10 Movies That Used Insane Gimmicks To Get Attention

The ads for the 1960 movie Scent of Mystery, about a vacationing man who stumbles upon a murder plot, really played up the Smell-O-Vision angle, to the point that the tagline reads, "First they moved! Then they talked! Now they smell!" Does it really sound enticing that the characters in this movie are going to smell? 

There was a lot of hype for the new technology, but it just wasn't ready yet, and so screenings were full of technical problems. For one, every time a smell was released into the theatre, there was an annoying, loud hissing noise, not exactly an ideal sound to constantly be hearing during a movie. Many of the smells also wouldn't actually reach people until it was too late to be effective, while some viewers just barely smelt anything at all. Theatres tried to fix the issues for later screenings, but there was so much bad press that it was too late. The movie bombed, and the studio wasted a whole lot of time and money on it.

They later retitled the movie Holiday in Spain and released it as a normal film, but that just made things worse because now there was no reason for all the scenes that clearly only existed for the smells. Today, it unfortunately isn't really worth watching: it was a movie built around a gimmick, and when that failed, there was really nothing left.