Hello people who sit on children.
Tonight I babysat a pair of nine year olds- always entertaining. For the sake of privacy let's call them Twin Boy and Twin Girl. Twins and I started out by eating cheese pizza and grapes while watching "Dennis the Menace". Whoa momma, was that interesting.
When I first popped the video into the VCR (remember them?), I assumed it would be a wholesome movie full of fun for the whole family. Oh, how wrong I was. It's a movie about a kindergartener, yet it's rated PG- that should have been my first clue.
The film's main audience should be five year olds, except they're not old enough to see it! I'm almost 17 and I'm not sure that movie was appropriate for me, much less two nine year olds! There are so many different directions in which this movie could have been taken. The romance between Dennis and Maragaret could have been explored, or maybe Dennis goes on an adventure with his best bud Joey. Unfortunately, the writers didn't do either of those things. Instead, they created a film which literally gave Twin Boy and Twin Girl nightmares. Who knew a movie based on a comic strip would be so scary?
As the title suggests, the main character is a five year old menace named Dennis (see? it rhymes, so it's almost clever, but not quite). At first I thought our protagonist was played by a younger version of Macaulay Culkin, but I was mistaken. That didn't stop me from
googling him to see what ole M.C. (not hammer) is up to now. I find it a little sad that Culkin looks exactly the same as when he was a child. Poor thing hasn't aged since 1991. No, seriously, he's bigger and he parts his hair on the other side of his head, but aside from these small discrepancies he looks
identical to his ten year old self. It freaks me out, but I digress.
I know that it was made in 1993 and things were different back then and movies weren't softened up just because they were made for kids, but come on! The "bad guy" in children's movies should NEVER look like this:
He's wearing a striped turtleneck with a leather vest in the
middle of summer for crying out loud. Who does that? The mentally messed up, that's who. He's certainly not incredibly scary in the traditional sense of the word, but boy is he a creep. This picture is from a scene when he first entered town, staking out the neighborhood and watching kids while they play on the playground. He's literally a pedophile.
Pedophiles usually have fabulously frightening names, so I
wikipediaed it and turns out, this one does too. Switchblade Sam, he's called. SWITCHBLADE Sam!?!?! Kids, a little tip from me to you, if you ever meet a man who's named after a prison weapon, run away! I had to fast forward through all of SS's scenes because Twin Boy was cowering in fear the whole time.
The movie climaxes when SS kidnaps Dennis, a five year old, and nearly knifes him by the river. It worries me that someone out there pitched this idea and someone else agreed to it. Being a young main character, Dennis is of course quite wily and has his kidnapper tied up in no time. The weird part is he sticks around for what seems like hours, just messing with SS, force feeding him beans, dropping firewood on him from 50 feet up and even setting him on fire (the last one was supposedly on accident, but we all know how blonds get). I suppose it all made sense within the context of Dennis's menacing character, but I found the whole thing a bit weird to be honest.
In the end Dennis saves the day by having SS arrested for robbing every single neighbor in the county. Switchblade Sam's hand is slammed in the police car door, causing him to drop his blade into a drain. And they all live happily ever after. Twin Girl informed me that SS could never have been a real robber in the first place, "he was probably just pretending, cause everybody knows real robbers are all pirates that dress in black... duh".
The movie ended and the twins were put to bed. I stayed up watching "How to Train your Dragon" and I loved every second! "Night fury" is arguably the best name for a black dragon in the history of folklore. All in all a spooky yet amusing babysitting experience.
Day Two Complete.
P.S. For your viewing pleasure, a
picture of "that kid from Home Alone" with Micheal Jackson. Google tells me they were close friends. How did I not know about this?? Tis a creepy and mind boggling combination of celebrities.
