PORTLAND, Ore. – Let’s say you’re in a dark theater, trying to extract your entire 9 bucks out of “Spider-Man 3,” and some dunderhead is jabbering into his cell phone a few seats away.

You could shush him (and good luck with that!). You could go to the lobby and tattle to a fresh-faced usher. Or … you could mute him with the push of a button on a remote control.

Regal Cinemas has begun offering handheld devices at many of its cineplexes, and while they won’t instantly stopper the talkative, they do allow moviegoers to report annoying behavior to the management surreptitiously.

The Regal Guest Response System is now in 114 cinemas nationwide and will eventually go into every Regal theater, said Chad Browning, national marketing manager.

The gadget, which alerts movie employees to problem behavior through a paging system, is the answer to Ashley Dietz’s movie-house prayers. Seriously. “All the times I wish I had something like this …” she said wistfully.

Dietz, 20, went to an early matinee of “Pirates of the Caribbean: At World’s End” at Portland’s Lloyd Center 10 on Wednesday specifically to avoid crowd noise. Would she rat out a fellow audience member for obnoxious behavior? “I’d definitely use it.”

Each pager has four glow-in-the-dark buttons: Sound. Picture. Piracy. Some other disturbance. One random audience member in each auditorium gets to play hall monitor.

Whether it’s a shrieking baby or Shrek’s belly out of focus, the pager alerts the manager, indicating the type of problem and specific auditorium.

“It says something about our social graces,” whispered 48-year-old John Ruchie, watching the coming attractions a few rows behind Dietz. “We’ve lost respect for each other somewhere along the way. Now we need something like this – putting spies in theaters to keep order.”

But 18-year-old Lily Lowell, who was also waiting to watch “Pirates,” likes the system’s anonymity. “My dad had to yell at someone at “Spirited Away,”‘ she said. “It was pretty embarrassing. I wish he could have just pushed a button.”