Movies that will blow your nose

Press, 12 August 1982, Page 16

Movies that will blow your nose

Bj

in Sydney

Back in the fifties the film producer, Mike Todd, launched a process called Smellovision, where suitable odours were released into the theatre to accompany scenes in his movie, Scent of Fear.

The system bombed, and the film was released without it. One critic said that even on its own the film stank.

Well, the Smellies are back in Sydney, courtesy of the Valhalla, an arts cinema in the suburb of Glebe. Their first venture earlier in the year was Garlic is as Good as Ten Mothers, made by the eccentric American film maker, Les Blank. ■ Pungent,. garlic smells waffed around the theatre as cinema staff held pans of hot

ROSALEEN McCARROLL

garlic fried in claret and oil beneath the screen, and fanned the fumes past, quivering nostrils. It was premiered to a host of garlic lovers who were offered chocolate-covered garlic cloves during intermission, along with an avalanche of garlic folklore such as, “Eleanor Roosevelt had a passion for garlic chocolate.”

But the hype and the pong were not enough to keep audiences coming. The film went up in a whiff of garlic fumes, only one week after it opened.

As the cinema manager explained, the garlic movie was a serious, 51-minute documentary which did not work as a gimmick. Polyester — the latest offering on the Smellovision/ odorama/aromarama circuit,

is nothiing if not gimmicky. Produced by John Waters, described by the cinema manager as the supreme master of the ultra-tacky, it stars a 3001 b transvestite by the name of Divine. Divine’s home life is a grotesque parody of the television family show, with a husband in child pbrnogra-

phy, a daughter pregnant by a punk gangster, and a son classified as criminally insane after he is unmasked as the Baltimore Foot Stomper. Her home is vandalised by police, her daughter is kidnapped by sadistic nuns, and her hubby runs off with an underclad secretary. Divine hits the bottle.

While all this is happening you are instructed to sniff the card provided. When a number flashes up on the screen, you scratch one of the 10 numbers on the card to get a scent of roses, a whiff of petrol, rented sandshoes, stale pizzas, or even, to use an American euphemism, a “pass gas”. Polyester has settled in for a six-week season, so it seems “pass-gases” and stale pizzas have beaten garlic by more than a nose.