Making New York Great Again by Sliming the Foreigners
(originally posted on IMDb 30 September 2018)

The original "Ghostbusters" wasn't merely an original comedy; it had an edge to it. Besides the more adult jokes, the film was open to interpretation of homoeroticism and paraphilia, what with the electric-shocking of a male subject, the dream of a ghost performing fellatio, the phallic handheld wand of the proton packs, the crossing streams and the gooey mess involved in ghostbusting. "Ghostbusters II" cleans a lot of this up, presumably for a more family-friendly mass appeal, despite the first film's box-office success. Heterosexual coupling (between Peter and Dana and between Louis and Janine) is even more in the forefront, there's the centrality of the baby--the result of heterosexual sex, and there's even a children's birthday party. Ray, Egon and Winston still get up to some shenanigans, with Peter remarking at one point that they're "scaring the straights," as they show up in a public restaurant in their underwear flinging slime on the heterosexual couples on dinner dates. But, that's quite tame compared to the first film.

Then, there's this paradoxical xenophobic plot involving Dr. Janosz Poha (Peter MacNicol), who is an ambiguously-coded lascivious foreigner. He's under the spell of a living portrait ghost, which is triply foreign as a painting, as the subject and as a ghost. Of all the ways to combat this foreign menace, the Ghostbusters turn to the Statue of Liberty, the symbol of America's welcoming of immigrants, which they literally displace and employ to rouse New Yorkers into a jingoistic fervor. These aren't good vibes; it's merely slime.