REEL LIFE / FILM & VIDEO FILE : Theater Complex Will Bring Movies Back to Santa Paula : Young people welcome the opportunity to see first-run flicks close to home, and the business community thinks more people will stick around.

The opening of Santa Paula 7 Theaters on Friday marks the first time in about 15 years that Santa Paula residents will be able to see first-run movies without leaving their own ZIP code.

“We used to have a Fox theater,” said restaurant owner and Chamber of Commerce President Dan Diaz. “That closed at least 20 years ago. And there was a drive-in, but that stopped about 15 years ago.”

Diaz sees the theater as a plus for business. “From my standpoint as a restaurant owner,” he said, “it will keep people in town for dinner.”

Kids also can’t wait for the new theater. “This is going to be really great,” said Dolores Fernandez, a 15-year-old movie fan. “It’s hard for us because we don’t really have any place to go. I can’t ask my parents or my brother to drive me all the way to Ventura when I want to go out for a movie with my friends.”

Wallace Theaters opens its new complex, which is at 550 Main St. in the Santa Paula Shopping Center, with “Rob Roy,” “Jury Duty,” “Outbreak,” “Major Payne,” “Pebble and the Penguin,” “Dolores Claiborne,” “Tommy Boy” and “Bad Boys.”

Call 933-6707 for times.

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With Easter coming up, Reel Life is offering a timely video suggestion.

If you can’t bear another viewing of “Easter Parade,” the 1948 musical with Fred Astaire and Judy Garland, there is an alternative, albeit an offbeat one.

“The Being” is a 1983 film that briefly screened as “Easter Sunday” before its creators decided to change the name rather than risk offending churchgoers.

It’s a horror/mystery set during the Easter season in a small Idaho town where people are disappearing. Suspicion quickly falls on the nuclear dump outside town, and the movie soon turns into “Nuclear Swamp Thing.”

David Nay, co-owner of Carmen Video in Camarillo, said that if you want to rent it, there’s a pretty good chance it will be on his shelf.

“It rents about six times a year,” Nay said. If it weren’t for girls between the ages of 13 and 19 (the prime audience for horror pictures) it probably wouldn’t rent at all, he said.

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Santa Barbara’s Riviera Theater, the closest place for many county filmgoers to see first-run foreign films, recently installed a Dolby sound system.

Manager Terry Boyle said the 60-year-old theater had a reputation for lousy sound. So the owners took a 6-year-old system from another theater and plopped it into the Riviera.

“We waited so long to upgrade because many of the foreign films weren’t recorded in Dolby, but now almost all of them are,” Boyle said. “Every screening we have at least two or three people tell us how much they like the new sound.”