It seems to be the way things are going now but to be honest, I can’t really blame the studios for re-releasing classic movies back into cinemas. After seeing Back to the Future earlier in the year, and it becoming one of my all-time best cinematic experiences, I am well up for them putting movies that I’ve loved for so long back into the cinemas – especially ones that I missed as I was too young to see them the first time round!

I’ve mentioned BTTF above, next up we have Jurassic Park then only yesterday found out that Top Gun was coming back to the cinema and now we hear via a press release from Park Circus Films that Ghostbusters is set to get a remastered re-release in October over the Halloween period. Ghostbusters was released in 1984 and again my parents weren’t up for taking their four year old son along to see such a great movie but in 2011, I will get my chance!

Ghostbusters stars Bill Murray, Dan Aykroyd, Sigourney Weaver, Harold Ramis, Annie Potts, Rick Moranis and is directed by Ivan Reitman.

The press release is below and I’ve also placed the original trailer for your viewing pleasure!

In an all-new Digital Cinema Presentation, 80′s cult classic GHOSTBUSTERS is back to save the world this Halloween.

Directed by Ivan Reitman and starring Bill Murray, Dan Aykroyd and Sigourney Weaver, the film is about a trio of university parapsychologists in New York, who lose their research grant and decide to open their own business, ‘Ghostbusters’. They are soon summoned to investigate strange happenings in a Central Park West flat and discover that all of Manhattan is being besieged by other worldly demons. But will they manage to capture all the ghosts and save the Big Apple in time?

As well as boasting an impressive cast list, this much-loved sci-fi comedy is remembered for its selection of imaginative ghost effects – in particular ‘Slimer’ and the ‘Stay-Puft Marshmallow Man’.

On its original release in 1984, the film was a hit with both audiences and critics. It won a BAFTA Award (Best Original Song) for Ray Parker Jr.’s theme tune and was also nominated for two Academy Awards (Best Effects – Visual Effects, Best Music – Original Song).

GHOSTBUSTERS will be back in cinemas worldwide this October.

Who you gonna call?

Maybe Bill Murray, maybe not.

Bloody Disgusting report that Dan Aykroyd, the man so awesome he’s had a band named in his honour (Dananananaykroyd), has said that Ghostbusters III will be going into production in early 2012, with or without Bill Murray.

His hope is of course that Murray will be joining him for the project, which is expected to see Aykroyd, Harold Ramis, Sigourney Weaver, and hopefully Murray re-teaming with director Ivan Reitman for the first Ghostbusters film since 1989.

A third film has been a possibility for more than a decade, and it seems that Murray’s dislike for sequels has meant that his cooperation with the project has stalled a number of times over the years. As such, Aykroyd seems to be sending out a pretty clear message now that whether Murray’s on board or not, the film is going to be going ahead as of spring 2012.

“Yes, we will be doing the movie and hopefully with Mr. Murray. That is our hope. We have an excellent script. What we have to remember is that ‘Ghostbusters’ is bigger than any one component, although Billy was absolutely the lead and contributive to it in a massive way, as was the director and Harold [Ramis], myself and Sigourney [Weaver]. The concept is much larger than any individual role and the promise of ‘Ghostbusters 3′ is that we get to hand the equipment and the franchise down to new blood.”

That final sentence seems to suggest to me that we could have a Ghostbusters IV in store for us a few years later, but it’s of course a bit too early to speculate about that with the third film yet to even begin production. Firm plot details are yet to surface, but Aykroyd has given away a bit about his character and the original cast handing down their roles to a younger generation:

“My character, Ray, is now blind in one eye and can’t drive the Cadillac… He’s got a bad knee and can’t carry the packs… Egon is too large to get into the harness. We need young blood and that’s the promise. We’re gonna hand it to a new generation.”

And he’s already got his eye on one young actor for the film:

“I like this guy Matthew Gray Gubler from the ‘Criminal Minds’ show… But there’s going to be a casting. We’re going to see everyone that wants to do it. We’re going to need… three guys and a young woman.”

Gubler is best known for playing Dr. Spencer Reid in TV’s Criminal Minds, as well as playing one of Joseph Gordon-Levitt’s friends in (500) Days of Summer. As Aykroyd says, it’s just his personal opinion, and there are still going to be auditions held for all the young actors and actresses that want a shot at taking on the franchise. With production planned for early next year, we’ll hopefully be hearing some firm casting news in the coming months, so watch this space.

Dan Aykroyd was recently interviewed by Vanity Fair while on a promotional tour across Canada and the USA for Crystal Head Vodka. They chatted about vodka, Yogi Bear, Justin Timberlake (who voices BooBoo alongside Aykroyd’s Yogi in the upcoming film) and Ghostbusters 3.

Bill Murray had some fairly negative comments to make about a developing script for Ghostbusters 3 when he was interviewed last month by GQ and especially the involvement of the screenwriters from Year One:-

It’s all a bunch of crock. It’s a crock. There was a story—and I gotta be careful here, I don’t want to hurt someone’s feelings. When I hurt someone’s feelings, I really want to hurt them. [laughs]Harold Ramis said, Oh, I’ve got these guys, they write on The Office, and they’re really funny. They’re going to write the next Ghostbusters. And they had just written this movie that he had directed. Year One. Well, I never went to see Year One, but people who did, including other Ghostbusters, said it was one of the worst things they had ever seen in their lives. So that dream just vaporized. That was gone. But it’s the studio that really wants this thing. It’s a franchise. It’s a franchise, and they made a whole lot of money on Ghostbusters.

Aykroyd wanted to allay any concerns about the quality of any third Ghostbusters instalment and defended the work of Stupnitsky and Eisenberg on both Year One and the initial drafts of Ghostbusters 3:-

He was talking about the writers from Year One, and I think he was reacting to the box-office success and the general public view of the film, which in my view was a very serviceable comedy, and in the end I think they’ll make their money back. I think he was concerned that the writing on Ghostbusters 3 by these guys would not be up to standard, but I can tell you firsthand, I’m working on the script now and those two—Stupnitsky and Eisenberg, [writer-producers of The Office]—wrote Bill the comic role of a lifetime, and the new Ghostbusters and the old are all well represented in it…we have a strong first draft that Harold [Ramis] and I will take back, and I’m very excited about working on it.

So there you have it folks. The script has been drafted, it is being worked on by Aykroyd and Harold Ramis and Bill Murray isn’t sure how he feels about it. Surely there is room in the world for another Ghostbusters film? I mean, who else you gonna call?

After a seemingly endless game of tease which has been played out between film websites for months, Bill Murray finally clears up rumours regarding the long-awaited Ghostbusters 3. Speaking in an interview for this month’s GQ, Murray (whose portrait here was created by celebrated comic book artist Daniel Clowes) has the following to say:

“It’s all a bunch of crock. It’s a crock. There was a story—and I gotta be careful here, I don’t want to hurt someone’s feelings. When I hurt someone’s feelings, I really want to hurt them. [laughs] Harold Ramis said, Oh, I’ve got these guys, they write on The Office, and they’re really funny. They’re going to write the next Ghostbusters. And they had just written this movie that he had directed.”

Year One was the movie in question, and I think we can all safely assume that if Ramis attempts to resurrect the franchise yet again, he won’t be tapping those guys to write it.

This news is a shame for those fans who are desperate to see some ghosts being busted again, but as this year in particular has proved, it’s a tricky endeavour to try and capture the same magic which existed in those cherished classics from the 80’s.

Ghostbusters 3

This news comes from the CEO of all things Ghostbusters, Egon himself, and while every interview Harold Ramis gives until Ghostbusters 3 hits our screens will be rife with questions about the long awaited sequel, you can bet that lips will be tightened as the script is finalised, and shooting begins.

HeebMagazine spent a while with Mr Ramis and covered his entire career as a director and star, it is a great read (complimented with some fantastic pictures of the man) and the inevitable Ghostbusters 3 question comes up.

Here’s what he had to say:

Something’s going to happen. Dan [Aykroyd] did write a spec GB3 screenplay a few years ago, but no one was motivated to pursue it. Now, 25 years after the original, there seems to be some willingness to proceed and apparently a substantial public appetite for a sequel. We’ll introduce some new young Ghostbusters, and all the old guys will be in it, too. Think Christopher Lloyd in Back to the Future … GB3 is progressing with plans to shoot next summer and release in 2011

I love the Doc Brown analogy, and whether or not the Bill Murray as a ghost rumours turn out to be true, the fact that the original team are taking this through is good news. All I, and I’m sure all Ghostbusters fans, want is a good film. Ghostbusters 2 wasn’t my favourite film of all time, but it proved that the characters and world created was solid enough to set new stories against.

Twenty five years is a good amount of time to wait, and like Back to the Future, this anniversary should be met with a celebration of the original films and, for Ghostbusters at least, a revisiting of our old friends seems like the perfect present.

Regular readers will know that HUG is a one stop nexus for all your movie wants but we’re also conscious of the fact that other sites can only provide you with information about the film culture of THIS universe. We strive to do better. Utlilising transdimensional bandwidth, we’ve linked to our sister site in a parallel sphere in order to bring you the first in a series on counterfactual movies from the other side.

We’re going further than your imagination would dare in order to give you the exclusive lowdown on the celluloid that’s inspired a tranche of film fanatics very different to ourselves.

The first in this series takes a look at Stanley Kubrick’s Ghostbusters.

Introduction:

We know Dan Aykroyd and Harold Ramis’ supernatural comedy as one of the defining blockbusters of the Eighties. A seemingly effortless fugue of Thirties style screwball patter and Saturday Night Live wit, our version is rightly lauded for its humour, high concept hijinks and sense of fun but there’s another version that isn’t so upbeat. In a parallel universe this story of paranormal investigators and ectoplasm is considered one of the most nihilistic movies ever made. Stanley Kubrick’s version refashions the laughs into a meditation on death, mental illness and existential desolation. HUG can now publish her sister site’s review for the first time. Brace yourselves.

WARNING: CONTAINS SPOILERS.

Review: Ghostbusters (Stanley Kubrick, 1984)

Ghostbusters is a natural progression for Stanley Kubrick. Since the mid-70s epiphany that saw him move toward genre fare having “wasted a career” in the purview of novels and historical dramas, he’s embraced high concept and defied the critics that saw it as a vulgar capitulation to populist filmmaking. His 1978 acquisition of the rights to DC Comics’ Superman, resulted in a movie that recast the man of steel as a sedentary homosexual who used his enhanced strength and heightened senses for sexual gratification. Brando’s turn as the man of steel shocked audiences raised on the two tone Americana of the source material. Those that balked at Clarke Kent’s kryptonite and cocaine fuelled masturbation were equally unimpressed at General Zod’s coprophic perversions. The ‘tarmacing’ scene, in which Terrance Stamp commands Margot Kidder to “kneel over Zod” before committing the act, was recently voted the 5th most shocking moment in film history by the AFI. But such criticism ( Robert Ebert called the four hour film, “a hallucinatory shock to both the eyes and the intellect”) missed the point. Kubrick was prepared to push the blockbuster into a thematic underpass populated by society’s fringes and cinema has never been the same since. It remains Pauline Kael’s favourite film.

Now, having just wrapped on Star Trek III: Vulcan’s Shame, which imagines Spock’s home planet embracing slavery, he’s retooled a script by comedians Dan Aykroyd and Harold Ramis; imagining a coterie of academics who abandon their scholarship to pursue the spectral remnants of the dead in New York City.

Malcolm McDowell plays Peter Venkman; an academic grieving for the girlfriend who killed herself. We’re treated to the suicide in a gruesome opening flashback in which Kurbrick’s static camera maintains emotional and critical distance from the woman who disfigures her breasts with a broken bottle before coating the lens with the spray from a severed artery. It’s a horrific, brutal sequence and its shock value is an upfront statement of intent for a film that cuts between sterility and violence with clinical precision.

Venkman, who’s devastated by the death, sees New York as an unmapped necropolis in which his love is trapped in purgatorial torment. Enlisting the help of colleagues Stanz (John Cassevetes) and Spengler (Jack Nicholson), the three invent a technology for detecting and entrapping spirits. As Venkman gets closer to his lost love, the space between the living and the dead begins to collapse, threatening to drive Venkman to a similar fate.

Trust Kubrick to take a script that was originally touted as a comedy and invest it with almost unbearable gravitas. Kubrick’s New York, shot in a bleak, reductive palate, reminiscent of a Rembrandt painting, is a city in which the spiritually decimated walk amongst the dead. More than once, particularly in one heartbreaking scene in which Venkman admits “I envy them, because they at least know they’re gone. We’re obliged to pretend”, Kubrick suggests that the scientist’s obsession with the afterlife has deprived him of any chance of living in the real world. With Michael Nyman’s ambient hum underscoring the gloom, Ghosbusters demands much of its audience and the overall effect is exhausting and occasionally the stuff of nightmares. Like Superman, visual effects are kept to a minimum in favour of emotional realism and psycho-sexual discomfort that batters its audience with stillness, sorrow and existential torment. Special mention should go to Canadian actor Rick Moranis whose turn as a social lepper who wistfully watches ghosts from his apartment window is both haunting and the closest Kubrick comes to a human touch.

A striking and melancholic tour de force.

Key Scene (from the screenplay by Stanley Kubrick):

INT. NEW YORK PUBLIC LIBRARY – DAY

Venkman is interviewing Alice, a librarian who’s claimed to see a ghost.

VENKMAN
Alice, why don’t you tell me again what you saw?

ALICE
It ““ it had arms and legs, and ““

VENKMAN
Alice, I need you to stop talking now. I need you to consider the possibility that as a woman you may be hysterical, possibly deficient in common sense. Do you understand?

ALICE
I think so.

VENKMAN
I don’t think you do understand Alice. I think you think you’re fine, but you’re not. You’re sick. My girl, Dana, she used to say she was fine but she wasn’t Alice. She was very sad. She slit her throat. She couldn’t go on you see. Life, she understood, was a question to which there’s simply no good answer. It’s a trick question Alice. A trick question.

ALICE
Can I go now Doctor Venkman?

VENKMAN
Where would you go Alice? There’s only one destination that awaits all of us. Death Alice. I’m going there soon and I encourage you to follow me. There’s nothing for us here. Nothing.

Alice stares at Venkman, a haunted expression on her face.

Next week: David Lynch’s Return of the Jedi.

"A striking and melancholic tour de force": Ghostbusters

While other Paranormal Activity is chilling spines this Halloween month, news is reaching us of one of our most cherished franchises, one whose long awaited sequel is rattling into pre-production.

Bloody Disgusting tells us that Ivan Reitman will be returning to Ghostbusters 3, behind the camera, though we are not told in what capacity. This is great news, as while the original team of Bill Murray, Harold Ramis, Dan Ackroyd and Ernie Hudson are all confirmed to return for the next film, having Reitman behind the camera will complete this reunion and should bring Reitman back to his glory days of Stripes, the original Ghostbusters films and, um, Junior.

What we also know (according to /Film) is that a script has been delivered from the writers of the subtle as a blowtorch to the face prehistoric comedy Year One, Gene Stupnitsky and Lee Eisenberg. I hope Ackroyd and Ramis will have considerable input, I’d hate to see this one disappoint.

Read here for more info. We’ll be watching.