by Don Hall

The wonderfully modern age of digital streaming is sometimes overwhelming but mostly amazing.

I grew up before cable tv was widely available and Blockbuster was but a dream to be hatched so my early experience with film was simple: drop your cash and hope the movie wasn't a turd.

Today, I can start a film on Netflix or Hulu and, if it sucks, I can just turn it off. No muss, no fuss. I paid my subscription and can watch as many or little as I want. The cost of starting a late-stage Bruce Willis movie and slamming it shut after the first ten minutes is minimal. In fact, I can do that all night long.

After dunking a Tyrese Gibson movie (Rogue Hostage) a mere four minutes in, I thought about how many trips to the theater ended the same way but in person and at some expense. More so, how many of these experiences resulted in a request for a refund?

Prairie Home Companion (2006)

I hadn't yet started working for NPR in Chicago when this came out. I wasn't a fan of the radio program. In the 90's, my theater company wrote and performed a long-running parody of Golden Age radio called The Armageddon Radio Hour so the synopsis of this Garrison Keeler starring film seemed promising. It was directed by Robert Altman, a personal favorite, as well.

‌A private investigator (Kevin Kline) keeps tabs on the proceedings as guests, cast and crew (Meryl Streep, Lindsay Lohan, Woody Harrelson) of a long-running radio show prepare for the final broadcast. Their home, the Fitzgerald Theater, is due for demolition, and they await the arrival of the Texas axe-man (Tommy Lee Jones). Meanwhile, the show's creator and host (Garrison Keillor) conducts business as usual in the face of the show's impending demise.

I can't speak for that 81% critic approval because I was bored out of my mind within the first fifteen minutes or so. I was alone so I simply got up, walked to the box office and explained that this movie wasn't what I thought it was.

"What did you think it was?" asked the teenage attendant.

"More interesting than watching gasoline glint in the moonlight in a parking lot."

He refunded my cash and I bought a ticket to The Prestige which was far more interesting.

Andy Warhol's Dracula (1974)

Released in 1974, I didn't see the first twenty-five minutes of this thing until 1988 at an arthouse theater in Dallas. I was trying to impress this sexy goth chick I'd met during a jazz conference in town and so artsy, bloody, and weird seemed to be my red carpet to her black carpet.

‌Count Dracula has depleted all the virgin blood in Transylvania and is dying from lack of a fresh supply. And so he and his manservant Anton pack up coffin and move to Italy, hoping to find a virgin there. There they find the De Fiori family, titled but poor and hoping to find a rich man to marry one of their four daughters. Being seen as a desirable suitor, Dracula settles in to drink his fill. However, thanks to the belligerent Marxist hired hand Mario, the daughters are not the virgins he hoped to find.

She was solidly cute but the opening credits where the albinoid Udo Kier sits painting his face with makeup into normal fleshtone likeness and then paints his white hair black did not bode well. I made it a full 25 minutes of the 98-minute running time before the almost comically bad acting, poorly staged sex scenes, and strange accents made the potential sex unworthy of my time.

My date stayed.

Despite sitting through a third of it, the guy at the front desk refunded my cash. "Oh, you're not the only one with this thing."

The Adventures of Pluto Nash (2002)

‌"Pluto Nash" is an action comedy set on the moon in the year 2087, starring Eddie Murphy as the title character, an audacious nightclub owner who finds himself in hot water when he refuses to sell his club to the local mob. The lunar gangsters are helping the mysterious Rex Crater mastermind a plan to take over the moon.

Seven minutes. I lasted seven minutes before I decided "Nope. I have more life to live than waste a single second more on this heaping pile of shit." I did not get a refund because, even after seven minutes, the refund line was so long that night, I wasn't convinced to wait my turn.

To this day I maintain that Eddie Murphy owes me $12.

Atlas Shrugged: Part I (2011)

I hear you. "Why would you pay money to see this crap?"

Before I realized how bereft of human decency was Ayn Rand, I actually enjoyed Atlas Shrugged. "Who is John Galt?" and the story of Dagny Taggart and her search for the answer to a crumbling America, while a bit overwritten wasn't a bad read.

Years later as my political ideologies coalesced into a leftist perspective, I understood more clearly why this book had become so reviled by the left and lauded by the right. I still always wondered what a movie version would look like and had it cast in my head for some time.

The credits played and I lasted all of twelve minutes. It was just so fucking bad. Not the politics of it necessarily but the acting, the direction, the writing, the film quality, the music. This thing was drenched in suck. It was worse than the worst Tim Allen movie. It was shittier than the most drecked up Hallmark Special Movie of the Week about a mentally challenged kid and his imaginary friend.

When I went to the box office counter, I didn't even have to ask. The kid saw my face and simply handed me back my dough.

All four of these movies are available to stream. I might give ‌Andy Warhol's Dracula a second chance.

And Eddie Murphy owes me $12.