The Dollar Experience

Hello my Good Ol' Three Faithful Readers!

I wonder if you're even out there. Maybe you grew old, awaiting for another post and died under silky cobwebs and running dust bunnies. Yet here I am and I hope your mummified eyes are still able to read my often hollow, sometimes amusing ramblings.

In any sense I guess logic would dictate that first of all I should explain my absence from these particular series of bits floating around in the Interweb. Yet, I'm not gonna do it. Deal with it. I guess if I keep on publishing eventually you can put the pieces together. Either that, or you can make up your own story. I'll bet it would be a lo more epic and cooler than whatever actually did happen in my life.

For now I'm going to talk to you about a real funny experience I had yesterday. As you might recall, I'm a horror fan. I love horror movies. When I dream, if I have a nightmare, it's actually a pleasant dream for me full of excitement and fun. Schitt, I've been killed in some dreams and that has not stopped me from enjoying the experience.

So there's this movie called The Midnight Meat Train, which is based in a short story by Clive Barker on the Books of Blood. Both the short story and the movie are amazing. You can read a good review of the film here. Suffice to say it's beautiful. Like a blood soaked haiku poem.

The point is for some reason Lionsgate did not want to release the film on big name movie theaters, and sent it straight to Dollar Movie Theaters. Apparently the move involves an odd feud between Lionsgate and Clive Barker. Don't know much of the details, but I know this and that, as horror fans, we should support our beloved genre.

It so happens there was a show in my city. So obviously I went to see the movie and was treated not only a really good horror movie, but also a very, very interesting life experience I had long lost. See, I was going to a Dollar Movie Theater. Can you understand the power of that? A motherfriggin' Dollar Movie Theater!

What instantly came to my mind was the image of kids. Kids who get their weekend allowance after finishing their chores like picking up their room, cleaning the dishes and mowing the lawn under the summer sun. They come back inside with a proud smile on their faces and extend their hands whereby their parents nod and say: "You earned it Champ" as they move their hand to their backs, to that sacred place where the magical leather device holds many, many plastic cards, business cards of unknown strangers who might one day maybe be useful contacts, old family pictures proudly flashed at said unknown strangers, folded napkins with lipstick kisses and telephone numbers, a forgotten condom too old to be used yet too meaningful to throw away.

All that does not matter to our young hero. All the kid cares about is when that glorified piece of paper comes out with angelic tunes being played in the child's mind.

Five $1USD bills.

When you're a kid, five dollars is a whole bunch of money. You still don't have a full grasp on the concept of what stuff is really worth and the fact that that bill means about 1.288 gallons of gas. All our Little Weekend Warrior knows is that he goes to his bike, holding to his five bucks for life and goes to the Dollar Theater.

And let me tell you, those five dollars take him a long way! He comes to the theater and parks his bike. And there they are; movie posters with magical beings, fedora wearing heroes, menacing serial killers, women in large cleavages being held by alien beings and 50-feet high monsters holding civilization hostage. It's the factory of dreams! And he stands there, looking at the future promises of action, adventure, horror and romance trying to make up his mind what dream is to come true this weekend for just $1.

Thus, our Little Weekend Warrior goes to the box office and drops his $1 bill and a movie ticket come back to him. He goes inside where there is an impregnated smell of popcorn on the old, rotting carpet; where flashing lights invite him to pop quarters on the arcade machines and pictures of old black and white celluloid heroes hang from the walls. He pops in 3 quarters trying to beat Galaga's high score and maybe one last quarter to the claw machine hoping to win some kind of surprise held in a plastic bubble.

Finally he goes to the candy store, where he buys a box of Milk Duds and large Cherry Coke before he nonchalantly walks towards the old man who is sleeping yet as soon as someone comes close to him with ticket in hand, like clockwork, he wakes up, smiles with his crooked and yellowing teeth before he cuts the movie ticket in half; he points out your theater number and that you should keep your half in case you have to go out to the restroom.

He moves towards his theater, and then looks back to see if the old man is looking. Lo and behold, the old man is sleeping again. Silently, the way Sam Fisher likes it, he goes past the theater number his ticket says he should go in and moves towards that prohibited movie. And he sits. And he enjoys and marvels at the magic that happens right there, in front of him. All the make up, prosthetic faces, the blood, the gore, the gratitous nudity and maybe, just maybe, he will learn something about human sexuality which he will share with his street buddies.

He smiles.

In the back of the almost empty theater sits a couple who are too young to afford a motel but old enough to discover their bodies. Somewhere over there is a horror movie buff half enjoying the movie half criticizing it. There's an old lady who went there not knowing what the movie was about and who leaves the theater half-way through the film. A group of friends sit having joking, throwing popcorn and making fun of the movie. But to our Little Weekend Warrior... it's all magic.

Magic happening before his eyes. His eyes swallowing all those images inciting him to dream. To smile.

You see, amidst the blockbusters and CGI effects and all the hype and the media we have forgotten what it was like to be taken away by movies. We forgot the mysticism behind the actors, the stories and the images that are laid out in front of us. We have forgotten what it was like when we went to the Mom and Pop's Dollar Theater with second run, grindhouse, unrated, artistic movies; being a friend of the janitor who would sneak you from theater to theater and sometimes to the projection boot where he would let you cut a frame of magic from the print. We have forgotten how much of our first sexual knowledge came from looking at grown-up movies and the art of popcorn wars and where the Montauk Monster is real.

And so I enjoyed The Midnight Meat Train in more, mystical ways than one. At one point I was going to complain that there was a small shadow covering a very, small part of the film on the bottom right corner. Yet I thought: "You cheap bastard! You paid $1 to see this movie. ONE BUCK!!! Shut up, sit down, munch popcorn and enjoy it!"

And so I did.

There's also another kind of dollar experience that has to do with lap dances and g-strings, but our little weekend warrior would probably not be allowed to go in. Much less so with just five $1 bills.