MY MOVIE LIFE: 1979-2006I'm not sure what was the first movie I ever saw, but certainly the first film I saw in a cinema was Snow White & The Seven Dwarfs, or possibly The Jungle Book. One of the two. I'd like to say this experience blew me away and left an indelible mark on me forever, but I don't think it did. For a small child, watching a film at the cinema is pretty much the same as watching one on TV, but with the inconvenience of being unable to leave your seat and the distractions of being in a huge room full of fascinating strangers...
I was born in 1979, and the cinema experience wasn't as healthy in the early-80's as it is these days, not helped by the invention of home video. So my more potent early film memories came from the video-tape revolution -– a Betamax double-bill of Star Wars The Empire Strikes Back and Superman II.
By the mid-80's, VHS had won the battle for home video supremacy and a whole world of movies were now available to me. I have fond memories of watching Raiders Of The Lost Ark, E.T, Indiana Jones & The Temple Of Doom, Ghostbusters and Back To The Future. Strangely, I always preferred Temple Of Doom to Raiders, probably because it had freakier scenes (the weird Indian village elder, the snake banquet, the heart extraction and that zombie girl). It was also easier to follow for a young mind unaware of World War II, although Raiders got a lot of replay value for the melting faces! Ghostbusters however was perhaps the most watched film of my pre-teen life, notably for being the first movie I knew all the words to off by heart, while Back To The Future's Michael J. Fox became a role model for me.
1988 was a key moment. This was when I saw RoboCop. I was nine. I saw it with my parents! Were they mad? Perhaps. This was certainly a very strange blip in their parenting skills, although I remember my mum asking my dad if I should be watching this -– seconds after Murphy's hand is blown off. He must have replied in the affirmative, but I was told I could go to bed if I wanted to. Not a chance! Strangely, Murphy's death is still a scene I can't watch without squirming like a little kid again.
RoboCop made me suddenly being aware that such hardcore movies even existed. I thought melting Nazi's were gruesome, but they had nothing on a man staggering around covered in toxic waste! I was never one for Disney cartoons, really (this was pre-Disney resurgence with Beauty & The Beast, remember), so Steven Spielberg was my "go to" guy for entertainment... not Paul Verhoeven!
Verhoeven's masterpiece left a huge impression on my young mind. Quite coincidentally, my best friend at the time showed me a scary movie that featured a frightening vampire being stabbed through the palm by his teenaged next-door neighbour. That scene alone scared me far more than RoboCop and gave me pause for thought over the next week. I'm a little ashamed now that this opus of horror was, er, Fright Night. Although I still maintain that the exaggerated fangs and make-up in that movie are the stuff of nightmares!
It's certainly strange what scares kids. Another early meeting with terror came in the form of Troll, a creepy horror about a hairy troll that replaces a young boy's sister, but only he can see his sibling has been swapped. I'm sure if I watched it now it would be as scary as an episode of Power Rangers, but at the time... frightening. I have two brothers myself, and when you're younger films seem plausible in some unquantifiable way. The stolen baby brother plot in Labyrinth had a similar effect on me, too!
Also in the 80's, disappointment surfaced with Ghostbusters 2 (fleeting fun, but forgettable), the Short Circuit movies were a guilty pleasure (I still get choked up when Johnny 5 is smashed up by those goons), and Karate Kid became the first film to speak to me about bullying and assorted teenaged issues.
It would be a few years before 18-certificate movies became something I'd actively seek out. Various gruesome video covers would stare down at me from the top shelves, but I was too young to rent them. In the meantime, I relied on friends with their dad's collection at their disposal. This was how two movies cemented my progression into adult territory: The Terminator and Aliens. If Steven Spielberg was my nanny, James Cameron was the older brother who talks you into trouble. The Terminator was a gritty adventure unlike anything I'd seen: time travel without the family-friendly spark of Back To The Future, an emotionless automaton who looked human, unlike RoboCop. Male nudity (!), self-inflicted torture (the eye scene), multiple deaths, the oppressive grimy atmosphere, all were like a breath of fresh air.
Aliens was perhaps the first movie monster film (ignoring Fright Night's vampire) that terrified me. It had the gung-ho adventure, but throughout it all was a palpable sense that these nightmarish creatures could just leap out at you at any moment. They were primal, unreasoning, and almost unstoppable. But It was the incidental scenes that really struck me: the cocooned woman pleading to be killed, Bishop being lanced through the chest and ripped in two, the stomach-rippling "chest-bursters". Aliens is a movie with great imagination and invention... and it became the first film franchise I really cared about. I later devoured Alien on late-night TV, bought a book on H.R Giger, rented Alien 3, and... well, ultimately my fervour died away with Alien Resurrection and Alien Vs Predator many years later...
Between 1989 and 1991, tales from friends of Freddy Kruger proved to be captivating at school, but it would be years before I'd see A Nightmare On Elm Street myself, and feel the disappointment. Your imagination is always superior to whatever horror films can throw at you. Well, most of the time.
My teenaged years were certainly fuelling my hunger for similar fare to Aliens and Terminator. Predator was another high octane adventure with plenty of blood-soaked mayhem to keep me enthralled. Then, sequels arrived: RoboCop 2 was something I enjoyed atthe time, to be honest. Terminator 2 Judgment Day really resuscitated my love for this genre, and soon movies like The Thing and Highlander were being tracked down on late-night TV. Like most kids without their own income, I was never particularly keen on buying videos, mainly relying on pirate videos my dad could get hold of from abroad.
But, y'know, I was still only a kid at heart. Tim Burton's Batman really hit the spot, as did the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles (yes, I admit it). I was particularly pleased that the Turtles movie finally made my parents understand why kids my age loved TMNT; they never understood the appeal of the cartoon, but they grudgingly enjoyed the live-action movie for its pulpy charm.
In the early-90's, my dad also used to rent quite a few low-budget flicks, giving me glimpses at this other facet to cinema such as Millennium, Slipstream, Mutronics, Robot Jox and A.P.E.X. All such movies were of debatable quality, but there was always something great about stumbling upon a diamond in the rough.
1992 features an important movie in my life, too. Batman Returns. Okay, I really enjoyed the movie (bought the stickers, the toys, etc), but the real reason to salivate was Michelle Pfeiffer's Catwoman. I was 13. She was hot. I didn't particularly understand the fetish angle to her costume, or anything, but... some things just speak directly to young peoples' awakening sexuality... and a tight black PVC outfit did that for me.
The movie world really changed in 1993. Jurassic Park changed the face of special-effects. We're still feeling the repercussions now. As I said, James Cameron had really spoken to my teenaged sensibilities for action, violence, horror and imagination... but now my childhood God had returned to try and win his crown back. Spielberg's Jurassic Park certainly did that.
I was 14 and the age of CGI had reinvigorated the cinema. Batman Returns and Jurassic Park had been my first trips to the cinema for years, and the promise of more CGI-assisted visuals drew everyone back to the big screen. Post-1993 saw CGI spearhead cinema's revival in many peoples' hearts, mine included. Video just didn't do stuff like Jurassic Park justice.
1996. Another effects-heavy finally capitalized on the possibilities of CGI and cunningly became my first taste of a Star Wars-esque visual experience. Independence Day. 10 years later it's easy to see the film's mistakes and flaws, but at the time... aliens attacking major cities, fighter jets shooting UFO's... it was just big screen bliss!!
By now I was in my late-teens and trips to the cinema were more commonplace. I couldn't drive and didn’t have a job, so the greatest resource was still television. Around this time, we got Sky TV and the dozens of movie channels further expanded my taste. There's only so much visual stimulus you can take before you start to seek out different sorts of movies. Maturity was beckoning, and Peter Jackson's Heavenly Creatures became the first film I remember watching and being genuinely entertained and moved by a story without flashy effects or a sci-fi/horror underbelly. Likewise, Quentin Tarantino's Pulp Fiction was phenomenal, inspiring me to seek out Reservoir Dogs.
Around 1996/1997, DVD was invented. I remember seeing an advert for a David Lynch film in this superior audio and picture quality. I was intrigued, but not yet convinced. That was until a trip to my local Curry's, where they were playing Independence Day on a widescreen television. Widescreen. Wow. It was like a mini-cinema. Between 1996 and 1999, I began to combine my low-brow and high-brow nature; for every From Dusk Till Dawn vampire slaying nastiness, there was a head-scratching Lost Highway.
Then, 1999. I was 20. The end of being a teenager... and how better to toast off my teenaged years, the end of the century, and indeed the millennium, but with two behemoths at the box-office: Star Wars Episode I The Phantom Menace and The Matrix. Both movies blew me away visually; not since Independence Day had I really seen such visuals. Episode I was a startlingly detailed universe of aliens, robots, planets, animals and spaceships. Breathtaking. It made me want to reconsider the Original Trilogy again -– up till now just three films on video tape I'd sometimes watch when bored.
But The Matrix stole George Lucas' thunder in my mind. I saw it a real flea-pit cinema with people behind throwing popcorn. I was supposed to be watching The Mummy, but it wasn't playing there anymore. So, what the hell, I gave this Matrix thing a try. The trailer had looked quite cool. A few hours later, I Ieft the cinema... awestruck, along with the popcorn-throwers. It was like a James Cameron movie, but more cerebral... a martial arts film a world away from Karate Kid... and with a style and quality of special-effects just totally brand new to me.
I am proud to say that on New Year's Eve 2001, I watched... 2001: A Space Odyssey. On the stroke of midnight. I had seen 2001 in chunks on TV, always unfortunate enough to flick over half-way through. But, not that night. Stanley Kubrick was now raised to demi-God status. Simply amazing filmmaking. Perhaps the greatest cinematic experience ever put on film.
Meanwhile, The Matrix had kick-started an interest in Japanese/Hong Kong cinema for the early 00's. It also fuelled the necessity to buy one of these newfangled DVD players and widescreen TV's. It was the year 2000; I was 21. A man. A man with money. And the need to spend this money on combining the worlds of TV-watching with cinema-going!
We're approaching the present day now. I don't think anybody reading can’t remember what's happened from 2000 to 2007. If you do have problems, it must be drug related. For me, in movie terms, it's been 7 years of collecting DVD's and watching most of the essential blockbuster movies on the big-screen. My taste has always been loyal to the sheer thrills of sci-fi, horror and fantasy movies. I was raised on them.
I'm now 27 and my twenties have seen me seeking out more cerebral stuff -– David Lynch, Stanley Kubrick, etc. Small indie movies also seem to offer something the mainstream doesn't these days, as do the excellent foreign-language films recently (Oldboy, Kung Fu Hustle, Crouching Tiger..., Battle Royale, Ringu, Hero, Dark Water, House Of Flying Daggers, etc.)
Still, as your taste develops and the latest spoonfed blockbusters isn't always enough, you somehow always stay true to your youth. I'll admit, the thought of Terminator 3 had me giddy for months, as does rumours of Alien 5. At the moment I'm quivering for Superman Returns to hit, and for James Cameron to return with a sci-fi epic. Why? Nostalgia, that's why.
Certain movies are forever protected by that golden sheen of dreamlike nostalgia... or forever burned into your nightmares... because no matter how hard you try... you'll never again see a film quite like you did when you were younger...
