Who You Gonna Call !

Rating: 9/10 (9 January 2001)

I'm familiar with a Saturday Morning live-action show called "Ghost Busters" that starred Forrest Tucker, Larry Storch and a man in a gorilla suit as an ape called Kong, but that was puerile, gimmicky and ridiculous compared to this straight-faced comedy about freelance parapsychologists who open their own ghost exterminating business. Insulting to real ghosts inasmuch as they refer to every sort of intangible goblin or monster as a "ghost", the film also makes fun and pokes ridicule to real ghost hunters as nothing but a pack of money-hungry, double-talking, over-sexed pseudo-intellectuals with a collection of illogical and unpractical Flash Gordon-equipment. There is a pretty decent movie here as Bill Murray proves to be an enjoyable and likeable cut-up with a genius-level I.Q., Dan Aykroyd as the boyishly innocent believer in ghosts ( a character not unlike myself) and Harold Ramis as the straight man to the idiocy and the only one with a foot grounded in reality. Rick Moranis is as usual the rather nerdishly inept comic relief, Ernie Hudson the man with the muscle and Superman-grin and Sigourney Weaver who isn't attractive enough to be the type of looker that she is supposed to be. Tossed in for Bill Murray to pursue unsuccessfully, she is less sexual than a car accident, but is a good enough actress to give credence to her role. Annie Potts also provides a wonderfully funny talent as their frustrated, harried and demurely sexy secretary ready to kill them just so she can catch her breath. Slavitza Jovan of the unpronouncable name (later of the House on Haunted Hill remake infamy) is also on hand as some sort of forgotten immortal here to revert the world back to pagan times. It's a great comedy with action overtones, but the ghost formula is straight out of the pen of a Hollywood hack.