YMMV / Ghostbusters II

• Alternative Joke Interpretation: Venkman sings, "Do", Ray sings, "Re", but Egon sings his own name. Is he punning on the fact that "re" and "Ray" are homophones, or is it because "mi" (the actual next note in the scale) sounds like "me"? Or is it both?
• Awesome Music:
  • "Higher and Higher." A literal example, as it's powerful enough to bring the Statue of Liberty to life and make her torch burst into a burning flame.
  • Bobby Brown's "On Our Own", which plays during the end.
  • "Flip City" performed by Glenn Frey of the Eagles.
  • Randy Edelman's score, an eerie blend of tenderness, fear, and jolly eccentricity.
  • Run–D.M.C.'s remixed Ghostbusters anthem that plays during the montage. Pure badass, meant to demonstrate the Ghostbusters are kicking ghost ass once again.
  • While Elmer Bernstein's work on the original movie was a tough act to follow, Randy Edelman composed his own share of iconic tracks like "Order in the Court" and "In Liberty's Shadow".
• Cargo Ship: Egon/Mood Slime. Some have even suggested that the mood slime is Callie's mother.
• Critical Backlash: While few fans would argue that this film is better than the first, most also have a hard time seeing it as the bottomlessly terrible and unfunny disaster it's often made out to be on the Internet.
• Delusion Conclusion: Some theorists believe that the team's sudden turn of bad fortune is either a Dying Dream or an actual journey through Purgatory. The theory claims that crossing the streams in the ending of the first movie ended up killing the Ghostbusters, forcing them into a hellish shared mental experience/afterlife in which they have to go through the same humiliating struggle for credibility they experienced in the first movie. Depending on the theorist, the finale—in which Vigo's portrait is replaced by a painting of the Ghostbusters portrayed as saints—is either their escape from Purgatory or the happy conclusion to the dream.
• Epileptic Trees: Who is the father of Dana's baby Oscar? Many of the fanbase had their own various speculations.
  • It has been speculated that the Violinist is the father of Oscar.
  • Ivan Reitman said in a 2016 interview with Rolling Stone that it was probably Venkman.
• Genius Bonus: Vigo the Carpathian and the mood slime cause, among other things, the Titanic and its ghosts to return. In Real Life, the rescue ship that helped the survivors was called the Carpathia.
• Harsher in Hindsight:
  • The death of Eric Clapton's 4-year-old son Connor after falling 53 floors from a high rise New York apartment on March 20, 1991 makes the scene of Oscar on the edge of the balcony even more uncomfortable.
  • It got worse in mid June 2017. After Hank Deutschendorf's death from schizoaffective disorder, that scene, especially with Ghost Nanny Janosz, reminiscent of a dementor, stealing Oscar, is now devastating. It's at the bottom of this article announcing his death and the charity created in his name.
• Heartwarming in Hindsight: Peter slipping up, telling the baby Oscar that he should have been his father. Come the release of Ghostbusters: Afterlife, it's revealed that Peter and Dana eventually married, therefore making him Oscar's stepfather.
• Hilarious in Hindsight:
  • One of the obnoxious kids at the birthday party is played by Jason Reitman, who would go on to take over the franchise 30 years later by writing and directing Ghostbusters: Afterlife.
  • Louis—played by Rick Moranis—has a budding relationship with Janine in this film. Wouldn't be the first time a Rick Moranis character falls for a woman with a thick city accent.
  • The psychic on Venkman's show that predicted the world would end in 2016, the same year the remake was released.
  • Kurt Fuller plays the assistant to the mayor of New York. Wouldn't be the last time, either.
  • When it's implied that Egon sleeps with the slime, Winston quips "It's always the quiet ones...". Ghostbusters: Afterlife reveals that Egon, the most stoic, private member of the Ghostbusters, is the one who started a family.
• It's the Same, Now It Sucks!: One of the key points of criticism about the second movie is that it's in many ways a repeat of the first.
• Memetic Mutation: "He is Vigo! You are like the buzzing of flies to him!" frequently comes up whenever people talk about Viggo Mortensen.
• No Problem with Licensed Games: After the NES adaptations of the two films, a second licensed game of the second film titled New Ghostbusters 2 was released. It was a huge step-up from the Activision games, with the characters actually being recognizable. The player could even play as Louis.
• One-Scene Wonder: Cheech Marin as the dock supervisor who sees the wreck of the Titanic arriving and simply says "Well, better late than never.".
• Realism-Induced Horror: Just about anything involving Oscar. Poor Dana nearly had a heart attack after everything she witnessed.
• Retroactive Recognition:
  • Ben Stein makes a quick appearance as the city worker who reports on the shell surrounding the museum (he's less recognizable due to A: his hair being black rather than gray and B: lack of his monotone due to the urgency of his report).
  • The boy at the birthday party who says, "My dad says you guys are full of crap"? That's Jason Reitman, Ivan Reitman's son, who eventually went on to direct Ghostbusters: Afterlife decades later.
• Sequelitis: The second movie is generally considered much weaker than the first and something of a pale imitation at that. The fact that that story requires a completely illogical Extra-Strength Masquerade to have the public not believe the Ghostbusters' claims of the supernatural after all the physical evidence and thousands of witnesses of Gozer's attack, and then essentially repeats the first film's basic plot, will do that.
• Signature Scene: The finale of the film, where the Ghostbusters bring the Statue of Liberty to life to inspire New Yorkers and combat Vigo's slime dome over the museum.
• Special Effect Failure:
  • The mechanism that makes the toaster dance is clearly visible.
  • As is the pump in the jar of slime, causing it to bubble up.
  • Dana's bathtub, filled with mood slime trying to grab her, is very clearly made of foam attached to a hand puppet, as it can be seen creasing inwards as the slime puppet lunges.
• Tear Jerker:
  • The fact that the guys who were hailed as heroes and saviors of the world five short years prior are laughingstocks now. Ray looks heartbroken when the bratty little kid at the birthday party tells him that his dad says the Ghostbusters were full of crap and that's why they closed down.
  • Peter's brief Freudian Slip telling Oscar "I should have been your father" and the flash of regret over his face.
  • The mundane jobs the Ghostbusters have at the beginning. Peter is the host of an unsuccessful talk show (and every respectable parapsychologist thinks he's a fraud), Ray is the owner and seemingly sole employee of a bookstore (whose only customers we see are Peter and an unnamed man picking something up for a Wiccan coven) when he's not doing kids' parties in costume as a Ghostbuster with Winston, and Winston is never seen doing anything outside of the birthday party gig. Egon is the only one who seems to be in a position of any prestige, hired back by Columbia University as a researcher. The fact that these heroes who defeated an ancient Omnicidal Maniac of a deity and prevented the Apocalypse are just regular losers in New York now is a little depressing.
• They Wasted a Perfectly Good Plot: It might have had more emotional impact had Ray's possession been brought front and center.
• Vindicated by History: Whilst the film still isn't considered as good or as beloved as the first movie, fans have helped elevate it to being not as bad as it could have been with its' primary flaw just being a Sequel Reset and recycling some ideas. The movie gets a lot of mileage by getting the Ghostbusters back together and riffing on each other, along with some creative sequences, genuinely scary moments and a fun soundtrack.
• Visual Effects of Awesome:
  • The walking Statue of Liberty was astonishingly well-done for 1989, and still holds up decently over thirty years later.
  • The River of Slime is tangibly enormous, palpably glutinous, and, with its bizarre coloring and slight luminescence, subtly ethereal. The Pneumatic Transit System through which it flows is impressively huge and gloomy.
  • The haunted portrait, achieved by framing filmed footage in a canvas, may be cinema's most famous Spooky Painting.
  • The Slime Blowers are a lovely addition to the 'Busters' arsenal.
  • All of the ghosts.
• What Do You Mean, It's for Kids?: You know, for a movie that's supposedly more kid-friendly, it features a lot more dark and frightening moments than the original ever did. Just check out some of the examples on the Nightmare Fuel page and you'll see they traded the more "adult" themes for some Grade-A scares that probably kept more than a few kids up at night.

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