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Films Your Parents Should Not Have Let You Watch

Watership Down scared the shite out of me too. I swear I still see BigWig in my nightmares, blood pouring from his nose and ears while he slowly strangles in a snare. Or the scene where Fiver sees blood pouring over the meadows while the rabbits all start getting shot and gassed. And this a kids movie! :shock:

I used to babysit for a girl about 11 years old whose parents would let her watch Rocky Horror. It was always REALLY awkward for me to watch it with her. Shadows of people going down on each other are not much harder to interpret than actually showing it. :oops:
 
CarlosTheDJ said:
I remember watching a film on the telly called something like "The Boy In The Bubble", about a kid who (I'm guessing) had some kind of immune system disease.
He lived in this plastic bubble thing to protect him I spose...the only bit of it I remember is a horse jumping over the bubble and hitting it with a hoof.

Anyway.....I was terrified for months that I would get whatever he had.
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That'll be "The Boy In The Plastic Bubble" starring a pre-Saturday Night Fever John Travolta in the aforementioned bubble.
 
JamesWhitehead said:
On its first transmission, I Claudius had some vile images of Caligula's excesses, which were excised from all prints afterwards and are not contained in any video versions.
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Really? What did they cut out? The last time I saw it repeated it was as I remembered from the original. However, given my memory, that's not saying much.
 
The DVD Talk site has an exhaustive toga-headed discussion about the I Claudius footage that was snipped after viewer complaints and lost from the masters. It is true to say that some believe the story to be a case of false memory syndrome.

At this date, I can't say for sure whether I even saw the episode in question. But somehow I feel I did and shouldn't have! :)
 
I saw the I Claudius 1980s repeats and certainly saw one of Caligula's, erm, unusual parenting techniques. But that was of course the repeat, as I was possibly to young to watch the first showings.
 
Oh yeah, and Richard Adams was apparently inspired by Agamemnon to have Fiver say 'the hills are covered with blood'.
 
My parents never let me watch anything scary at all when I was a kid.
Now I'm making up for it. :)
 
I was too much of a feartie to watch anything grown-up-scary, so I saw hardly anything for adults. Even the odd clip of American Werewolf in London on Film Buff of the Year or the trailer for Artemis 81 was too much for me.
 
I watched all the Hammer horror movies when I was a kid, and it taught me both the difference between reality and special effects, and how the effects were done. The only downside now is that I can't watch a movie properly without thinking about the effects. Unless it's a realistic documentary style violent flick, it just looks like a lot of clever prosthetics and CGI etc. I won't watch anything with Clint Eastwood or Donald Sutherland in it anymore, not because they scared me, but because I learned that everything they are in is shit. *Apart from Eastwood's spaghetti westerns, of course!* (Anyone remember that sickly odd movie with Sutherland in it where their kid, dressed in a red hooded coat as killed and he saw her in Venice? Puke!) See also Day of the Locust and Body Snatchers.
 
spellbound said:
(Anyone remember that sickly odd movie with Sutherland in it where their kid, dressed in a red hooded coat as killed and he saw her in Venice? Puke!)
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Um, would that be the all time classic Don't Look Now? Day of the Locust isn't a patch on the book, but the ending is incredible in its bile. The Body Snatchers remake is probably great too, but I find it far too depressing (although the "Amazing Grace" scene is a little masterpiece of thwarted hope).

I would stay up and watch the late night movie on the portable TV, but I don't remember anything scaring me. I do remember seeing trailers for scary movies, though, which gave me a small taste of terror, stuff like The Evil Dead (the trailer for that was the last shot of the film, I found out years later!) or Phantasm (with the flying balls!).

Although the less said about Piranha II: Flying Killers the better. "Now they can fly!" What?!
 
Probably badgering my parents to let me watch the Mystery and Imagination ITV series which adapted a lot of classic horror and ghost stories in the late 60s wasn't a totally good idea, they only let me watch the last couple of series though.
 
Watched I Clavdivs, but the real coming of age for me was Bouquet of Barbed Wire. I never saw my old mum in the same way again. :shock:
 
That's another series I saw on the repeat, having had a sheltered upbringing. ;)

What puzzled me about it was how unpleasant the characters were. I thought you were supposed to like people, or at least fancy them a bit, to have an affair with them. This lot all seemed to be doing it to get one over on someone. Why didn't they just post some dog muck through the letterbox? Works for me. :lol:
 
Someone mentioned Lifeforce in this thread (thankyou, search engine) so I'll just say here if you're thinking of getting the Arrow Blu-ray of that (out this week), then I recommend it because it's solid nourishment. Looks great in HD, still absolutely nuts and probably more enjoyable now than it was then, plus the extras are excellent. Special mention to the Mathilda May interview, she remains delightful.

But don't show the film to minors.
 
Some comments from parents express their shock that such a film could be shown, because they remember the effect it had on them! :banghead:
 
I found it quite upsetting, but I watched it all because I was absorbed in it and had to know the ending.

As far as I can see, it would provide a pretty good conceptual background for global politics in 2016 - refugees, apocalyptic visions, war, famine, death, terror, demographic decline and exploitation!
 
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Judging by the school I was at, I'd estimate that I must have watched Peter Greenway's Drowning By Numbers at age eleven or twelve. I didn't have a blind clue what was going on, mind you, but I was transfixed by the sumptuous imagery and - it must be said - nudity. I've re-watched it a few times in adulthood and still rank it as one of my favourites and I still don't really know what some of it's all about.
 
I watched Nightmare On Elm Street at too young an age and then had dreams about Freddie Kruger afterwards. I was just old enough to know that he wasn't coming to get me but when i feel ill a few weeks later and had feverish nightmares, boy did he come out to play.

Oh, and the face ripping off, maggoty-chicken drumstick scene from Poltergeist really freaked me out. I saw it again not so long ago. It's not at all how I remember it and it's obviously quite crap now. But back then. Hee-Bee-Jee-Bees!

Edit: Edited for filling in all the missing letters in my sentences. I must try harder.
 
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Anything with witches involved used to terrify me. my childhood bedroom nightmares after those nearly always involved a witch coming in to get me. I blame my obsession with The Evil Dead film on my early exposure to those; the witch in the cellar.
 
Poltergeist is something my parents probably should have stopped me from watching, but we watched it all the time when I was a kid. I've just watched Poltergeist 3 on Netflix for the first time. I wish they'd stepped in and stopped me watching this load of drivel. They're never there when you need 'em.
 
My parents got a video back in 82. Betamax. Just before the video nasty hype really hit. I saw all sorts of horror films, both at home as well as at my friend's houses. The VHS set.

The only scene that ever shocked me was the beheading at the beginning of 'The Exterminator'. Which in all fairness the man in the video shop did tell my mother about. He said that scene was a bit much, but the rest was fine for a ten year old.

I saw it recently, the decapitation scene was comical, but I don't know if I thought the rest of the film was OK for a kid of that age. With the 'chicken ranch' scene and all that. No.

I've since re watched a few of the old titles on the 'Horror Channel', as well as a few I missed because they got banned. 'Driller Killer', 'The Night of the Demon' and so on. But I've never managed to get more than about ten minutes into any of them because they're so unimaginably shit.

Only ones that ever scared me from then, until my mid thirties were 'Alien', and 'Jaws'.
 
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The parents had no choice with regard to the films collected here by the BFI. We didn't want to watch, we had to watch. It includes "Apaches" which drove me insane the one and only time I saw it. I lived on a farm and the film convinced me that I would die screaming in agony from the poison I would undoubtedly drink in the next few days. To this day I am wary of anyone else handing me a drink, even in my own home.
 
Bambi.
That was the first horror film I saw.
 
jimv1 said:
Holiday on the Buses. The horror. The horror.
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Bob Grant Holiday on the Buses (1973).jpg

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This man, no doubt an upstanding Thespian, was more or less indistinguishable from the Childcatcher to my young mind.


Edit: And, according to modern sensibilities, this:

Watership Down 'would be rated PG today' says BBFC head

The U-rated 1978 film Watership Down would be classified PG were it released today, the new head of the British Board of Film Classification has said.
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BBFC director David Austin told BBC Radio 5 live its violence was "arguably too strong" for it to be rated U now.

He added the film also contains language that would be "unacceptable" in a film rated U under 2016 criteria.
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EyronRen said:
The parents had no choice with regard to the films collected here by the BFI. We didn't want to watch, we had to watch. It includes "Apaches" which drove me insane the one and only time I saw it. I lived on a farm and the film convinced me that I would die screaming in agony from the poison I would undoubtedly drink in the next few days. To this day I am wary of anyone else handing me a drink, even in my own home.
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Shit! 'Lonely Water'. That and 'Jaws' have made me pretty much totally terrestrial.
 
Does the plastic bag I found in my Dad's wardrobe full of video tapes with no labels on count ... because when my parents went out, I enjoyed watching them?
 
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