WHEN the final credits rolled at Bournemouth’s Westover Road Odeon, it was especially poignant for one couple – because it’s the place they met.

Andy and Sue Willis hit it off during a double bill of The Howling and Death Sport in June 1981.

And Sue recalls that when a long-haired young man approached her in the back row, he reminded her of a werewolf from the film they’d been watching.

Both had gone to the cinema – then called the Gaumont – on the way home from work one Monday night.

They both rode motorcycles at the time and got talking after Andy, then 19, spotted that 18-year-old Sue had a helmet on the seat next to her.

“There were maybe half a dozen people in there at the time,” said Andy.

“I said ‘Do you mind if I sit next to you?’ and it went from there.”

Sue said: “I had already seen part of one of the films and he came in later. I just saw this hairy bloke gradually work his way along the back row.”

She added: “He looked like the werewolf that was in the film.”

They chatted in the back row and Sue gave Andy her phone number.

“There weren’t that many people there. We had to get a pen off somebody else because we didn’t have one,” said Sue.

Andy had gone to the big Gaumont 1 screen on the way home from his job with newspaper and magazine wholesaler Thunder and Claydon, while Sue was working as an audio typist with Lloyds Bank Trust.

“We both used to go to the cinema after we finished work,” said Andy.

“We may have been in the same cinema before.”

The pair were married on August 7, 1982, at Longham United Reformed Church, and continued to go to the Gaumont together.

They have raised two sons, now 30 and 27, and live in Foxholes Road, Oakdale.

The 88-year-old cinema on Westover Road closed last Thursday to make way for a new Odeon multiplex nearby in the BH2 leisure development. The cinema has been bought by a developer with plans to turn it into shops and flats.

Andy said they were sad to see it go. “We couldn’t believe it when they were going to shut the cinema and open this new Odeon,” he said.