disaster. In the real world, we’re far from forgetting it seventeen years later.

The judge is also one of our first indications that the supporting characters no longer feel so gloriously real and human as they did in the first film. They’re cartoony here, and far less interesting and memorable for it. The judge pulls faces and rises up dramatically as he sentences the Ghostbusters. Janosz — played by Peter MacNicol, who we know can do much better work with cartoony characters than he does here — is too large a caricature to register as menacing, let alone interesting. Peter’s talk show guests are played explicitly for laughs and don’t feel anywhere near as real or relatable as his test subjects in the first film. All of this goes a long way toward making New York City in this film feel further removed from reality.

Even Janine becomes literally more of a cartoon, as she’s given a new appearance that’s closer to the Real Ghostbusters incarnation of the character. And, again, as a result she’s far less interesting and might as well be a different character altogether.

This is by no means a strike against Annie Potts, who is still very funny. It’s just that we got to know her as the type of crusty receptionist we might have to square off against at the DMV, and now, suddenly, she seems more like a naive art student. I’ll admit that this is truer to Potts’ actual age, but it’s strange seeing the same character played by the same actor in such a drastically different way. (I’ll be irrelevantly honest here, though, and say that Potts is cute as all hell in this incarnation.)

I will throw some props to the old man at the museum who is excited to meet Peter and expounds on his love of Bass Masters (“It’s a fishing show!”), because he feels very real to me, and he’s amusing enough to stand shoulder to shoulder with any supporting character from the first film.

Ghostbusters II is also chock full of solid ideas that don’t go anywhere, and moments that should feel inventive but instead feel empty and soulless. The slime blasters, for instance, are a nice way to avoid leaning on the first film’s proton packs, but they don’t really do anything. The boys spray them at some walls inside the Statue of Liberty, and then they hose down a prancing Janosz.

At one point Vigo seems to imprint upon Ray in the same way he imprints upon Janosz, which is genuinely unnerving and well-played by Aykroyd. But that also goes nowhere. Toward the end of the film it comes into play, admittedly, but only for a few seconds, and it doesn’t hinder the Ghostbusters taking down the villain in any way.

And the ghosts in general aren’t as interesting or creative as they were in the first film. There we encountered all kinds of ghosts that didn’t seem anything alike. Slimer, the librarian, the undead cabbie…they all felt very distinct in their design and their portrayal. Here, the equivalent ghosts wreaking equivalent havoc are just…there. The Scoleri brothers admittedly look pretty cool, but outside of them the ghosts are just differently colored and sized translucent blobs. It’s a massive failure of imagination.

And, hey, as long as we’re complaining: is Egon actually having sex with the slime? Or is that just some kind of brotherly ribbing I’m not privy to? He doesn’t say no, which concerns me. I can understand Peter joking about the possibility, but I can’t understand Egon sticking his dick into a bowl of ectoplasm.

But, hey, didn’t I say this movie was actually pretty good?

I did! And I stand by that, even if it is worth pointing out many of the reasons it has earned its dour reputation. It does falter. It is weaker. It is often absolutely stupid.

But it’s still a lot of fun. It’s not as funny or as interesting or as clever as the first one, but it’s a feel-good film. A comfort film. One you can turn on and be passively amused by without having to give it your full attention. As Father Crilly might put it, it’s chewing gum for the eyes.

And that’s okay. There’s nothing at all wrong with a movie that is only entertaining.

This time around, I went into Ghostbusters II expecting to enjoy one or two standout moments. Instead, I actually found a lot to like.

I like that Egon’s experiments about human emotions affecting the physical environment tie into the “mood slime” later. It makes his quick understanding of the slime feel like less of a contrivance. He’s already tested the theory; he’s primed to make the connection.

The slime itself is a great motif (and also seems to draw on the popularity of the cartoon series and the toys, which featured slime extensively), and it makes for some truly great visuals. I also like that it works as social commentary, with the New York City setting already being perfect for a plot about negative energy.

I like that we get more Winston, as he’s a member of the team from the start, and that Ernie Hudson gets more to do. I like the “Do-Re-Egon” bit because come on how can anybody not?

I really like the dancing toaster, which is one of film’s most memorable moments to me, and expertly turns plot exposition into visual spectacle. (It also inextricably linked “Higher and Higher” to this film for me, just as “Tequila” is permanently associated with Pee-wee’s Big Adventure.)

I like Peter playing Dana’s cello as a bass guitar. I like his interactions with baby Oscar, which feel warm and genuine, and represent a believable evolution for the immature womanizer we met in the first film. I like that Janine zips Louis into Egon’s uniform, a great visual for the way he’s supplanted the previous object of her affections.

I adore Aykroyd’s childlike excitement when he finds Peter and Dana in the fancy restaurant, and his gesticulating launches slime onto another diner. It’s one of the few moments in which the character feels real again, and it works perfectly as both characterization and an unexpected visual gag.

And so I end this review where I began it: conflicted.

I expected to unload on Ghostbusters II. I expected to break it down, paragraph by paragraph, explaining why almost nothing works. I expected to feel embarrassed all over again by the fact that I ever enjoyed it.

But all it did this time was convince me that it’s worth shutting your mind off every so often. When I rewatched this in college, I was so distracted by its bad decisions that I didn’t acknowledge its good ones. Now, expecting those bad decisions, I was able to shift my focus elsewhere. To the lines and moments that work. To the dancing toasters that remind you that it’s okay to just have fun sometimes. To the sheer, unavoidable joy of seeing the team back in uniform, even if their second outing is nowhere near as good as their first.

But that was also the last time we’d see them in uniform. We never got a Ghostbusters III, though Aykroyd evidently did have a concept for it. (This was cannibalized to some degree for a video game in 2009, which saw the cast reunite for voice acting duties.)

Of course, where there’s money to be made, there’s somebody interested in making it. Columbia Pictures didn’t make quite as much money on Ghostbusters II (it had a slightly larger budget and pulled in a bit less than the original) but the film was certainly a financial success. Columbia wanted a third.

In 2016, they got that third, with an all-new cast and creative team behind it.

Only this time, it starred some women.

Join me next week, when I’ll cover the most idiotic controversy in modern history.

It’s interesting to note that just a couple of years ago, “I like Ghostbusters” would be about as benign (and common) a statement as one could possibly imagine. Now it’s fraught with inference, with baggage, and with controversy.

That’s because, until very recently, the word “Ghostbusters” meant a movie. Or maybe that movie and its sequel. Or maybe some toys. Or maybe a spinoff cartoon. With the release of a gender-swapped third film, however, the conversation shifted embarrassingly. This is to say nothing about that third film’s quality, or merits, or actual issues. It’s just to say that prior to that film’s release (or, I suppose, announcement), a conversation about Ghostbusters went one way. Now it inevitably goes another.

We’ll waddle into that whole minefield later, but I bring it up here because, at some point, the new film’s fallout seemed to taint the original’s reputation. Not in any substantial or successful way, but once the rebooted Ghostbusters started receiving mixed reviews and less-than-stellar box office returns, a number of its defenders deflected.

“It’s not like the original was all that great anyway,” they suggested. One film critic that I otherwise respect (and who I’m choosing not to link to, lest this be seen as a kind of bullying) even resorted to cheap snark to say that people were looking back far too fondly on a glorified toy commercial in which Dan Aykroyd gets fellated by a ghost. (In the frantic rush to be within the first fifty thousand people to make that observation, I guess, he managed to get every detail in it wrong.)

This was odd to me. Of course, I’m somebody who refuses to believe that a subpar sequel, remake, or adaptation dispels the magic of the original. Arrested Development season four was awful, but it doesn’t change the amount of respect I have for seasons one through three. Charlie and the Chocolate Factory was a thoroughly worthless re-adaptation of a classic, but the version starring Gene Wilder is no less available for its existence. And I have an entire series dedicated to celebrating both halves of the novel-into-film equation, however successful or not the process was.

I’m used to keeping my opinion of one thing separate from another, however closely those two things might be related. In fact, I don’t even find it that difficult. The prequels didn’t ruin the original trilogy; they just crammed a bunch of unwelcome shit into the lore. Big deal.

In this case, though, folks were actively trying to tarnish the original, and I don’t get it. Likely there was some element of bitterness there, and I can understand that, to some degree. When you enjoy something so many others vocally do not, it’s easy to feel alone. But to then try to tear down something that they enjoy…well, that’s not an especially admirable response.

Especially when it’s outright false. I watched Ghostbusters repeatedly as a child, and have seen it many times as an adult as well. I rewatched it this very afternoon so that I could write this article, and I can say that it’s an excellent movie. It’s funny. It’s clever. It’s profoundly well-acted. It was deservedly popular and massively influential. For my money, there hasn’t been another sci-fi comedy that holds a candle to this one. (Though Back to the Future is almost certainly the closest.)

Trying to sully the reputation of Ghostbusters is something that, quite simply, isn’t worth the effort. You’ll have no chance of succeeding, and you’ll only look foolish by trying to point at and mock something that’s actually damned good. Every one of us grew up loving something that by no means stands up to the scrutiny of adult eyes. Ghostbusters, though, isn’t one of those things.

It’s probably difficult to imagine just how big this movie was if you weren’t there to experience it. I was three when it was released, but Ghostbusters (or “Ghost Busters,” as it’s oddly spelled on the title screen and seemingly nowhere else) remained a huge presence throughout my entire childhood.

We played with the toys, watched the cartoon, drank the Hi-C. We played the terrible video games. We rewatched this movie and its sequel endlessly. We pretended we were the Ghostbusters on the school yard. I don’t remember what ghosts we thought we were busting, but I do remember that I was always Egon. If our friend Jen was around, she had to be Janine. We never had a Winston.

The fact that a film released in 1984 would retain its relevance and staying power through a good portion of the 90s isn’t unprecedented, but it is exceedingly rare. Ghostbusters took everybody by surprise, though. The movie about some goobers from Saturday Night Live saving the world from a Sumerian god was actually…good. Critics enjoyed it. The public loved it. It pulled in around ten times its $30 million budget.

Nobody knew what to expect of Ghostbusters, but once it caught on, there was no doubting its impact. As Peter Venkman put it, “The franchise rights alone will make us rich beyond our wildest dreams.”

In fact, much of the film seems to reflect its own history and reputation. Coincidentally, I’m sure, but Ghostbusters for long stretches works almost as an allegory for its own creation.

In the film, Ray Stantz puts a third mortgage on his house to get the Ghostbusters off the ground. Throughout the movie, money is an issue, with a take-out Chinese meal representing “the last of the petty cash.” But the team keeps plugging away at their dream, believing in themselves when literally nobody else will. By the end of the film, crowds of fans are chanting their names, crying out for their attention, and hawking bootleg Ghostbusters t-shirts. The seemingly foolish investment up front pays for itself (at least) ten times over.

Then there’s the team itself, which seems to come together out of happenstance. Peter, Ray, and Egon are academic colleagues who all find themselves suddenly without funding and unemployed. They don’t start the Ghostbusters because they want to, but because they have nothing else to do and might as well. They find a secretary, Janine, because she’s the only one who can put with them. They hire Winston Zeddemore because he needs a paycheck at exactly the same time they need another set of hands.

The way the team grows and expands out of necessity mirrors, just about, the way roles were originally written for other actors. John Belushi, John Candy, Paul Reubens, and, according to some sources, Eddie Murphy. Even the way they build themselves up as a brand –- with a firehouse headquarters that, according to Egon, “should be condemned” and a secondhand ambulance that barely runs –- reflects the way the Ghostbusters script was rewritten: a legend was born of budgetary constraints.

Aykroyd, who would go on to play Ray, wrote the original script on his own. At some point, Harold Ramis, who would go on to play Egon, made it clear that the script as written was far too ambitious and expensive for any studio to actually film. (Which makes Ramis seem, amusingly, like the same kind of cold logistician Egon is.) Together, Aykroyd and Ramis rewrote it. Aykroyd is an enormously talented and very funny man, but I think it’s safe to say that we only know and remember Ghostbusters today because Ramis got involved.

I don’t know if Aykroyd’s original script has ever surfaced, but it evidently involved the Ghostbusters traveling through time and around the world to battle some kind of massive paranormal force. Maybe it would have been great, but Ramis reined him in, restricting the entire plot to the city of New York, relegating the elaborate, centuries-spanning supernatural context to a few bits of spoken backstory, and spending time, instead, on the far-less-expensive interaction between characters.

Logistics are often a great curator. If you can’t actually film your original idea, you have to ask yourself what you can do instead, and what might actually work better. You’re essentially forced to come up with a stronger concept. Aykroyd and Ramis certainly did, and the final film balances the fantastic and the practical beautifully.

It also balances a humorous approach with a human one. There are jokes in the movies — and great ones — but not reality-breaking sight gags or slapstick. The jokes work in tandem with the narrative of the film, and the characterization, rather than serving as intermissions from it. Both aspects work together. It’s a comedy, and it’s a sci-fi film. It works either way, but neither half would work anywhere near as well without the other.

This succeeds, to be blunt about it, because the comedy stays where it belongs. The humor almost never comes from the otherworldly danger unfolding in the city. That is to say, the plot isn’t funny; the characters are. Ghostbusters knows better than to cross the streams.

That’s a wise move, because it means audiences can stay invested even while they’re laughing. It also means that the relatively long stretches between jokes don’t feel dull or out of place. They’re part of the movie. Ghostbusters is one of those rare comedies that’s so rightly confident in itself, it can afford to take its time between punchlines. (Which, I’d argue, makes the punchlines we eventually get feel even funnier.)

We can see this illustrated by the film’s very first scene, in which a librarian encounters a ghost in the stacks. Abnormally for a comedy, there are no jokes at all in the scene that introduces Ghostbusters to the world. Most comedies, understandably, would work hard to open with a strong or memorable comic setpiece. After all, shouldn’t audiences be laughing?

Ghostbusters replies, “Not necessarily.” Aykroyd and Ramis knew that if there were anything funny about our initial experience with the film’s central threat, it would become that much less threatening, and throw off the tonal balance. If the library ghost is a humorous figure, that makes it far harder to believe that Dana Barrett is in any danger when she’s seized and possessed by demons later in the film. Going for a cheap and easy laugh here must have been tempting, but it would have hamstrung many pivotal moments later on.

Instead, we watch the librarian as she goes about her work. Some books hover from one shelf to another. Cards are spewn from the drawers of a catalogue. Then, in a panic, she turns a corner and finds herself face to face with something so horrifying, she screams and collapses.

What a hilarious movie!

Of course, what this scene is really doing is setting up the comedy to come. The librarian’s encounter with the ghost isn’t played for laughs, because that’s being saved for when our heroes encounter the ghost. Again, it’s not the situation that’s funny; it’s the characters.

We see things first from a normal citizen’s perspective. We get a sense of why people would panic and call somebody like the Ghostbusters. (Technically they aren’t Ghostbusters yet, but you get the idea.) We understand why someone would be desperate to get this dealt with as quickly as possible, by whomever could possibly handle it. If this scene were played for laughs, we wouldn’t be able to identify with that feeling. When we return to the library with our heroes in tow, however, the comedy naturally opens up…at the same time we get to learn about the characters.

Bill Murray, Dan Aykroyd, and Harold Ramis feel immediately like associates who have known each other for a long time. They have an established dynamic. That’s why Peter can tease Ray or drop a book on the table to interfere with Egon’s readings. They know who he is, and they know that this is how he behaves.

By continuing to work with him they are making it clear that they’re okay with his behavior, which is why at no point in the film does anyone shout at him to back off. If his behavior were unwelcome, as it certainly is to other characters and in other contexts, it wouldn’t be as funny. Instead, this is a group of friends. They like him. We learn a lot about them from their interactions.

And, indeed, he plays an important role in the group, though it’s not one that’s immediately obvious. For the audience at home, Peter Venkman gets the lion’s share of the laughs, and that’s reason enough to keep him around. But what does he bring to the actual Ghostbusters?

Egon is quite clearly the brains of the operation. He’s extraordinarily knowledgeable, resourceful, and insightful. It’s easy to conclude that he’s the one who creates (or at least develops) their equipment, and while he lacks basic human social skill, he’s the most innately valuable member of the team.

Ray brings the enthusiasm…and the money. He’s the excitable boy who purchases the firehouse so he can slide down the pole, and who is so thrilled by his new job that when Peter is slimed by a ghost, he first expresses joy…and then asks, “Can you move?” Late in the film, Peter explicitly refers to Ray as “the heart of the Ghostbusters.”

What Peter brings is less obvious, but no less important. If Egon is the brain and Ray is the heart, Peter is the swagger. Dana becomes quickly aware of this, telling him as they investigate her apartment, “You don’t act like a scientist. You’re more like a gameshow host.”

But they need that as well. Peter’s the one who giddily convinces Ray toward the beginning of the film to go into business for themselves. He’s the one who gives interviews to the press and works the crowd. He’s the one, surely, who gets them to produce a television commercial. It’s probably not correct to say that he craves attention, but he’s certainly the only one who knows what to do with it.

The characterization is wall-to-wall one of Ghostbusters’ strongest aspects. I’d argue that it’s stronger here than in almost any other comedy, and than most other films in general.

Every character, the moment he or she is introduced, is established firmly. This applies most obviously to the Ghostbusters themselves. Ray’s introduction is all oblivious giddiness. Egon’s reveals both his deep intelligence and his propensity to get lost in the experiment. (On the time he tried to drill a hole in his own head: “That would have worked if you hadn’t stopped me.”) Winston’s sets him up as a hired gun; a day laborer who will do whatever needs doing without any strong feelings about it one way or the other.

Peter’s introduction is the most elaborate of them, and rightly so, as he’s the only one of the main four with a true character arc. The others essentially end where they start in terms of who they are, but Peter goes from repeatedly administering electric shocks to a volunteer just to flirt with another (if you haven’t seen the film, well…just watch it) to taking his work so seriously that he is willing to sacrifice his life to save others. (He’s the one who decides that they will cross the streams to defeat Gozer…something that reliable Egon promises will have “a very slim chance” of survival.)

But the characterization goes further than that. It extends to every other character as well, no matter how minor. There’s the beleaguered and stressed-out mayor of New York City, who is clearly in an unwinnable situation but genuinely wants to do well by his constituents. There’s Walter Peck, who steels himself behind his own presumed authority and immediately finds himself locked in eternal posturing with Peter.

There’s the stuffy hotel manager who is desperate to have our heroes clear out an infestation, but simultaneously desperate to keep his guests from knowing what’s going on. Hell, there’s the guy waiting for an elevator in that same hotel who doesn’t quite believe the Ghostbusters’ limp cover story that they’re exterminators. And there’s the maid who nearly becomes the first test subject for their proton packs, and who we can see in the background putting out the resulting fire with her squirt bottle.

Everybody feels real. Not one of these characters, however minor, however silly their scene, feels like a caricature. And because of that, they all feel as though they matter. Absolutely nothing in the film feels like padding, however tangential to the plot something is, or appears to be.

I honestly think my favorite moment in the entire film is when an unnamed coachman witnesses the early stages of Louis’ possession and sums it up with a simple, “What an asshole.”

It’s funny, but it’s not a punchline. It’s a very human response to a very extraordinary event, and that’s where Ghostbusters truly succeeds. It successfully funnels a vast supernatural catastrophe into a real-world setting, and shows us how real people would react to it…whether it’s those who fight back, those who dismiss the danger, or those who just watch it unfold.

The human focus isn’t accidental. (In fact, it could be a deliberate creative response to the time-hopping excess of the original script.) One of the biggest surprises rewatching the film as an adult is how little we see of the busting of ghosts. True to the title, the movie is actually about the Ghostbusters…not ghost busting.

There’s the library scene at the beginning, of course, but the only things that get busted are their egos. Later there’s the long hotel sequence during which they capture the ghost we’ll eventually know as Slimer. There’s a montage that includes some busting interspersed with press appearances. And finally they battle Gozer.

That’s not much, and it means that nearly everything else is human interaction. People being people. Colleagues being colleagues. Antagonists antagonizing. There’s actually very little in the way of plot, but a hell of a lot in the way of defining and exploring character.

Okay, well, it’s not entirely fair to say there’s little in the way of plot. There’s honestly quite a lot of it. It never feels that way, however, because of the way it’s parceled out.

Peter shares some of his notes with Dana outside Carnegie Hall. Egon gets a possessed Louis to open up about Gozer’s intentions. Ray pores over architectural blueprints in jail and explains his findings. Winston takes a quiet moment, driving at night, to connect what he’s seen and heard lately to a passage in Revelation.

These moments and a number of others occur throughout the film. Never once is a character tasked with delivering a long-winded monologue explaining what’s happening to the other characters or to the audience. Instead, the data points are scattered like breadcrumbs. If you care enough to follow them, you’ll come to a greater understanding of the specifics behind what, exactly, the Ghostbusters are beating back. (And, I’d wager, what we would have seen in Aykroyd’s original script.)

If you don’t, however, the film doesn’t feel any emptier. In fact, I’ve seen Ghostbusters several dozen times throughout the course of my life and I still couldn’t explain to you the supernatural backstory. What’s more, I don’t care. That’s not what the movie is to me.

I see a comedy about four misfits ultimately taking down a great and rising evil. Does it matter to me who Gozer specifically is? Or the role of Ivo Shandor, a completely unseen character, in bringing Gozer back? Or why lesser ghosts are able to terrorize New York City before Gozer is able to break through? Or why Dana and Louis are specifically chosen to host Zuul and Vinz Clortho, Gozer’s Gatekeeper and Keymaster? Or how, exactly, the two of them fucking brings Gozer back?

None of this matters to me. If it does to you, that’s great; you’ll have plenty to dig into and enjoy and think about after the film ends. But it all happens in the background. As in Her, or Shaun of the Dead, we see a potential collapse of civilization occur from an artfully, deliberately limited perspective. Bigger things are happening, but we can only see what our characters see. The rest is inference and assumption.

That limitation seems to have been Ramis’ most significant tweak, and it’s the reason those who care about the lore and those who don’t can enjoy the film equally. To paraphrase Winston, If I’m laughing I’ll believe anything you say.

So, okay, clearly I enjoy the acting, the dialogue, the way the characters interact. But I’d be lying if I said a big part of the appeal — both then and now, for myself and for audiences in general — weren’t the spectacle.

I don’t know that I was ever afraid of the ghosts, to any degree, as a kid. Which surprises me to think about now, as I was definitely a wimp when it came to scary things. The earliest nightmares I remember were brought on by Little Shop of Horrors and a commercial for Aliens. (Coincidentally starring the Keymaster and the Gatekeeper, respectively.) I think it’s safe to say I scared easily. But nothing in Ghostbusters actually registered as frightening at all.

Looking at the film now, though, there are a number of pretty chilling moments. Certainly the most effective is when Dana is grabbed from within a chair and dragged screaming into her bedroom, a sequence which plays as straight horror and is only indirectly undercut by comedy, when Louis is pursued by the same kind of creature in an expressly humorous way. Then there’s the undead taxi driver, who actually does look pretty scary…but he’s only on the screen for a few seconds and doesn’t do anything especially horrific.

Regardless, if I wasn’t afraid of anything in the film, it certainly wasn’t due to unconvincing effects. In fact, by and large they hold up pretty well today. That’s impressive for a silly comedy filled with sketch comedy stars.

Nearly all of it still looks fantastic. The proton streams maybe didn’t age that well, and certain things like the devil dog (as we called them then) crushing Louis’ table don’t seem to be properly integrated, but the stumbles are absolutely the exceptions. The ghosts still look great, with Slimer leaving ectoplasmic residue on the wall he flies through being a notable highlight. The librarian ghost at the beginning looks and behaves in an impressively frightening way.

And to this day, I don’t know they pulled off the effect of the eggs popping and cooking on Dana’s countertop. I’m sure it was a heated surface, but how did they get the eggs to explode the way they did so that their contents would land in the right place to be cooked? There are other objects on the countertop that aren’t being warped from the heat, so it must have been a fairly precise target.

It’s also interesting to me that the Ghostbusters really do just bust ghosts. They fight them, they capture them, they lock them away in what is essentially a prison cell. No thought is given at any point to why these ghosts are haunting these particular locations (though in at least a few cases, environmental details can help us piece together a story).

The boys give no thought to what the ghosts want, or to the fact that helping them resolve their earthly business might allow them to move on to peaceful rest. If memory serves, I do think the cartoon spinoff got into this a number of times, but here, I find it amusing that these guys find evidence of the paranormal and immediately set about beating the shit out of it. (It’s not for nothing that Peter’s triumphant gloating after catching Slimer is, “We came, we saw, we kicked its ass!” They didn’t outwit it; they ganged up on it.)

I could go on for another few thousand words about what makes Ghostbusters work as well as it does. I haven’t even really dug into the three major supporting characters yet.

There’s Dana, played by Sigourney Weaver (who we’ve seen here before). She’s given relatively little to do aside from play the straight man to Peter, and that’s a bit of a shame, but she does it well. (And, if memory serves, she’s given quite a bit more to do in the sequel. We’ll find out next week.) She also functions as an audience surrogate for a brief period, seeing the Ghostbusters’ commercial and being passively amused by what is clearly a scam, before having to rely on them when something inconceivable happens to her. (Their slogan — “We’re ready to believe you!” — turns out to be an accidental bit of marketing genius.)

I also very much enjoy the perfectly acted moment after she shares her story with Egon. His announcement — “She’s telling the truth. At least she thinks she is.” — understandably upsets her; she’s been through a traumatic situation. And yet it’s clearly the correct thing for Egon to assess first.

The fact that the gadgets she’s hooked up to are revealed to be little more than a homemade polygraph upsets her, and that’s a very human response. But Egon is not thinking of her feelings, or of the human element at all. He’s determining whether or not there’s anything to investigate in the first place.

The fact that he then turns to Peter and shines his headlamp into his colleague’s eyes, ignorant of Peter’s reaction, further illustrates how detached Egon really is. It’s a sight gag, but it’s also characterization.

Weaver is also incredible — and worrying — as the physical manifestation of Zuul…equal parts seductive and terrifying in her performance, pivoting in a moment from one to the other.

Then there’s Louis, played by the consistently delightful Rick Moranis. Louis is the humorous counterweight to the serious Dana. Everything she goes through, he experiences the comic version of.

She’s seized by demonic claws and dragged screaming into the clutches of gods-know-what; he gets chased through the streets of the city and eventually, in a panic, offers the creature a Milk-Bone. The moment of her possession is played strictly for horror, while his is played as physical comedy, with Louis sliding helplessly down the glass wall of a restaurant while witnesses refuse his cries of anguish and return to their meals. (That, by the way, is still one of the most perfectly, effortlessly cruel bits of dark comedy I’ve ever seen…and it’s perfectly in keeping with the thematic danger New York City finds itself in for the sequel.)

Even their possessed states are handled differently. Dana’s is actually scary and upsetting; Louis’ is jokey. He tries talking to a horse. He asks strangers if they’re the Gatekeeper. He imitates Egon’s words and gestures during testing not to be a pest, but because he’s like a child seeing these things for the first time.

We’re worried for Dana, but we’re laughing at Louis. That sounds wrong, but both sides of that coin are handled exactly right for what they are.

Then there’s Annie Potts, who may actually be the film’s secret MVP. As a kid I didn’t think much of her character, but as an adult she’s deeply relatable. Like Winston, she’s there because she needs a paycheck. But for her, it really is just a job…and she hates it as she would any job. She’s underpaid. She’s alternately underutilized and overworked. She doesn’t even especially seem to find the fact that her bosses are fighting actual ghosts interesting.

And that’s intrinsically funny!

Not as obviously funny as the gang wrecking up a grand ballroom, or a gigantic marshmallow stomping through the city, or Peter investigating Dana’s apartment. (Asked if he’s using his tools correctly, he hesitatingly replies, “I think so.”) And so her role in the comedy went right over my head as a boy. But now that I’ve worked a number of soul-destroying jobs, as well as jobs I should have liked but which sucked the life out of me because they’re still jobs…yeah. I get Janine.

Also, I love that she acts and dresses like she’s about 60 when Potts was only in her early 30s.

Mainly, though, I love that every single one of her lines plays like a perfectly delivered joke. Some of these are obvious, but others I’m not sure I picked up on before now. When a policeman arrives at the firehouse for instance, she asks, “Dropping off or picking up?” As a kid I just assumed Louis’ case wasn’t isolated; other possessed folks must have changed hands back and forth between the Ghostbusters and the police. Now, though, I see that she was asking if the Ghostbusters were being arrested, and making it clear that this would neither surprise nor disappoint her.

It’s subtle, it’s funny, and it’s perfect.

Honestly, I’m not sure how easy it would be to identify things in Ghostbusters that don’t work. I guess there’s the ghost blowjob bit, but that’s brief. What’s more, it’s a dream sequence, so all the folks who think Ray got fellated by a spirit need to learn to pay attention for more than a few frames of film. Otherwise, nothing really falls flat for me, and any joke that doesn’t get a laugh is either surrounded by good enough acting or followed quickly by something that does.

The ending, I’ll admit, feels abrupt to the point that it seems to come from another movie. Gozer is defeated and…that’s it. I adore Winston’s euphoric “I love this town!” but that’s really the end of the movie?

The film we watched, as we discussed, wasn’t actually about Gozer. It wasn’t about ghosts. It wasn’t about the end of the world. It was about people. It was about how these people relate to each other, and how they deal with an impossible fight against unknowable adversaries. It was about how people interact, how they see the world, and how the Ghostbusters find a place for themselves.

But the ending seems to suggest that the movie was about Gozer, and it thinks that once Gozer is stopped, there’s no story left to tell.

We confirm that all of the major characters are okay, Dana and Peter kiss, and the Ghostbusters drive off. I don’t know what kind of resolution I would have expected, but “Hey, that supernatural thing we never fully explained is gone forever now” wasn’t it.

It’s a small complaint, and it does absolutely nothing to interfere with how enjoyable the ride is, but it feels like it should be the ending to Aykroyd’s original script as opposed to Ramis’ rewrite.

I suppose we can read a bit of narrative closure into that ending. The Ghostbusters start the film losing their funding because nobody takes them seriously, and end it being celebrated by cheering strangers who recognize them as saviors. That’s fine. But the team’s journey toward acceptance wasn’t the focus of the film; it was one of many things that unfolded largely in the background. For the movie to end there, it feels…misjudged.

Again, though, that also feels like a reflection of Ghostbusters’ own creation and legacy. An idea that was doomed to go nowhere gradually finds acceptance. Gets a shot at a wide audience. Finds fans that tell their friends. Eventually sees itself heralded as important, as brilliant, as a part of the world that we can’t imagine going without.

Ghostbusters might be the clearest example of lightning in a bottle that I can point to in the film world. Everything comes together to work perfectly. The writing, the acting, the casting. The directing. The special effects, the soundtrack. The cinematography. The pacing, the editing, the set construction, the props…everything is exactly right. It may not be the funniest comedy I’ve ever seen, but I’d unquestionably put it on my list of the best ones. No part of the film turned out as it was initially envisioned, but all of it was exactly as it should be.

In just over an hour and a half, Ghostbusters introduced so much instantly identifiable iconography to our cultural landscape. It wasn’t just a movie people liked, or which made money…it was a movie that mattered.

It gave us the Stay Puft Marshmallow Man. It gave us Slimer. The Ecto-1. The firehouse. The theme song. The logo. The uniforms, the proton packs, the ghost traps, the containment unit.

Ghostbusters gave us a world that intersected with our own and enriched it. It left us knowing who these characters were, what they wanted, and how they’d each go about getting it. It spun a tale too complex for most of its fans to understand, and yet made sure that that didn’t even matter.

It gave us a touchpoint. Something we’d all relate to. The reason we played Ghostbusters in the schoolyard wasn’t just because we liked the film, but because we knew everybody would understand it. It became instantly as recognizable as cowboys and Indians. And our parents were just as likely to find the film funny and entertaining as we were, even if we enjoyed different parts of it.

A sequel was more or less inevitable. In fact, it was practically obligatory. The Real Ghostbusters cartoon debuted in 1986, two years after this movie, and was immediately popular. It found a fanbase of its own and funneled those fans back to the original film. The cartoon was supported by an equally popular toyline. Tie-ins came in all media. The world wanted more Ghostbusters, and was willing to throw money at anything bearing the name.

In 1989, we finally got our second Ghostbusters film. I remember being overcome with excitement, and it was one of the first films I saw I theaters.

Next week, we’ll find out if it was worth waiting for. But even if it wasn’t, whatever dips and dives the franchise might take from here, the only important to thing to remember is that the original Ghostbusters still exists.

And it’s still fantastic.

That will never change.