This week’s screening of Matinee was great. I loved every minute of it and I especially love John Goodman’s description of going to the movies. The way he described it is exactly how I feel about any movie I see, whether that be a horror movie, action movie, drama, or any kind of movie. By watching a movie theater in a movie and reacting to the first showing of a movie, that makes me miss going to the first showing of a movie and having an active audience that is as invested in the movie as I am. I just want to go to a movie theater again and be a part of a crowd, but as of this moment, we don’t know when it will even be possible to go back to the movie theaters. Other than that, I really loved this movie and the humor that was in. I especially laughed out loud at the scene where everyone was panic buying and you had the one person taking all of the toilet paper. For this week’s readings I really connected to the reading “Collective Screams: William Castle and The Gimmick Film” by Murray Leeder and that is because while I was reading it, I thought of an old film that had little gimmick to it. 

Now, when I was first reading the article, for a gimmick film I thought of films like Spy Kids 3-D: Game Over, Avatar, and also Spy Kids 4-D: All the Time in the World. But, there was one film that I thought of that no film that I can think of, has ever tried to replicate its’ unique gimmick. The film that I am talking about is the 1985 Clue. 

I don’t know if people have heard of this film, because it is a cult film, but this film did something that no other film has tried to replicate since. This was the first ever film to be based off a board game and I have to say it is a pretty good one. This film was so unique when it was released in the 80s that it has probably one of my favorite gimmicks that hasn’t been done again since the film was released, not that I know of. What I am talking about is the film had three different endings that were released into theaters. Each ending is different and at the time, nobody knew what theater had what ending, so eventually theaters started to advertise which ending their theater had by saying that they either had ending A, B, or C. I would have loved to have been alive when this film was released so that I could experience this gimmick and try to see all three endings. When the film was released to physical media, the studio put all three endings with it. If you want to watch this film, it is available on Amazon Prime to watch, if you have a prime account. Also, I have never heard of another film since the release of Clue to have multiple endings in movie theaters. I would love for a studio to try and do this again.

So, to finish this off, I am going to include a few videos of bonus features from Doctor Sleep that I did not want to include in my presentation because it included major spoilers for film, so don’t watch any of these videos if you want to go into the film without knowing the ending and what they did in the film. I also couldn’t include them because they are very long. Don’t watch these if you don’t want to be spoiled.