br>by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2022 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
Last night at 9 my husband Charles and I watched the 2021 movie Ghostbusters: Afterlife, third film in the original Ghostbusters cycle and a reasonably entertaining movie but also an odd one. The film takes place in modern-day Summerville, Oklahoma, where single mother Callie (Carrie Coon) has fled with her two teenage kids, son Trevor (Finn Wolfhard – that’s really his name) and daughter Phoebe (Mckenna Grace, who turns in by far the best, subtlest and most nuanced performance3 in the film) following her eviction from her previous home. Callie has received word that her father, a “dirt farmer” in Summerville, has just died and she needs to go there to collect her inheritance, but when she arrives she finds out that her dad died deeply in debt and the only thing he left her was a crumbling farmhouse. A few minutes early into the movie I joked to Charles, “It’s a perfectly O.K. movie but one wouldh’t think t his was a sequel to one of the funniest movies ever made.” And, despite some nice comic-relief wisecracks on the soundtrack – most notably when Callie and her hids are in the car driving to Summerville, she tries to assure them that “you’ll make some new friends there,” and Trevor snaps back, “Out of what?” – Ghostbusters: Afterlife remains an obstinate serious movie, too dark to be the kind of laff-riot the original was ande at the same time just a little too light to work as serious horror.
At one point Charles, no doubt referencing the amount of screen time given to the teenage kids and their problems (mostly typically adolescent stuff complicated by the fact that they’re in a small town in the middle of nowhere and just about all the townspeople couldn’t stand their grandfather), said, “This is the kind of Ghostbysters movie John Hughes would have directed.” I fired back, “And Stepken King would have written the screenplay.” King’s work is actually referenced here via a showing of clips from the film Cujo that a harried high-school teacher, Gary Grooberson (Paul Rudd, the closest thing this film has to an adult leading man; he,s O.K. on the eyes but more than a bit on the nerdy side and one would never guess from his appearance here that he’d win People magazine’s annual “Sexiest Man Alive” cover, which he did) puts on to distract his students and give them something to do, and there are a lot of shots of looming cornfields that couldn’t help but remind me of Children of the Corn.
It’s only half an hour into the movie that writers Jason Reitman (who also directed; he’s the son of Ivan Reitman, who directed the first two Ghostbusters movies and is credited as a producer on this one) and Gil Kenan, even bother to connect this story to the original Ghostbujsters from 1984 and its first sequel, Ghostbusters II, fromm 1989. It turns out that Callie’s father was Dr. Egon Spengler (Harold Ramis, who also co-wrote the original script with fellow Ghostbuster and Saturday Night Live alum Dan Aykroyd), one of the original Ghostbusters. Only he got a psychic emanation of a massive spiritual incursion in Summerville, Oklahoma and he accordingly packed up all the Ghostbusters gear, drove to Summerville in the iconic white Cadillac station wagon that was such an important element of the first film, and left his fellow Ghostbusters, Dr. Peter Venkman (Bill Murray) and Dr. Nathaniel Stanz (Dan Aykroyd), in the proverbial lurch. Murray, Aykroyd and Sigourney Weaver reappear in this film playing their original characters as they have naturally aged (and of the three, it’s Aykroyd to whom the years have been unkindest), but to the extent that this film has a plot, it’s Phoebe’s coming-of-age story as she discovers her heritage as a Ghostbuster and picks up the slack, including drafting her brother Trevor into driving the iconic ghost wagon even though he’s failed three driving tests and gets them busted for driving without a license by local Sheriff Domingo (Bokeem Woodbine), whose daughter Lucky (Celeste O’Connor) is attracted to Trevor – or ast least was until she discovers that he was only 15, not 17.
Also in the cast is a local boy called “Podcast” (Logan Kim) after the podcast he’s continually working on (and the long boom mile with a wind sock on it starts to look like yet another piece of ghostbusting equipment). Together the terrific teens manage to vanquish the Sumerian goddess who’s haunting the town courtesy of Ivo Shandor (J. K. Simmons), who built the town of Summerville in the first place to support his mine and after his death had himself buried in a glass coffin to preserve his body, sort of like Lenin. Of course he comes to life briefly in the climactic sequence, but all too little is done with that. It was interesting to watch Ghostbusters: Afterlife in this context, preceded by five trailers – mostly for serious adult superhero movies like Spider-Man: No Way Home, Venom and Morbius (the last is already out on video and is regarded as the biggest flop in the history of the Marvel Cinematic Universe) – and succeeded by a making-of reel in which the Reitmans, father and son, along with Gil Kenan and others involved in the production are interviewed and speak with a strange reverence for the original Ghostbusters and what it has meant to people over the years.
That gives me a major cloe at to what went wrong with this movie: the original 1984 Ghostbusters was superbly balanced between a dark, almost mephitic background uf urban decay in New York City and the hilarious gags they played against it. The first sequel, 1989’s Ghostbusters II, way overdid the comedy – it was half an hour into the film before it seemingly occurred to the writers that they actually needed a plot and couldn’t make an entire feature out of just a succession of gags (something Charlie Chaplin and Buster Keaton understood almost intuitively when they began making features in the 1920’s). Ghostbusters: Afterlife erred in the other direction: it took itself all too seriously. No one gets “slimed” in this version, and instead of a giant Stay-Puft marshmallow man as in the 1984 original we got hundreds of little Stay-Puft marshmallow men who come to life and break out of a cellophane bag in a supermarket – and it’s one of the film’s few genuinely funny scenes but still nothing like the hilarity of the original. The few clips we get from the first film – notably a reprise of the Ghostbusters’ commercial which the new generation of ghostbusters watch, natch, on YouTube – liven up the proceedings but also shows the great gulf in amusement level between that movie and this one.
