80's Kid's Movies that Freaked Kid's Out.

There are some movies that came out made for children that were, for all intents and purposes, scary as shit for kids. I was born in the early eighties, and grew up on movies back when they were awesome, back when they were still thinking of good ideas and before they invented the term "reboot" or "prequel". I loved a lot of movies, but some of them were… kind of creepy for kids, and yet they were catered towards people as old as my five-year-old daughter. I watch these movies now, and many of them are still as awesome as they were when I was a kid, but I remember certain things freaking me out about them when I was the "targeted audience" age.

Return to Oz is a great movie, with a talking Jack O' Lantern, a fat robot, and Fairuza Balk before she became a white trash witch and the Waterboy's love interest.

That smile kind of creeps me out.

But the movie has some really dark and creepy parts. What about the witch Mombie and the decapitated heads she keeps in glass cabinets? She takes off one head and switches it with another, and there's nothing comedic about it. Then there is the scene where the Gnome king gets a poison chicken egg dropped down his throat and he turns into a rock skeleton and rots away.

Which is pretty gruesome when only a minute ago he looked like this:

The Neverending story was AWESOME when I was a kid. A magic book that got you out of math class, luck dragons, rock biters, giant, wise turtles that sneeze every other minute while deciding whether or not to be a pain in the ass. Oh, yeah, and don't forget the creepy statues with nude female breasts that shoot lasers from their eyes and the gianormous wolf creature that wants to tear you to shreds.

This is a kid's movie. Cover up.

Gmork, the enemy, is a wolf who literally says he will tear Atreyu, the hero, to shreds. For a kid, the creature is pretty scary, and when he lunges forward from his cave, you see that he is excessively larger than Atreyu. It's like a six-year-old kid watching a full size tiger lunge towards him, claws out, ready to eat some human meat.

That's not zoomed in. His head is twice the size of yours.

 The Secret of NIMH was an kid's movie, but some parts of it I didn't get until I rewatched it as an adult. There are so many reference to adult themes that kids would be confused or disturbed about. I'm not talking about sex (like Shrek). No, more like death and murder, over and over. The kid's father died in a rescue mission against the evil experimental corporation that made lab rats smarter. The rats drugged the farmer's house cat on a regular basis, something I had to question my parents about when I watched the movie. Even worse was the Great Owl, who offered advice, but decided whether or not to eat those he gave advice to.

With his creepy-ass demon eyes.

And then there's Legend:

No explanation needed

Time Travel - The Unfortunate Impossibility

So time travel – and interesting concept, somewhat amazing idea, and all around badass idea to think of what the possibilities would be if only the technology were that far ahead. Unfortunately, it can never happen.

You make a mistake, sometimes you wish, "oh, if only I could go back in time and undo that." You miss an opportunity, you think "Oh, if only I could go back and time and change that decision." What if you could go back in time and buy the winning lottery ticket? Go buy stock in Apple before they built the iPod? First off, if the technology were to be invented, don't you think everybody would be doing that? If everybody won the lottery, then nobody wins.

Jim Carrey learned that playing God

Getting off topic here. Where was I? Oh yeah, time travel. Sounds like fun to play around with, if it were possible then everybody would do it, yeah, yeah. The truth behind it was actually answered in what I think was one of the most ingenious movies ever made. It didn't do too well in the box office, and it is a remake, something that Hollywood has done waaaay too much of, but this was one movie that improved over its predecessor in some ways. That movie… The Time Machine.

The movie based on the movie based on the book that popularized the idea of time travel, and yet from everything I have seen, it is the only movie that seems to put its finger directly on the reason behind why time travel is a flawed concept. In this movie, however, they answer a different question, which is essentially the same: Why can't I change the past?

The movie's not going to ask "Why is time travel impossible?" because then we'd have no movie. But the core concept behind the answer to its core question is an answer to why you can't time travel. For clarification, let me give a little background on the film – on this film, not the original story or the movie from 1960 with mutated smurfs.

They look hungry for Smurfberries.

The original story is about a time traveler, whose name isn't given in the book, who has adventures and gets to see the far, far future just because he thinks it's awesome. But like I mentioned in my earlier post, everybody has to have a damn back story, and this movie was no exception. They decided to give the time traveler a reason to go back in time, and what more of a reason than love, of course, because you can't even have a time traveling movie without a romance subplot.

Nothing but good old hard core sci-fi action.

In the new Time Machine, his fiancé is murdered, he goes back in time to save her, and the space/time continuum didn't like him doing that, and she's dies again a different way. He decides to go to the future to find out why he can't save her, why she would keep dying no matter how hard he tried to change it. Finally, he gets his answer from this movies version of the blue-smurf monster Morlocks.

"I killed Mufasa."

He gives the answer that the protagonist has been looking for, and the basis behind this article I am writing now. By going back in time to change the past, he changed the reason for going back in time in the first place. Her death was the motivation that caused him to build the time machine. If she had lived, he wouldn't have built it, and therefore couldn't have gone back to save her. BOOM! Paradoxes are an impossibility.

You can't just do something like they did in Back to the Future where he had to get his parents back together or he wouldn't exist, because what if he had failed, and his parents never got together? He disappears from existence then. So if he never existed, who the hell went back in time and screwed everything up in the first place? The whole premise behind the movie is impossible. Essentially, every movie with the exception of one that has to do with time travel is total bullshit. That one movie… none other than Terminator.

A movie that officially made Arnold the badass of the 80's.

In these movies, the machines were stupid enough to not realize that from doing what they are doing, they are actually causing events to happen in the first place. They didn't realize that by going back in time to eliminate John Conner, they would eliminate the reason to go back in time, therefore they would not have gone back in time in the first place. Paradox. But this movie fixes all that, because it essentially proves that you can't have a paradox. Things happen a certain way, and you can't change those events no matter how hard you want to. In Terminator, you have two things go back in time – the robot, and a human named Kyle Reese. Lets start with the first one.

The robot chases after Sarah Conner, giving her a heads up to what is coming in the future, and therefore telling her to be prepared. She passes this knowledge on to her son by training him his whole life to become the savior to mankind. If she hadn't done that, John Conner would have never become the threat to the robots, and if the terminator hadn't tried to kill Sarah, she never would have trained John. They ultimately created their enemy by trying to kill him. Not only is this, at the end of the first movie, the robot is crushed. You find out in the sequel that the robot arm that was not destroyed was used to create the technology that developed Skynet. So not only did they create their own worst enemy, but they created themselves (interesting detail, nobody actually developed the technology. It came from nowhere). So this movie is the exact opposite of a paradox. They do not cause things to not happen that would jeopardize their own future, but by their own actions, they create their exact future. And this is the only way that time travel would work or make sense.

And of course you have Kyle Reese, John's father. If he didn't go back in time to impregnate Sarah Conner, then there would be no John Conner.

If you're reading this and you want to argue about the rules of time travel established in that movie (the liquid metal terminators technically violate the rules established in the original film), that's not the point I'm trying to make. Everything after Terminator 2 goes against, this, because by altering the timeline, you alter the events that led to John Conner's conception and to Skynet's inception. The point I'm trying to get across is that time travel is impossible. There is no possibility that you could go back in time and change the events that led up to you going back in time in the first place. One event negates the other. It cancels itself out. Sure you could do something else that would not have that specific effect, but the very fact that time travel would make that action possible makes time travel impossible.

Anyways, does anybody actually read my blog? If you do, leave a comment, or comment on Facebook or Twitter and give me some feedback.

If you don't like superhero movies, Hollywood's gonna make you like 'em.

So I've been in a different state for this week, trying to think of what to write for this blog and come up with jack shit. Has anybody watched the new Daredevil series yet? The one on Netflix trying to reboot Ben Affleck's film, which wasn't horrible (bad, but not Hulk bad), except it vomited out this travesty:

They really got to stop doing that, providing the public with movies starring an actress dressed in skimpy clothes ready to kick some ass. It would be one thing if the movies were rated R, then the production companies would be sure to gain attendance at the movies for the possible chance to get a look at the title character naked.

Wrong film. Try Swordfish or Monster's Ball.

It just got me to thinking how bad they want everybody to love comic book movies (or shows now). The production companies are practically trying to force it on us, and if we don't like what they give us, they try again. I just mentioned Hulk, and that's a prime example. Ang Lee tried and failed (what would you expect from the guy who gave us Brokeback Mountain), everybody noted that the movie sucked, so a few years later, they tried again with Edward Norton, and in my opinion, they succeeded.

Fantastic Four, the first one, could have been better, but then part 2 came out, and when something that is supposed to be a hardcore action superhero movie gets the same rating as Madagascer and Despicable Me, you know they did something wrong. Now they got a new version coming out this summer, rebooting the franchise once again.

I hear they are talking about rebooting Blade. Marvel has plans on making films for the next 20 years or so. So does DC, trying to get a piece of the action. I wouldn't be surprised if Elektra gets her own reboot (I hear she isn't in the new series, but I'm only on episode 3).

Either way, reboots are happening. If nobody likes Ant Man when it comes out, they'll try again, and again, until we accept it.

Why does everybody have to have a back story?

Was watching the Halloween reboot movie the other day, and while it is interesting to show Michael Myers with a horrible white-trash hillbilly family as the reason for his snapping and turning to a serial killer, I remembered when I was a kid and I saw the original Halloween (It was on TV and the whole "see anything you like" scene was edited out. Kind of a bummer for a preteen boy with crazy puberty hormones). That movie was great because there is no reason for Michael Myers losing his sanity as a kid and killing his sister. He just snapped, his humanity just turned off like one of the vampires on Vampire Diaries (yeah, I watch the show. It's a guilty pleasure, and I have the excuse that my wife likes the show, so I can blame it on her), and he goes homicidal. It was the kind of show that makes you think, what if that just happened to anybody? He was a normal kid, and all of the sudden, he turned killer out of nowhere. Fans of the original didn't need a back story.

He wasn't like Jason Voorhees, where they explain his reason for killing in the first movie he appears in (its part II, for those who don't know). They have this chat at a bar talking about how Jason's mother sheltered him so closely and he was unable to tell the difference between right and wrong. No, Michael Myers was the ultimate killing machine. No remorse, no reason, he wasn't freaking human. He was a normal kid, then all of the sudden a button was randomly turned off like he was the freaking Terminator, and he became a killer. But it seems they are doing this more often with movie stories. They feel that the movie has to have an explanation. They have to give away all of the secrets, explain everything down to the nitty gritty. Look at Star Wars. The original trilogy – excellent. Then they did the shitty prequels. They had to explain how Vader turned evil, and they did it with three movies, excessive CGI, and Jar Jar Binks.

Misa gonna shit on your childhood memories

 But that's an old example. How about something more recent. There are, off the top of my head, three current TV series based on old movies that are there to explain the stories behind the stories. I'll start with the worst.

From Dusk 'til freaking Dawn. If you haven't seen it, watch it (the movie), but not the sequels because as anybody knows, sequels suck.

Except for you guys

In the movie, it started off as a crime/action flick. Two bank robbers, one of them losing his mind because he is a perverted sociopath, take a minister and his family hostage so they can escape to Mexico and avoid arrest. That is what the whole first half (or longer, I think) that the movie is about. They go to a strip club to meet some guy who is supposed to help them, and the next part of the movie is strippers all over the place. So far, nothing to suggest this as a horror film. Then, all of the sudden after Salma Hayek does a sexy stripper dance for Quentin Tarantino (who, by the way, wrote this film, and Robert Rodriguez directed), she suddenly turns into a vampire (well, a cobra-vampire, which is kind of weird). Either way, the rest of the movie is about fighting vampires and surviving the blood-sucking strippers.

Now the show, it tries to explain the reason the crazy bank-robbing brother is crazy. No, he can't just be a rapist sociopath, he has to be having visions coming from the crazy vampire/stripper bitches telling him to be a violent rapist sociopath. This stupid twist, which starts from the beginning of the series, ruins the purpose of the movie, which was to make you think Robert Rodriguez was making another movie like Desperado which was awesome and came out the year before, and then surprise you with the damn vampires. Seriously. Look at the movie poster that came out with the movie, and tell me this is a vampire flick.

Vampires... with guns.

Then we have Hannibal. 

Thomas Harris hates writing, and then he somehow wrote one of the most iconic horror villains known to man, and due to demand wrote three more novels, although he hated every second of it. While Hannibal is an excellent novel (my favorite right behind Salem's Lot), it was the one that started giving Hannibal a back story, and then Harris basically rewrote parts of Hannibal to give the story that anybody who actually read the book already knew.

"And did they really ever explain why Hannibal Lecter liked to eat people? Don't think so. You see, it's scarier when there's no motive, Sid." - good point, you psychos.

Finally, we have Bates Motel. 

Norman Bates was obsessed with his mother. She got married, and in jealousy (Oedipus complex, anyone?) he killed her and her husband, then lost his shit and his personality split so that he went batshit crazy and became both himself and his mother, who was now a homicidal maniac. But now we have this prequel series, to explain why Norman Bates went crazy, or basically say he was crazy the whole time. In the movies we are given the impression that his mother was so overbearing and insane that she drove her son to insanity. Now the series that seems to be trying to take the mother's side. Yeah, she is overbearing in the series, but Norman is already schitzo from the get-go. His obsession and insanity had nothing to do with his mother, and once again, this kind of ruins the original story.

As a final point, they are making a series of Scream instead of sticking to the original plan of making a new trilogy. And it may even have a supernatural twist .

Why, Wes Craven? Why?

Going too far and backing off (in writing)

So I wrote book two in my "Lycanthropy Journals" series a couple of years ago, finished the book in its entirety, and just sort of put it to the side. Never read over the rough draft, never reviewed it at all. It was just sitting there gathering digital dust on my computer. I guess I got distracted with writing "Whirlwind" (my paranormal romance book – yeah, I actually wrote one of those, and it's actually pretty damn good), and with finishing my Halloween anthology. So I have recently been going back, reading over the draft of this book and editing it, because I need to write book three (it’s a trilogy, damn it. They come in threes). I don't remember most of the story. As I read it, it all sort of comes back to me, still not completely sure how the events led up to the finale, but then I got to this one chapter, and I basically freeze. I have no problem with excessive violence and pushing the edges with shit, but I read this chapter, and I could not believe I went as far as I did with pushing the lines. Maybe I was just trying to be "edgy" with my writing, I don't know. But I read it, and I did not even remember ever writing it, and I was almost in shock at what I had written so long ago (I'm taking out the chapter, or at least deleting most of it),  and it made me think of when shows try to push the limits, and as a result they go too far.

The show Hannibal is pretty good, but my wife stopped watching it after a scene where a psychopath (or sociopath – I really need to learn the actual difference) who is obsessed with making his sister miserable, has some surgeons give his sister a hysterectomy when he finds out she is pregnant.

It makes you kind-of glad the guy got his face cut off.

I still watch The Walking Dead, but it almost went too far with the two girls (about ten years old). One of them was psychotic, and killed her younger sister to prove that zombies are still people, and Carol, who is one of the two truly bad-asses on the show (the other being Glenn, not Darrell, damn it), takes her in a field and shoots her in the head.

Don't fuck with Glenn.

And Shameless – well, if you're easily offended, don't watch Shameless – it's in the title.

I guess sometimes you can push the limits but sometimes it just turns people away. I thought it was pretty messed up when Anakin went in and killed a bunch of children who were Jedi-in-training in episode III of Star Wars, but they didn't show this in detail, they just told what happened. In my book, I was building up just how crazy this psychotic killer is, but I guess some things need to be left out, and just implied (maybe I'll leave the chapter for the unrated version or something), but it just shows how forgetful a person can be about something they write in the past. Also, sometimes you don't realize what you've written when you've been drinking a lot and have just watched some independent horror film on Netflix (or ABC's of Death - don't watch that shit).

Disney says Santa’s a dick

So I know it’s not anywhere near Christmas or anything but they have this movie called Mickey’s Once upon a Christmas, where there are a bunch of short Christmas stories compiled into one movie starring Mickey, Donald, Goofy, etc. There is one story entitled “A Very Goofy Christmas” starring Goofy and his son Max. The point of this particular story is that Max doesn’t believe in Santa, and Goofy is trying to make him believe.

They go to visit this family who is not doing too well financially, and the son is showing his toy he got last Christmas from Santa – a cheap, small toy car.

"Santa gave me this one last year, but this year I hope he's gonna give me another one."

This is the part where the story also seems to focus on another point – that Max is a selfish bastard (seriously – who the hell is his mom). You see, the entire story, Max goes on and on about how he wants this badass, expensive as shit snowboard. Even after he sees how other kids have to deal with much less than he has, he still keeps going on about his damn snowboard. When he thinks he finds the real Santa, he completely forgets about the kid with the cheap car toy (Hot Wheels cost a buck at Wal-Mart right now), and is fixated on his own selfish wants, going into detail about that damn snowboard.

Finally, after a bunch of stupid shit, Max finally discovers that Santa is, in fact, real. And he even gets the snowboard.

But wait a damn minute. The gift didn’t come from his parents, it came from Santa. This means that regardless of one’s parent’s financial situation, it shouldn’t make a difference when it comes to Christmas because these gifts are coming from Santa. So Santa deliberately gives selfish Max his expensive snowboard, while giving the poor kid his cheap as shit fucking car. So, according to Disney, Santa gives the poor kids cheap shit and gives the rich kids expensive shit. He prejudices himself against kids in different social classes or holding a certain wealth status. I’m half surprised they didn’t have Santa visiting black or Hispanic kids and giving them racially offensive gifts.

Consensus: According to Disney, Santa’s a dick – but if you’re rich, don’t worry. You’ll still get your expensive-ass snowboard and go back to not giving a shit about the poor kids you were hanging out with earlier.