Aug 07, 2007,
Dre Rivas
The idea of going to see Daddy Day Camp this weekend is a frightening one. I've pretty much given up on Cuba Gooding Jr. these days. My doc says he's bad for my blood pressure. But this might be a new low, even for him. I got to thinking about some other scary kid features, some intentional, others not so much. I came up with a ton, but I've listed below a few of my favorites. Read on brave ones!
Labyrinth (1986)
Here you're dealing with goblins, talking foxes who love the stench of toilets, M.C. Escher staircases, creatures that remove their heads and limbs (and joyfully sing about it) and, naturally, David Bowie. Some were first introduced to Bowie as Ziggy Stardust. I came to know him as Jareth, the goblin king. It is movies like this that really make me miss Jim Henson. Plus, the unintentional comedy of seeing Bowie singing with puppets in numbers like "Dance Magic Dance" is solid gold.
Neverending Story
This movie just depresses me and the happy ending always felt tacked on after all the misery it put me through. This is not a complaint, just the reality of the situation. Everything in this flick creeps me out at least a little: The man in a suit on the snail; the giant old turtle who sneezes snot all over Atreyu; "The Nothing;" the way Artax (Atreyu's horse) just gives up and dies in the quicksand for no apparent reason; the way those Sphinxes crumble ... I even find the friendly dog-dragon Falkor off-putting. That's all I got.
Dumbo
The year is 1941 and white men are still voicing characters called "Jim Crow" (for more on that, click here). The real reason this movie makes the list is that freaky-deaky pink elephant sequence. Nothing like seeing a child elephant and his pet mouse get hammered and then hallucinate in a kids film. One year at summer camp the counselors made us watch this movie and that sequence about thirty times. If that was their way of making us not want to take to the drink it worked. At least for a few more years.
Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory
Here's another movie that always disturbed me, and to give you an idea of what I'm talking about, I need only direct you here, to the film's psychedelic boat ride. See, the trippy scene in Dumbo was mainly a result of hipster animators strutting their stuff. Here, the filmmakers were clearly trying to frighten children. But not just frighten them ... disturb them, scar them, hopefully forever. My favorite part of the whole experience? It has to be Wilder's delivery of the following:
Is it raining, is it snowing? Is a hurricane a blowing? Not a speck of light is showing so the danger must be growing. By the fires of hell are glowing ... is the grisly reaper mowing? YES! THE DANGER MUST BE GROWING FOR THE ROWERS KEEP ON ROWING! AND THEY'RE CERTAINLY NOT SHOWING ... ANY SIGNS THAT THEY ARE SLOWING!
Mac and Me
I will go on record as saying this is one of the worst films I have ever seen. It's a really bad take on E.T., a 90 minute commercial for McDonalds (every time you see a corporate plug, take a drink. I'll meet you in the gutter), truly an evil film. The bad acting, dialogue, ludicrous logic and ripped storyline make you want to forget that mankind was in any way affiliated with the creation of this project. This movie has been known to send scores of good men and women into deep modes of depression. It has ruined lives. I once heard Hemingway took that shotgun to his face after an early print of Mac and Me was screened for him. Director John Landis's last good movie was in 1988 when Coming To America was released, the same year Mac and Me came out. Coincidence?
Still, I cannot shake the film's power over me. The aliens, the M.A.C.s (Mysterious Alien Creatures, don't you know), are some of the most oddly designed beings in a children's film ever. And yet ... you cannot look away. Just try not to watch this clip a good five hundred times. And when you're done with that, see the movie as it should have been.
What I've basically concluded is that we don't scare kids enough these days. Most of the movies on this list are not of this generation. We've become way too politically correct and vanilla because we're constantly trying to protect the kids. But a generation of kids raised on films the likes of Daddy Day Camp ... that is a frightening world, indeed.
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Dre writes three times a week for Film.com. He claims to not own Mac and Me on DVD. Email him!
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