What movies aped Ghostbusters?
November 30, 2015 7:27 AM   Subscribe

I can think of a handful of films that tried to recreate the Ghostbusters formula. Men in Black, R.I.P.D., Evolution, Howard the Duck, The Watch... What are some others?
posted by arniec to Media & Arts (14 answers total) 1 user marked this as a favorite
 
If "organization designed to protect humanity from the supernatural or unknown" is what you're going for, Hellboy also fits.
posted by AzraelBrown at 7:38 AM on November 30, 2015 [3 favorites]


Oh, also X-Files, and by extension, Kolchak: The Night Stalker.
posted by AzraelBrown at 7:42 AM on November 30, 2015


I think the chronically underrated Mystery Men definitely owes something to the Reitman school of high-concept comedy. The same goes for Edgar Wright's Cornetto Trilogy (Shaun of the Dead/Hot Fuzz/The World's End), although Wright succeeds in differentiating his style enough that those films don't feel directly derivative of Ghostbusters per se.
posted by Strange Interlude at 7:43 AM on November 30, 2015 [4 favorites]


Kolchak: The Night Stalker

Kolchak came and went before Ghostbusters, so it's kind of the other way around.
posted by Strange Interlude at 7:45 AM on November 30, 2015 [1 favorite]


Kolchak was also played straight. The key to the "Ghostbusters formula", as much as it exists at all, is that the heroes are somewhat bumbling and in over their heads against the supernatural.

Buffy The Vampire Slayer (the show, not the movie) owes a fair amount to it, I think. And though I haven't seen it and it's supposed to be terrible, Pixels is obviously a lazy rip-off of it.
posted by mkultra at 7:51 AM on November 30, 2015 [2 favorites]


Not exactly, but if memory serves, The Frighteners is kind of in the same ballpark.
posted by bonobothegreat at 8:35 AM on November 30, 2015 [3 favorites]


There are more than a handful of shows in which someone is charged with the job of essentially bounty-hunting escapees from A) Hell and B) the Future. Under column A) we have Brimstone, Reaper, the Spawn franchise (it's common for the bounty-hunter to be a dead-and-damned person), and of course RIPD is in this category. Column B) gives us Time Trax (shudder), and Continuum, but I can't think of any movies on this end. Column A comes in all forms but usually the hero is working directly for the charismatic devil for some reason. (Reaper reveals that the main character, a GenX slacker, is the devil's mortal son.) Column B involves someone working for the Time Police, or else a cop hired by the Time Travel regulators to clean up the mess they caused by letting loads of criminals escape into the late 20th/early 21st century, doh! I would include Quantum Leap as a near-miss on these, since that show's hero was fixing the timeline while inhabiting the bodies of people from the past (within his own lifetime).

I mention all this because I really want to bring up the superior show "Dead Like Me," which is about a small handful of people who, upon their death, were drafted into the bureau of Grim Reapers. Their job is to contact people in the moments before their death and unseat their souls so they don't experience the pain of their death. But of course they also get to use the chance to seek closure in their regular lives. The bureaucracy is mostly invisible; the reapers meet daily at a waffle house, the leader gives them post-its with names and times, and the reaper goes to witness a death (usually a rube-goldberg/Final Destination affair that's gruesome enough to keep the show on pay-cable). The reapers in question are a variety of people with a variety of strategies for both adjusting to their undead status and dealing with their weird supernatural function as well as maintaining a real life. The main character (again, GenX slacker) is trying to figure out how to live independently, how to keep an eye on her grieving family (with whom she is physically unable to share the truth), and finding satisfaction in her new life. 2 seasons, the second of which is some of the best television i'd ever seen at that time.
posted by Sunburnt at 9:35 AM on November 30, 2015 [1 favorite]


Harry Potter
posted by benbenson at 10:02 AM on November 30, 2015


Jack Black described Goosebumps as being like Ghostbusters for kids...
posted by Mister Moofoo at 10:15 AM on November 30, 2015


Column B) gives us Time Trax (shudder), and Continuum, but I can't think of any movies on this end.

Timecop.
posted by The Tensor at 11:21 AM on November 30, 2015 [1 favorite]


It just occurred to me that the correct answer is (as always) Ghostbusters 2.
posted by Strange Interlude at 11:21 AM on November 30, 2015 [2 favorites]


They Live
Mars Attacks!
The Faculty
posted by mkultra at 12:50 PM on November 30, 2015


Ahem. Ghostbusters aped The Ghost Busters, a 1975 Saturday Morning cartoon show. Speaking of apes, one the (1975) Ghost Busters was an ape, Tracy the Gorilla.
posted by Rob Rockets at 1:00 PM on November 30, 2015 [1 favorite]


How could I forget Timecop! I have brought shame upon my family.

Which brings me to: Time Tunnel, a show from the 1970s, two guys from the future who are more or less lost in history, aided by a kid (contemporary to the show) who guides them with his half-remembered middle-school education, repairing the past.

The movie "Stargate," as well as its TV show, Stargate: SG-1 and spinoffs SG: Atlantis and SG: Universe. A secret military team uses alien stargate technology, recovered from an ancient Egyptian dig site, to explore the, and then accidentally invite alien attack, which they must then defend against.

The original movie Stargate covers this concept in a one-off, while the TV series follows on with just one real retcon, namely "Oh, we thought there was just one stargate to go to, but it turns out there are way more, and more aliens to boot."
posted by Sunburnt at 5:00 PM on November 30, 2015


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