Here in Austin, we treasure our movie-going experience like pirates treasure booty, so it's only fitting that the best non-Alamo theater in town is the Highland Galaxy on Middle Fiskville Road, just behind funktastic ghetto-grotto Highland Mall. The Highland was one of the first chain theaters in the country to install Texas Instruments eye-poppingly crystal-clear DLP optical semiconductor projection technology -- we caught both 3-D screenings of
Coraline and
My Bloody Valentine 3-D there and we're still reeling from the optacular awesomeness of it all -- and now the Highland has announced another bold move into uncharted theatrical ballyhoo territory.
That would be the pending installation of a row of
D-Box theater seats slated to coincide with this weekend's opening of
McG's
Terminator: Salvation. Despite the virtually unmarketable name,
D-Box Motion Mode® technology, which utilizes either hydraulics or very small Teamsters to literally shake, rattle, and roll audience members all over the the place, sounds like a swell idea to us, or, at the very least, a great way to get your date to latch onto you once the lights go down and those seats start a'rockin'.
That said, it's hardly a new idea. Similar kinetic gambits to lure dwindling audiences into theaters have been a staple of theatrical and economic downturns at least since
William Castle hot-wired theatergoers butts for
The Tingler way back in 1959. Ditto that for
Irwin Allen's 1974 suckbuster
Earthquake, which used a patented process called
Sensurround® to rattle and hum viewers right into
Marjoe Gortner's head. Ick! (It should be noted here that the Alamo Drafthouse has in the past replicated
both of these bombastic ballyhoo strategies to better effect than even the original innovators managed.)
There is, naturally, a potential downside to all this. While D-Boxing may indeed provide a fun new way for young, attention deficit destroyed gameboys (and girls) to feel like they're part of the action on-screen, we're going to bet that it's not recommended for
all movies. We've done some serious thinking on the matter, in fact, and compiled a short list of five films (and there are plenty more where these came from) that we'd never, ever want to see utilizing this new, improved rump-shakin' and mind-blowing technology. Because, you know, that's what we do. We blow minds for a living. Like D-Box Technologies, yo. Check it: