MOVIE REVIEW : Return to the Old Haunt

Fans of “Ghostbusters” can breathe a little easier. It’s slimebusting time again and The Boys are back in ferocious form. One-line zingers ricochet around “Ghostbusters II” (citywide) like ectoplasmic ghoulies, contained in a production that builds to a grand finale even funnier than the guys’ classic duel with the Stay-Puft Marshmallow Man.

And so, during our descent into the Valley of the Sequels, it’s nice to discover that the makers of “Ghostbusters II” have worked hard to keep their movie’s edge sharp. There is a certain amount of probability here; we can be pretty sure that the Ghostbusters, with their clunky homemade critter-zapping packs, will continue to suck all the spectral badness into their little cosmic Roach Motels.

Nevertheless, the movie’s style is meticulous, beginning with Ivan Reitman’s producing and directing; the script by performers Harold Ramis and Dan Aykroyd; a buoyant musical score, and inspired production details and special effects.

The original cast is all present and accounted for. Bill Murray’s Dr. Peter Venkman, who mooned over Sigourney Weaver’s efficient Dana Barrett, can do it again, since in the five elapsed years she’s found and shed the man of her dreams and father of her baby, Oscar. (Blond, pink-cheeked Oscar, in the person of 8-month-old twins William T. and Henry J. Deutschendorf, is a major heartbreaker.)

Ramis, Aykroyd and Ernie Hudson again play varying degrees of serious and semiserious scientists. And kids, who love this sort of thing, will probably glom onto Peter MacNichol’s brilliantly performed Janosz Poha, a smarmy would-be seducer whose gleefully off-center accent will give them something to twist their tongues around in imitation.

The movie’s premise seems not at all impossible: There is a repository for all the negative energy exuded by New Yorkers in the course of an ordinary day as they rise, suit up and prepare to annihilate their fellow Manhattanites by thought, word or deed.

This accumulated vituperation has become a river of nastiness flowing just beneath the city streets. Because this is a comedy, the slime is pink-ish and pretty and when it seeps through a pavement crack, it looks no more threatening than thin Smucker’s jelly, oozing out of a peanut butter sandwich. However “Ghostbusters” fans know better.

New York has produced such an abundance of vileness that it has nourished a malevolent presence--Vigo (Wilhelm von Homburg), a centuries-old fiend, primed to rule the city before you can say his full name--”Vigo, the Scourge of Carpathia, the Sorrow of Moldavia”--unless something is done.

A looming painting of this broad-browed, piercing-eyed tyrant is at the “Manhattan Museum of Art,” where Weaver works as an apprentice art restorer. It seems that Janosz Poha is Vigo’s man in Manhattan, and in a faintly “Rosemary’s Baby” touch, Vigo needs a baby in whose body to return and conquer. By now, no one can be unaware of the story’s drift.

Fortunately, the movie isn’t only Adorable Oscar in Jeopardy. The writers have crafted a perfectly sensible opening: They see the city fathers as elected scolds, still royally teed-off at the condition in which The Boys left New York at the close of the last movie. Accordingly, they’ve been forbidden to bust a single ghost, even with pink slime bubbling away as cheerfully as the Maxwell House percolator.

It’s clear that it will take a whale of a manifestation to put our heroes back at the wheel of Ectomobile-1, and sure enough, one explodes, enough to stand even Ramis’ Dr. Egon Spengler’s jaunty pompadour on end. When ghostbusting is finally legitimate again, the kids in the audience will have a field day with all the swooping, diving apparitions who are rounded up, while the adults may notice their nice details, the ghostly jogger, for example, streaking around the Central Park reservoir, taking his pulse at his throat.

What gives the movie its sense of comic free-fall is its total lack of in-jokiness, that stultifying sense of actors playing for each other’s pockets that we’ve been plagued with lately. To be sure, there’s a nice familiarity to the interplay of Aykroyd, Murray, Ramis and Hudson, and of all four with Rick Moranis as their super-dweeb accountant now promoted to tax lawyer, but it’s a coziness that works to include, not alienate, the audience. Strangely enough, the pair who seem entirely unconnected are the movie’s uneasy lovers, Weaver and Murray, who circle each other with all the warmth of rival real-estate brokers.

Somehow, that doesn’t gum things up irreparably. “Ghostbusters II” (MPAA-rated PG) also doesn’t seem to be pushing as hard as its predecessor, which of course makes it even more fun. There’s an old-shoeishness to the proceedings; even Murray’s owlish put-downs seem a little less snide--they’re almost affectionate, if that’s not too outrageous a word in this context.

Over on the hardware side, this is one of those times when the Industrial Light and Magic crew succeeded totally. Leaving aside the fantastically realized heroine of the film’s last sequence, you might consider the Vigo painting, that face that’s part Klaus Kinski with a soupcon of Frank Morgan’s fearful floating Wizard in “The Wizard of Oz.”

In the welter of credits, along with “Bathtub trainers” and “Bathtub wranglers,” you’ll find “Vigo painting supervisor” Glen Eytchison who should be saluted along with the film’s more than 400 other artists and technicians. That would include more regularly recognized jobs: the production designer (Bo Welch); the editors (Sheldon Kahn and Donn Cambern); the cinematographer (Michael Chapman); the costume designer (Gloria Gresham); the visual-effects supervisor (Dennis Muren); creator of the musical score (Randy Edelman) and whoever located the unforgettable Oscar(s), presumably casting maven Michael Chinich.