Great(ish) Film Gimmicks

The current glut of holiday movies in “eye popping THREEE DEEEE!” is just the latest example of studios trying to fill cinemas. Today they’re competing with increasingly sophisticated home theatres and movie piracy, just as they once fought against the threat of this new-fangled TeleVision with such desperate gimcrackery as CinemaScope, Stereoscope and Cinerama. Trash auteurs like William Castle and John Waters took the movie gimmick to its natural conclusion with such genius ideas as “Percepto!” (which delivered small vibrating shocks to seats in the cinema) and the self-explanatory Odorama.