This past week saw the last gathering of the Student Movie Club at the Spectrum Playhouse on Friday, May 9th. For those unfamiliar with the Student Movie Club, gatherings consist of the screening of a movie, followed by an after-movie chat, with CIP’s theatrical teacher Kyle Goldman at the helm. The film screened was one chosen by the students. By popular demand, we watched the 1984 supernatural comedy classic, Ivan Reithman’s Ghostbusters.
The film, about disgraced university scientists who form a paranormal pest control outfit, is still as funny as ever after three decades, with standout performances from Bill Murray, Sigourney Weaver, Rick Moranis, and the film’s writers, Dan Aykroyd and the late Harold Ramis. Ernie Hudson and Annie Potts are also good as the newcomer Ghostbuster and the Boys in Grey’s secretary, respectively. Indeed one small but notable aspect of the film is the budding relationship between Ramis’s Egon Spengler and Potts’s Janine Melnitz. Only a few brief scenes hint at it in the finish, because Ramis didn’t come off as sappy, but it was expanded on the animated television spinoff series The Real Ghostbusters, and remains fairly memorable to fans of the franchise to this very day.
Ghostbusters became a full-fledged franchise, thanks not only to the animated spinoff, but also due to a 1989 sequel, a second animated series (Extreme Ghostbusters) and assorted merchandise, such as video games and comic books. While there has been rumblings of a possible Ghostbusters III or reboot film for years, fans were blessed with a 2009 video game for Playstation 3 and Xbox 360 (among other platforms) that reunited the original cast and writers and was set two years after the second film, and more recently IDW Publishing has been publishing Ghostbusters comic books following the game’s continuity. So, there is a fair amount of Ghostbusters media out there to please fans.
All in all, I must say that I’ve had plenty of fun being a part of the Student Movie Club, and I hope Kyle Goldman gets to continue it during the summer session. There’s lots of movies I would love to see, but at the top of my list are Gremlins (and maybe its sequel, Gremlins 2: The New Batch), Beetle Juice, and Who Framed Roger Rabbit.
– John Pannozzi