When I was a kid, my parents would occasionally put on a movie with me that was entirely unsuitable for children because it had the involvement of someone they liked a lot.

One time was the movie Freejack (1992), a scifi cyberpunk dystopia that downplayed any social commentary it may have had in favor of cheesy action. What brought my parents to have my brother record it for them and bring it over was the presence of Mick Jagger as one of the main characters, a ruthless mercenary hunting Emilio Estevez.

Now, speaking as an adult the movie is bad. The acting is phoned in, the action is so-so, and the plot is borderline nonsensical. However, to child-me, it was a harrowing ordeal, leaving me at the edge of my seat desperate to see how this could all work out. The most accurate view I can offer is that it is a fairly entertaining movie with dumb but interesting costuming and can be downright hilarious at times.

I showed the movie at a personal movie night I had in college, where it did not impress even with its badness, but it holds a special place in my heart.

However, while Freejack is not appropriate for children due to the amount of swearing, violence, and dystopian themes present throughout, it is hardly what I'd call scarring despite the anxiety I felt throughout the film. There were plenty of other things that were much worse.

So before I get into The Crow (1994), some background: my mother is Asian, and by the early 90s there wasn't a lot of Asian representation in media, even if there was more than before. My Mom saw how a lot of racism screwed with her and how the racist climate messed with my brother's head. She didn't want me to feel othered by society, and so it was important to her and my Dad to show me movies and TV with Asian actors as much as possible. It was a tragedy to her when Brandon Lee died during the making of The Crow, and so it was a family event to watch the movie that killed the son of Bruce Lee.

The movie, as you might guess, is filled with violence of all kinds of different natures, bordering on horror in many cases. Incest, cannibalism, sexual violence, and that's all I can remember off the top of my head. I was about 8.

Now to further appreciate the irony of this: my Dad feared the goth subculture. He had always been an open-minded if kinda judgy person, more of a jock than anything else, but the Satanic Panic of the 80s had managed to get to him in only one way (despite him despising churches) and that was in the villification of goths. My Dad had absolutely no problem with The Crow. Just more dark and edgy stuff. He probably would have liked a lot of folks in the Goth subculture if he could ever stand to like people at all.

As for the effect it had on me, I felt terrified the whole movie. My brother and his friends were cheering and laughing as it is a bit cheesy and everything was back then. It was a "superhero" movie according to some. I guess it can be qualified as such if you squint. Regardless of the young adults attempts to get me to enjoy the movie, I was basically having an anxiety attack the whole time. But ultimately I mostly forgot it. Another buried memory from a childhood full of weird crap.

One day in college, many many years later, I went to a movie night at a friend's place. The theme was Alex Proyas movies, and while I wasn't excited to see The Crow, Dark City is my absolute most favorite movie of all time. So I arrived late to mostly miss The Crow. When I walked through the door, the host paused the movie so that the crowd could stare at me.

In my early adulthood I had adopted sharp dressing as a quirk, and my most common ensemble was a vest and tie, a trenchcoat, and my long flowing hair; incidentally, almost the exact outfit that was being worn by the main villain of the movie at that very moment. I had absolutely no memory of the character at the time, and I have no idea if maybe I had subconsciously internalized this style or if it was just an odd coincidence.

But that was not the most inappropriate movie my parents ever had me watch. That honor goes to Full Metal Jacket (1987) when I was about 8 or 9. My Dad felt that I had to "understand the 60s" and that Stanley Kubrick had done an excellent job in distilling it down to two hours.

This absolutely traumatized me. I was terrified of the concept of basic training pretty much my entire childhood. I oft times ruminated on the horrors of mercy killing and the violence inherent in an imperialist invasion. Y'know, normal things for a literal child to think about.

At one point in my life, I attempted to go to military OCS training but ended up not going for various reasons. I think one of the reasons I wanted to go was to confront the fear of training environments that the movie had instilled in me. Probably should have just gone through ROTC.

Later on in life, I complained to my brother about some of this, and he replied back that one time in the 70s when he would have been around 11 or so, Dad took him and Mom to Caligula (1979) because of my Dad's intense interest in Roman history and the involvement of Gore Vidal in the writing. He might have missed that the movie also had the involvement of Bob Guccione and Penthouse magazine in order to secure funding, and is thusly filled with violence and sex.

A reasonable person may ask in this day and age: why were my parents like this? Well, I do not know if it was a prevailing opinion back in their day, but my parents simply did not believe in censorship (with important exceptions). I think my Dad might be one of the people who didn't see a need for PG-13, as he didn't really give a lot of sympathy to three year old me when I was utterly terrified during the sacrifice scene in Temple of Doom.

Still, I look back on all these times with a smile, when the worst problems in my life were my parents' poor judgement in media regulation for their children. Hell, my Dad let pre-teen me have cable in my bedroom, something that he later decided wasn't such a good idea after all. But ultimately it was fine and maybe it didn't do too much damage. Though I do hang out at the goth clubs now...