GHOSTBUSTERS: DVD

SYNOPSIS:
Three unemployed parapsychology professors (Bill Murray, Dan Akroyd, Harold Ramis) set up shop as a unique ghost removal service. Their first customer is cellist Dana Barrett (Sigourney Weaver), who is scared out of her apartment on the 22nd floor of a high rise apartment building on Central Park West. They wise-crack their way through the city, and stumble upon a gateway to another dimension, one which will release untold evil upon the city. The Ghostbusters are called on to save the Big Apple.

"The menu is a funky impression of Manhattan's highrise skyline – from which you can make your scene selection, choice of languages (German or English) or watch the movie with any of 15 subtitles including Hindi, Hebrew and Hungarian. A little more clarity here would have helped. But it's probably the special effects section Ghostly Gallery) that is of particular interest, as we meet the team responsible for the green flying blob, the Stay Puft Marshmallow and the other FX in this now classic film from 1984. Bill Murray and Dan Aykroyd talk about the experience: they say it's similar to getting smoke into a coke bottle with a baseball bat, while the visual effects team (who also worked on Poltergeist and Star Wars), emphasise the energetic, fun approach. You can view split screen story boards (the story boards are at the top of the screen, the action below); we found these interesting, but not hugely stimulating. By pressing the 'angle change' button, the viewer can toggle back and forth from the rough cut to the final cut. All these kind of features take a bit of practice to manage: we found the facility to view from a different angle a bit frustrating, partly due to lack of expertise perhaps, with the technology. But of course these are just the add ons – the film itself, in wide-screen, reproduces wonderfully in this DVD transfer, and hearing Elmer Bernstein's catchy score is a blast. The film's tone and comic invention continues to make it great entertainment, and the format delivers this in the best possible package for the home."
Louise Keller & Andrew L. Urban