Five Star Cinemas - Red Hill

Wow what an experience coming to Red Hill Cinema today! Firstly we tried to pay for food with cash but was told that you don’t take cash! We had never been to your cinema before so didn’t know that! Secondly your disabled access was challenging to say the least. The elevator was quite difficult to work and I certainly couldn’t just use it myself like a normal elevator but my husband had to go up and down the stairs and with a bit of fiddling was able to get me to the top. A usher was kind enough to ask some people to move to accommodate my wheelchair access, but they refused and your usher rightly pointed out that a wheelchair would block access anyway and it wouldn’t be appropriate to have it in the isle. But your usher did manage to humiliate me by pointing to an old chair in the corner at the back of the cinema that I could choose to sit in or I had the option of just sitting in my wheelchair the whole time during Wallace and Gromit! I am not sure if you understand how humiliating it is to not only have a degenerative condition where you struggle to even speak some days, where you are unable to walk unassisted and where you can’t get through a normal day without help even to get dressed. But being provided with that chair in the corner certainly was up there with humiliation. It is like you don’t feel important enough to even get the minimum of what a normal person gets at the cinema. I will admit that my husband was pretty angry and did take a snap of the people who wouldn’t move from the disabled seats, but I can assure you that he did delete the snaps and I did ask him to take me home as I was starting to cry. Your usher did again handle himself remarkably well when he yelled at my husband and stated that he doesn’t need this hassle on Boxing Day (paraphrasing), as did the selfish angry older woman who couldn’t move up to accommodate me! I didn’t get to watch Wallace and Gromit, I didn’t get to drink the lemonade we purchased or eat the chips we ordered. I think the whole humiliating exercise Cost us around $75 (which was a Christmas present from my mother in law) took me around an hour to stop crying. I keep picturing the crappy chair in the corner that was just pointed at by the usher to be my seat! Thank you Red Hill! It was just another day where I was made to feel like my existence in society was just an inconvenience to everyone involved.