JCC Were you allowed to watch R-rated action movies as a kid?

I grew up watching violent action and adventure movies. Some actually quite loud and bloody. I remember watching Terminator 2 when I was 9. My dad took me to see True Lies when I was 12 (while my mom and sister went to see The Lion King. Suckers.) My favorite movie in elementary school was RoboCop. I don't wanna make my parents seem too lax there, so I'll say it was the ABC Sunday Night Movie version. Granted, it was still pretty violent.

I have no violent tendencies at all. I hate fighting. I have no desire to shoot a gun or blow anything up. I think a contributing factor there is that I was told and easily understood the difference between reality and fantasy. But I think those movies did a lot of good for me, because it instilled me with a strong belief that, more often than not, the good guys win. Maybe that's because in the movies I watched, whenever a gunshot or a laser blast went off, the odds were about one in 500 that it would hit a good guy. (I'm watching Die Hard as we speak, which is a great example of this)

So I think that whole argument that violent movies make violent people is moot. How about you? Did your parents let you watch violent movies with boobs and bad language?

 

Yes, all the time.

 

Not really.

 

That's because we know you don't like to smile...

 

The Lion King is pretty awesome. But it doesn't have Arnold one liners or a Jamie Lee Curtis strip tease. But it does have that awesome baboon Rafiki... Hmm...

 

i was allowed to watch whatever. i remember watching a clockwork orange when i was like 5.

 

Yes... I also watched Revenge of the Nerds with my mom... awkward.

Same here.

 

And I'm assuming you didn't turn into Malcolm McDowell. My apologies if you did.

 

I think there's an argument to be made that violent media desensitizes people to real violence and makes them more willing to accept it, such as war where night vision footage looks "like a videogame." Kids would be more susceptible. And Jabba-wocky has made the argument before that there is plenty of evidence that it increases the chances of aggression and violent tendencies. That's not to say VIDEOGAMES CAUSE SCHOOL SHOOTINGS, but to pretend such things universally have no effect on childhood development is stupid.

I wasn't allowed to watch "R"-rated movies until I was about twelve. Or eleven. I honestly don't remember. I can't say I missed much. Most action flicks are dumb glorifications and the worthwhile "R"-rated fair has meaning beyond the grasp of most pre-adolescents.

 

I was just thinking how funny it is to watch Revenge of the Nerds now... how so very dated it now is---I mean, they were excited about seeing bush.

//random thought.

 

Yeah, pretty much. I saw Revenge of the Nerds when I was 9 and Robocop when I was 11 (to be fair, I watched it for the whole "guy becomes a cyborg" angle: the gruesome violence was just a bonus). I think my parents understood that I knew this stuff wasn't real, and if they thought it affected my siblings or I badly they would've really vetted what we watched.

It also helped I was the sort of person who likes to watch cartoons, so as a teenager I wasn't receiving just a steady diet of R-rated movies.

 

I saw A Nightmare on Elm Street when I was 7 years old ><. I had nightmares for quite awhile after that. It also didn't help that my Mom had a sweater that looked like Freddy's.

I also saw The Bodyguard (Aunt & Uncle let me watch it) when I was 12 or 13. Desperado in high school at 14 years old. Pretty sure I've seen both Terminators during my teens as well.

tldr; yes

 

Nope. My first R-rated film was at 17. For me, entertainment does effect how people especially children perceive things and the pervasive denial of this is just furthering the damage.

 

It depended on the movie and whether or not I had parental supervision. I was sufficiently squeamish about blood for a sufficiently long time that it didn't really matter that much.

They were much stricter about which video games I was or was not allowed to play, until I turned 17.

 

I saw a lot of movies that my mom would not have shown me.

I thought Poltergeist should have been R and Terminator was no worse than Gremlins or Ghostbusters.

 

I think video games might be a different story altogether. It's strange to think that I like R-rated violent movies, but I never liked bloody video games. Preferred Street Fighter to Mortal Kombat. Turned the blood all the way off in Die Hard Trilogy for PS1 and always felt bad when I accidentally shot a civilian. That's why I never got into games like Grand Theft Auto (although I loved it's Simpsons counterpart Hit and Run). I think watching violence and acting out simulated violence have two different effects on people. If I had children, I wouldn't let them play bloody war games. (How about a nice game of Tetris?) Maybe that makes me a hypocrit, but you gotta set your moral barometer somewhere I guess...

 

I wasn't permitted to watch any R movies as a child. However, kids usually have ways of watching them if they want to see them.

My Dad did let us watch movies with blood and guts. Just no cussing, sex, etc.

 

It's not an action film but I was allowed to watch "The Rocky Horror Picture Show" when I was maybe 10.

I also saw "The Crucifixion" when that came out.




Sent from my stupid little astro droid using TapaTalk 2.

 

Yeah I think I saw that on Cinemax when I was rather young. All it made me wanna do was dance. Something even Grease couldn't do. Haha

 

The blood and gore never got to me, but the subject matter could disturb me, yes. For instance, RoboCop's "crucifixion" by shotgun, where the bad guys are having a picnic shooting Murphy's limbs off disturbed me a lot, but more because of the premise of the scene. They're torturing him just for fun. I think I was 8 or 9 or thereabouts when I saw that.

I saw Bruce Lee choke Kareem Abdul Jabbar to death at 5 or 6. Not a good memory.

Did watching that mess me up for life? Who knows these things? But I remember that it was disturbing to me at the time. I don't think I was ready for the life lesson of "be a careless cop, and you'll be robbed of your antlers by sadistic criminals with magnifying glasses" at age eight. Every child is different. I would think that parents get a feel for what their child can take as they go. I am, admittedly, impressionable, even to this day. I watched the original Oldboy some time ago and was in a bad mood the rest of that day. So, for instance, my parents would warn me against watching scary movies when I was little.

Apart from whether some scenes can be disturbing to a child, which is obvious (some things can be disturbing even for adults), the question is often asked whether it desensitises kids to violence and makes them violent. I don't think that it necessarily must, but I think it can, sure.