Movies, and Velociraptors: Part 2
Jurassic Park was one of the single coolest things to have watched in the early 90’s. I actually had a chance to watch this movie over at a neighbors house only two weeks after it came out on video (This would almost double the coolness factor, since I would then ruin most of the film for all of my friends) but my sister was with me at the time, and told me with a scowl that she was leaving, and if I wasn’t coming my parents would be told, and bad things would happen. Needless to say, my opportunity was ruined. However due to some savvy maneuvering with the tying of shoelaces, I got to stick around for the first few minutes of the movie, and these few minutes scared me to death.
The room we we’re watching it in was completely dark, and my friends had a giant 32″ Sony TV at the time. A large crate was swinging over jungle foliage, as men in burnt orange hats stared up, as if this was just a normal day on the job. I excitedly thought that this would be my first glimpse of the amazing special effects the movie had to offer, and continued to fumble with said shoelaces while my eyes fixated on the glowing screen in front of me. I loved dinosaurs at the time, and my favorite one was a triceratops. My heart pounded faster as I became more and more certain that the 3-pronged dinosaur surely was the one in the crate.
The call of “Gatekeeper!” echoed out, and chaos ensued. The man struggling to open the crate door fell, and was dragged screaming into the crate. Flashes of white light filled the room as the other workers blasted away with some sort of shock guns, and as the gatekeeper’s fingers slowly slipped out of another mans hands and gunshots sounded, I made my quick goodbyes and managed to not quite run out the front door. All I had seen was a reptilian eye, but it terrified me. It wasn’t until I was 12 that my parents decided that maybe they could be a little lenient, and decided to rent Jurassic Park for us to all watch together that weekend. I was scared to death.
I knew this was a big chance to prove that I could handle “adult” movies, and that I just had to pass this test or my parents would hold it over me for another year every time I casually chanced a look at the back cover of a PG-13 tape at Hollywood Video. To prepare myself, I revisited two movie scenes that totally freaked me out at the time. The first one was the ending of The Last Crusade. For me, the tension as one Nazi soldier tried to creep through traps and reach the holy grail, and his sudden beheading, was far worse than the melting faces of Raiders, or some of the gross-out moments of Temple of Doom (how the hell was that movie only rated PG!?). The second was the Wampa ice cave scene in Empire Strikes back. There are two common threads in these two scenes. The fact that my parents owned both the Star Wars trilogy and the Indiana Jones trilogy, and that both these scenes let my own imagination terrify me. This was, and probably still is, my major weakness with “scary” moments. I am scared to death of the machinations of my own mind.
Saturday quickly approached, and I grew more and more nervous. If I turned face and ran now, this would be proof-positive that my tyrannical parents would find justification in their unfair laws. I carefully weighed the risks (being scared to death, screaming) with the positives (breaking free of parental shackles, a new world of movies being available to me) and decided I would just have to suck it up.
Dinner was a blur of meat and vegetables, and we lined up to get ice cream for dessert as my Dad started the movie. I took my time carefully layering different ice cream flavors into my mug (we never used bowls for ice cream), and of course had to pack it down as much as possible to get the most ice cream per unit volume ratio. Finally content that I would have to place the mug in the trash compactor to increase it’s density any more, I went over to the coach, sat down, and grabbed a blanket and pillow. That pillow didn’t escape from my embrace for the rest of the movie.
