Well, you can hardly blame her with a name like that…
When I went to see Star Wars: Revenge of the Sith in a packed theater during the last 20 minutes the house lights came fully on like the movie was already over and stayed on for the rest of the showing. You could see see the screen fine however so nobody seemed to mind.
When I went to see Jackass The Movie in the same theater years later all the trailers were suspiciously for Disney films so imagine the packed theaters surprised when some Disney movie came on instead of guys getting kicked in the nuts. Then we find out the theater showing the Disney movie had gotten the Jackass film reels, R rated trailers and all. Literally had to have the whole audiences swap theaters when the managers had a bunch of angry parents storm into the lobby after watching the first 5 minutes of Jackass. Also the jerks didn’t even rewind the movie so I never saw the first five minutes I paid for, they just resumed where the projector stopped at.
My own cell phone annoyance story:
A few years back I was in Manchester, killing time before my flight home early in the morning. My bus to the airport left at maybe 03:30, so I decided to skimp on a hotel and spend the night watching movies in a cinema. The last film started around midnight—it was A Quiet Place, which I knew almost nothing about. It played in a huge auditorium. When I entered, I was the only member of the audience. I decided to sit way up high, a three or four rows from the back. After the previews, I was joined by one other customer, a woman who looked to be in her early twenties. Out of the thousands of seats, she decided to sit in the row behind me, a few seats to my right.
So the two of us started watching the film, alone in the spooky, dark, cavernous theatre. The movie turned out to be a suspenseful, post-apocalyptic horror story about monsters who hunt based on sound alone, so the few remaining humans in the world have to be very, very quiet at all times. So quiet, in fact, that my companion figured that it was the perfect opportunity to whip out her cell phone and place a call to a friend. She gabbed and gabbed, even as I turned around several times to glare at her. Eventually I stood up, turned around, and told her to shut the damn thing off or I would get the staff to throw her out. (I really didn’t want to do that, as I was enjoying the movie and didn’t relish a trip all the way downstairs to track down and plead my case to one of the few remaining employees.) The woman didn’t stop talking but stared at me hatefully for a while, as if I was encroaching on her God-given rights to ruin the viewing experience for a full 100% of the other guests. Eventually she got up, climbed down the stairs, and took a seat in the middle of the auditorium. She continued to gab on her phone, but she was far enough away that I decided I could suffer through the rest of the movie.
Are all movie projectors capable of rewinding? I mean, I suppose some of them might be, but I can imagine that others might not have that capability. (Maybe the projector runs only in one direction, and they use a different machine to rewind the reel. Or maybe they have some single-reel arrangement like eight-track cassettes, where the tape loops back on itself.)
The worst? I guess it would be the theater overseas that had low hygienic standards. Usually it was no big deal; you expected that. But watching a movie, I have no idea what it was, and seeing a rat silhouetted against the bottom of the screen as it ran across the floor of the stage.
Rats on that island were HUGE!
The weirdest was when Mr. CelticKnot and I were courting. We went to see Twister. The first scene shows our leading lady as a child when a tornado struck the family farm. Everyone has to go to the shelter, people are yelling, the wind is tearing everything up, tragedy…
The film ran, the dramatic music played, but there was no sound effects or dialogue. They stopped the movie, apologized, fixed it, and continued playing from that point. We’ve seen the movie many times, and I feel like that scene was more dramatic and scarier with just music.
Before the death of film, most theaters used a platter system, and those are one way.
Everything on the payout side is controlled by a $9 microswitch, which will fail at the most inconvenient time possible, with either a knot of film causing a burn/break, or it gets stuck in over drive and tosses a mile of film on the booth floor. It got even better toward the end of film when the film stock was replaced with mylar–if you got a head wrap it would pull the platter and the projector over–so some enterprising boffin devised a mini guillotine device to chop the film it things went pear shaped.
Wrong movie story, (not mine, (thankyouverymuch)
Substitute projectionist, Life and Times of Grizzly Adams, three deck platter. (think one payout, one rewind and one spare for another print). Nothing labeled. Short movie, so he picked the smaller of the two prints, laces up and runs it down. Looks in theater, filled with kids. Just as he was about to mash the start button, he reads the image of the beginning of the film. “Pagan Rome, 79AD.”
Yup, he was about to start “Caligula”:smack:
Somewhere in an alternate universe someone is talking about their worst movie experience; the time some jerk wouldn’t turn their phone off.
Master Wang-Ka, you made my day with that story! 
Just out of high school, went to see The Groove Tube on a blind date. Most of the movie was cringe-inducing for my still 17yo self sitting next to a rare date that I’d just met but then came “Mr. VD” (sanitized in the referenced link as Safety Sam), a close-up of male genitals filmed upside down discussing the hazards of STDs. The shot started as a close-up of two google-eyes and zoomed out to see the full member.
Fortunately, this was a double-date with the friend who arranged the event and selected the movie so I was not seen as the perv who wanted to show my date larger-than-life male junk.
That film opens with a couple running through a park stripping and eventually nude. But that scene embarrassed you? 
The first date I went on with my ex-husband, we saw Natural Born Killers. It was a pretty intense experience for two people who didn’t know each other very well at the time. I don’t think we said a word to each other all the way home.
Made it through that OK but things definitely went off the rails with the Uranus Corporation commercials featuring Brown 25
I had a first date at NBKs too. After the film I wanted to discuss it but she didnt. There wasnt a second date. :o
No horrible expereinces, walked out of Cayote Ugly and Showtime.
The two most cringworthy films I saw were Basic Instinct as an early teen, with my parents. And on a first date, a young, shy Sitnam took a quiet shy girl to see Sleepers, which I still really like, but the theme was far from romance or at least horror so the girl could snuggle up to me.
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In college I finally got a girl I was crazy about to go out with me one Friday night. I chose to take her to a showing of the 1927 movie Napoleon at the campus theater. This was a four-hour, black & white silent movie. I guess I was trying to be sophisticated and arty, but we both fell asleep and left in the third hour. I didn’t get a second date.
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In 2007 I was at Gitmo doing research about the detainees and their treatment. My host was a lieutenant colonel who was quite friendly. He took me to a movie at the outdoor theater on the base. The movie started and I saw that it was the recent release Rendition, about CIA agents kidnapping people and taking them to secret places to be interrogated and tortured. I laughed and said to my host, “Wow, can’t beleive you’re showing that here!” He looked at me sternly, and said, “Why?” It was awkward the rest of the evening.
Anticipated for years seeing The Phantom Menace when it came out. Didn’t immediately rush out to see it after everyone said how bad it was.
Then a few weeks later a friend and I had the day off in the middle of the week with nothing to do and it was pouring rain. Figured “how bad could it be” and went to see a matinee. Friend couldn’t stand it and went out to the lobby to re-access after the first half hour. I joined him and we would have left but it was still pouring rain. So we sat through the rest of the miserable movie depressed on how Lucas misfired on something that seemed to be a sure thing.
Back in HS, I worked up the nerve to ask a girl out to senior prom as our first date, she said yes, and things progressed to the point where many years later, we ended up married (and still are).
It was a couple of years in to the relationship when she mentioned that another mutual HS friend of ours had asked her out before I had.
“What, also to the prom? And you turned him down, obviously.”
“No, it wasn’t to the prom, and I didn’t turn him down. He asked if I would go to a movie with him.”
“You went on on a movie date with <x>?”
“I didn’t say that, either. He asked if I would go to see a movie with him, and I said ‘OK, what movie?’ He said, ‘Fatal Attraction.’ I thought that’d be weird to see on a first date, so I said, ‘Um, no, not that one.’ And he just walked away.”
Thanks, <X>, if you weren’t such a butthead I might have ended up with some other woman!
(…Thanks?) LOLOL
I can’t remember any seriously terrible movie experiences, but I did walk out on Rollerball because it was so boring.
And I love Gosford Park. So much going on, but so much not being said. Funny, sad, and intriguing. But I like calm movies. I hate movies with a lot of noise and shouting and car chases. That’s boring to me.
I think Pennies from Heaven is the only movie I ever walked out on.
I would have walked out on Barry Lyndon but I was with some friends and it would have been rude. So I had to sit through that whole interminable snoozefest.
I saw that movie with my ex-husband. It was, for the most part, truly boring. But the scene of the funeral procession of the little boy, with his casket borne on the goat cart he loved to drive, really got to me. You’d seen him pleading with his parents to stop fighting, then the was the procession with the music welling up. I turned by head and started bawling on my husband’s shoulder. To this day it remains one of only two movies I’ve ever flat out sobbed at.
Shyamalan’s Signs on opening day. I had liked Sixth Sense and Unbreakable just fine and I was with four friends who wanted to see it. We got there a little late and the place was absolutely packed. The only place with any seats left was the very front and me and two of my friends ended up in the very first row, near the edge.
It was a pretty poorly designed megaplex and from where we were sitting I had to crane my neck back to see the whole screen for the entire film. Plus they had turned the volume up to 11 and we were right by a speaker - the normal spoken dialogue was LOUD and every dramatic moment was ear-splitting. To top it all off the film was absolute dogshit( IMHO ).
I walked out pissed off with my ears ringing for the rest of the evening and a painful crick in my neck that lingered for a couple of days. Absolutely crap experience all the way around.