Have you ever watched the wrong film by mistake? Maybe you watched Hercules Reborn instead of The Rock action flick, or maybe you somehow wound up with the Japanese Spider-Man series? Shares yours.
I had a very tightly-knit family as a kid. This was, in-part, because of convenience afforded by us all living next-door to each other. My house (where I lived with my mother and brother Michael) was separated from one set of neighbors by a tall wooden fence. This made everything from our side of the picket fence feel like our own small-village. The next house over was my aunt and uncle and their son, and one house over from them was my grandfather and grandmother (and my older brother Scott).
This created a certain dynamic where every house felt like our own and no area was off-limit.
I remember when I was a kid, my uncle was real big into renting DVDs from a rental store and burning them onto disc (which is very illegal by the way). He had a stack of them and I remember that I swiped a copy of “Girl Next Door,” a film I had assumed from my friend Legend’s (real name, by the way) instruction was a 2004 romantic-comedy film about a high school student that falls in love with a former porn star. Of course, because it was a “burnt disc,” our only indication was the title chicken-scratched onto the disc with a sharpie.
The film ended up being the 2007 film of the same name loosely based on the true events surrounding the torture and murder of a young girl. Instead of a light-heart and goofy film about complicated love and absurd shenanigans that ensued, my friend and I were treated to a very harsh film about incest / rape and the cruelties we humans can inflict on each other. The bread and butter of American cinema!
Take it easy,
McConnaughay