Please help me finding the name of this movie I partially watched as a kid

No, 1992 is way too late. I have no idea of the exact time, but I was born in 1981, so I don’t think it could have disturbed me any later than 1988 or so.

Valhalla is incidentally a long running and iconic comic book series (the cartoon film is essentially based on a couple of the first comics). Good stuff making the Norse legends accessible to children.

Bumpity bump.

I’ve decided to relive a whole mess of traumatic experiences inflicted upon me by the 80’s animation industry (maybe I’ll write about it, if anyone cares). I’m looking for something that terrified me but don’t have much to go on.

I think it was an animated sci-fi of some description - it’s possible it may not have been a movie but series of some sort. Also a small chance it was actually an anime but my gut tells me it wasn’t. I’ll put the very early '90s as the cutoff point for original release year for it as there’s no way I’d be scared of anything like this following getting my grubby little paws on Doom - one loses the ability to feel fear after being mercilessly spawncamped by their chainsaw-hogging dad at the tender age of 10.

The main sequence that upset me is that there’s basically a cave with a bunch of (black?) tentacles in the roof of it, maybe close to the cave mouth? The tentacles are concealed somehow - the characters that enter the cave didn’t seem to notice them, and of course the tentacles reach down at some point and grab one of them unexpectedly (and/or maybe one of the creatures they were riding?). I vaguely recall a bit where we see a two-way radio belonging to one of the characters lying amongst said tentacles or whatever later on.

After a lot of, uhm, graphic search results for ‘cartoon tentacles’ I finally found it! It’s a 1982 French/Hungarian animation called Les Maîtres du temps (connoisseurs may recognise Mœbius’ style here) . It was dubbed by the BBC and aired in 1987 & 1991 as The Masters of Time.

It’s on youtube!

https://youtu.be/JcnEpr7kd_w?t=3449

I’ve set the time to the moment in question - a disturbing depiction of strangulation (I think the quietness makes it all the worse, really). Pretty intense stuff for a 4-8 year old.

Yikes, even freaky for a 55-year-old! If I had been a child and seen that scene of the Birdo Beast being taken by cave tentacles, I probably wouldn’t have even needed to see Jaws to live a life fascinated by horror movies. :)

-Tom

This all because of that manga thread making me feel so nostalgic about Nausicaä. So this is sorta about horror but mostly about wanting to reflect upon my fondness for what I’ve (very generically) called elsewhere ‘weird sci-fi’. I loved - loved - Nausicaä when I was little and remember practically all of it, and it fits my ill-defined criteria, though it had its moments of horror too (that warrior god sequence at the end where it melts and there’s bones and stuff poking out of the gore - brrrrr).

The other stuff I saw back then I’ve been less clear on - I saw Nausicaä countless times whereas The Masters of Time was definitely a ‘just the once tyvm’ sorta deal (though those freaky tentacles have surfaced in my mind countless times over the decades, without home, without name, until now). It’s somewhat difficult to remember the exact sequence of when I saw things but I think the first ‘weird sci-fi’ film that I watched which absolutely freaked me out was the 1986 Transformers Movie.

It was part of two cartoon movies recorded to the same worn VHS tape I watched at my aunt’s house when my parents were busy working and she’d take care of me and my [literally] baby brother. One of the movies on the tape was what I was ‘supposed’ to be watching (The Care Bears Movie, yawn) but I guess I lucked into a double feature recorded for my much older cousins.

Transformers was terrifying in places - the opening moments see a horrifying megastructure-sized deathbot roaming the galaxy and devouring the first populated planet it comes across. For a 5(ish) year old with barely any grasp of death as a general concept, seeing genocide perpetrated against an entire species just for snacking purposes was… kind of… a lot. One member of that species survives but gets eaten alive by robopirhanas later in the movie anyway (blimey this movie is bleak). I didn’t have much to do with Transformers before or after so bits like Optimus Prime dying were kinda lost on me - the main sequence I recall really upsetting me was near the end where a bunch of robots are being conveyed into a giant vat of acid. I remember that sequence being much longer - and graphic - than it actually was. Horror thrives in the imagination above all else.

Anyway, at least with Jaws The Shark, all I had to do to avoid certain doom was keep to the shallow paddling bits of the pool at our local leisure centre. I could run out pretty quick - I practiced - enough so that I was very confident in my plan for survival.

However, I had no plan on what to do if some unknown cosmic horror just decided on a whim to devour the Earth. And I still don’t.

Cool scene! I can definitely see why it lodged in your psyche. :)

Nausicaa is amasing, as is the rest of Ghibli (I really like Howl’s Moving Castle and Mononoke, of course).

I feel like “The Last Unicorn” deserves an honorable mention ITT, also.

I’ll never not say Spirited Away is my favorite, it was perfect in every way. But Mononoke was awesome too, like Crouching Tiger, seeing a true master work with the established plotlines and beats and just flat-out do them better than they’ve been done before.

I love them both, but Princess Mononoke is just so rich and beautifully ambiguous and complicated. It’s no secret that Miyazaki is a curmudgeon and an embittered environmentalist, but he nevertheless shows all sides of the civilization/nature dichotomy. You need a place like Iron Town to put up walls against the wilderness in order for the marginalized to have a stable role in society. But inevitably that means making nature the enemy. And you can’t expect any sympathy from nature–that’s not what it does. Also, it taught me that the Forest Spirit makes the flowers grow!

I didn’t get round to seeing anything (else) by Ghibli until I was in my 30s - though there was definitely a phase when I was around 9 or 10 when I watched a lot of anime. My parents worked, a lot, during that period so my brother and I were frequently left alone most weekends with our reward being whatever animated stuff they had in stock at our local blockbuster. Which, apparently, comprised mainly hyper-violent Japanese cartoons.

I guess my dad had something of a laissez-faire toward the age ratings on the boxes (they’re just cartoons, right?) and thus we were both introduced at tender ages to a lot of dismemberment, swearing and even the odd boob (well, ‘even’ boob - they come in pairs, generally). Being the sibling wots in charge, I did have to turn them off on occasion when I thought things got a bit much for my younger brother. Though being a little sneak responsible censor I did of course watch 'em all later just by myself to ensure it was the right thing to do.

We loved it all, of course. The frequent Friday trip to Blockbuster to pick out something new was such a joy. I don’t remember everything we saw, but a lot of it I would certainly term ‘weird sci-fi’. (Un?)fortunately I guess whoever stocked that section didn’t care much for whimsical anime about talking animals and the like, so there was no Ghibli. Mainly just mechas, monsters and samurai slicing chunks out of each other.

So, retrospectively I’m kinda sad I missed out on Catbus, Sailor Moon and a bunch of other, ‘softer’, things that were too uncool/girly for them to stock. However Akira totally blew our fragile little minds so much at the time all we could think and talk about for some time following were motorcycles and laser guns anyway.

(Nausicaä is still my fave)

Akira is horrifying, and it made me want to motorcycle

On the day I learn to ride a Kawasaki Ninja I will definitely be listening to this:

Its major theme seems to be that at what the limit of what is possible, the universe is mostly what exists inside of your head

I like the original Ghost in the Shell better, but Akira would have to be a close #2 of all time:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vsnh5ey_9WI

This was an amazing movie, but I didn’t care for the show at all. The scenes of planes landing over… kai tak airport(?) are just iconic, as are the themes of consciousness and evolution. It owes a lot to Blade Runner, but this film has a tone that has not been reproduced to date, imo. I love how it just goes off into these incredible philosophical discussions in the midst of a police procedural drama… because, let’s talk about it, you know? As someone who grew up in Japan, it’s also a movie that does not take place in Japan, but some analog of the Philippines I guess? The subtle cultural displacement is just very cool, to me.

I’m of the generation that the powers that be (the recently liberalized TV stations) thought it would be cool to show somebody punching a heart out of somebody else, blood included, in kids prime time (just after school). That’s the beginning of Saint Seiya. I think I must have been 10 or so.

We were also exposed to blatant pervy misogyny (Ranma 1/2) and much other fun stuff, all in open TV broadcasts at the time every kid in the country was watching TV. I guess cheap cartoons (cheap to buy licenses for) beat content being adequate. My whole generation is sort of messed up.

But my personal trauma came from a scene in Nadia, Secret of the Blue Water in which the main character talks through his best friend’s unavoidable death through radiation exposure, separated just by a reinforced door. Fun times for a 10 years old….

Can’t find the scene, but this is TVTropes’ description:

The climax of this episode involves a genial sailor, Ensign Fait, sacrificing his life to save the Nautilus both from a lethal gas leak and from being captured by the American battleships. What makes this moment truly heartwrenching is how Jean gradually becomes crushed when he vainly argues for the sailor to be rescued. Fait’s death scene, incidentally, is truly terrifying, in which the sailor coughs uncontrollably to his death after screaming “Oh no! I don’t wanna die! There’s so many more things I wanted to do!” right after he told Jean that it was okay because he lived a good life. To have him completely contradict that right after, and in such a desperate manner, made this a huge Tearjerker. Jean’s breakdown is similarly heartbreaking: he pounds his fist hopelessly on the sealed hatch to the engine bunker, calling Fait’s name until he finally collapses on the floor, wailing hysterically.

No need for shady VHS rentals (although I had those too). This was kids broadcast TV!

Oh, believe me it’s worth it! If a little hard to hear over the roar of existence wooshing past you at 140+mph. I have thus far been unable to source a matching laser gun. =(

GitS was/is important to me, but given it only came out (here) in the late 90s I was well into my teens when I saw it. On the one hand, I love its exploration of transhumanism, the soundtrack is haunting, and the action scenes are just exquisite (that’s a lot of stuff in a single hand!). But on the other the overall narrative never made complete sense; there’s a bunch of background political stuff that happens that gets almost completely glossed over and I only ‘got’ it when I finally read the manga. Which, btw, is totally worth the price of entry for the steamy sex scene alone.

I loved SAC too and legit cried when Tachikoma sacrificed itself at the end of the first season. But don’t tell anyone! I like people to think I’m the tough type that rides motorbikes and shoots laser guns for fun.

English dub, but you’re not kidding - it is very rough. This is basically K-19 for kids.

QT3 needs to set up a support group!

In the UK we only had 4 TV channels at the time and I guess there was enough British/US content to hand that I don’t think anime shows ever really aired here (if they did, I missed 'em). That probably changed when Satellite TV became a household staple from the mid 90s onwards. As a result I kinda had two anime phases; the late 80’s/early 90’s days of shady VHS (which stopped at some point, I guess when we were both old enough to not be kept trapped indoors) and the early/mid 00’s when I first got internet and went on a total anime binge. I did see GitS in the late 90’s but only due to it being so heavily advertised in Syndicate Wars!

It’s also very well done. You can see the underpinnings of what was really good about Gainax here (and the psychological sadism of Anno too).

On the other hand, it’s necessary to watch things that traumatize us at least a little. I still remember watching an animated Lensman movie on TV when I was probably 8 or 9 years old, and after some of the main characters died at the end, I felt the shock for days. That wasn’t how TV was supposed to go, and that made it a lot more meaningful for young me.

A few years ago I stumbled on it on Youtube, went straight to the final scene, but in this version, after the hero sacrifices himself another character goes “Thank heavens the power of the lens saved his life!”. Fucking cowards.

Oh, I agree, and watching stuff above my age was a big part of my upbringing. But that scene was sadistic :) (kidding, it was just very well done, and thus perhaps a little too effective for the target audience).

But really, this scene stuck in my head for forever. I think it was about 10 years ago at most (so when I was over 30) that I decided to track down when it came from (I didn’t remember the name od the series. Wasn’t watching regularly, just picking up the random episode), and I remembered the details to a T and was able to find it easily. Talk about impact.

PS: about the details. The cut above is missing the part when the kid, earring they are sealing off the reactor, runs towards it, and finding the first door locked, goes through a ventilation shaft into another section of the hallway, gettin just this close to the dying sailor that he’s trying to save, who’s at the other side of the last door. Then the above scene plays.

We don’t really have a “General movie discussion” thread so I chose this one as the most general and active.

We need a word, probably a German word, for movies that you suddenly want to see but are on none of the major streaming services. Various other threads got me wanting to see Jaws again, and I know I’ve seen it on HBO, Netflix, and Amazon a million times but when I want to see it there’s nothing. Movenfreuden? It happens constantly, that one movie that you suddenly remember and want to see and you know it was available a month ago and now it’s gone.

Yeah, I don’t know what the word is, but we need it.

Conversely, there have been several movies that I couldn’t find on streaming, so I got the dvd from the library. Within a few weeks, the movie shows up on Netflix or something. I swear they’re watching my library account.

Fahrvergviewin’.