THE hugely successful comedy Ghostbusters (Pearl, 9.30pm) was originally planned as a vehicle for Dan Aykroyd and John Belushi. Following Belushi's untimely death from a drug overdose it was re-written to give more emphasis to one of the minor characters.
Ironically, it was Belushi's death and the resulting re-write that made the movie such a box office smash. The minor character that became a major character is Bill Murray. It is his film all the way. With his deadpan delivery and snide quips, Murray holds is own where a lesser actor would have drowned in the myriad big-budget special effects.
Ghostbusters does, however, owe much to many less successful ghost movies that preceded it. It is a hybrid of spook pictures as diverse as Spook Chasers, Spook Busters, Ghost Catchers and countless others.
The essence of Aykroyd's plot (he wrote the screenplay with co-star Harold Ramis) is not original. In Spook Busters, for example, a minor comedy made in 1946, some boys set up shop as ghost exterminators and tangle with a mad scientist.
But that does not make Ghostbusters less fun. Murray, Aykroyd and Ramis play a trio of New York City parapsychologists who set up their own ghost-busting shop, complete with a bored secretary (Annie Potts). For a fee they will rid homes of the supernatural.
They are hired by Dana Barratt (Sigourney Weaver), a symphony cellist who lives in a spectacular building above Central Park where strange things have been happening. They capture a large, gooey, green ghost and experience several other weird occurrences, including a ghost in Weaver's refrigerator. As Murray says: ''Not the kind of thing you normally find in a major appliance.'' LITTLE Drew Barrymore, angelic child star of E.T., is another to have suffered the Jennifer Capriati syndrome. She burned out and became involved with drugs before returning to film-making with roles in a number of flops, among them Gun Crazy and Poison Ivy.
In Doppelganger (World, 9.30pm) she desperately tries to bury the Shirley Temple image that had been a millstone around her neck by playing a beautiful, flirtatious young woman who believes she is being stalked by a creature that looks like her, walks like her, and talks like her.