Video Nasties at Breakfast

I wasn't able to watch the film Assault on Precinct 13 again for over 25 years.

My parents were pretty liberal about the sorts of things we were allowed to watch on TV - they weren't the sort of 70s parents who thought that Tiswas and Grange Hill were going to corrupt their children (I knew some kids who had parents who thought that ITV was inappropriate in its entirety). We were allowed to watch all sorts of films and TV that were well beyond our reach in legal as well as accessibility terms. I still suspect that our viewings of 70s/80s american sex comedies were my parents' attempt at sex eduction.

And so it came to pass that Assault on Precinct 13 was rented from the dodgy bloke up the road who ran a video rental operation from his tobacco-smelling front room (until one of his technologically-challenged neighbours reported him and he had to transfer the whole shebang to a disused car sales forecourt on the other side of town).

Now, Assault on Precinct 13 was one of those films that was upsetting all sorts of people at the time. It wasn't quite being labelled a video nasty in the ways that Driller Killer and Texas Chainsaw Massacre were, but it was close.

My mum was working nights that week. She was working in the old folks home opposite the mental hospital. She'd come home smelling cold and slightly damp. She'd often cycle there and back on this awful, second hand, folding "ladies" bike. It was a light, metallic green.

So my dad, in her absense, let my brother and I watch this quasi-video nasty. But it was slightly longer than we expected it to be and our bed time came and we were sent to bed before the film finished.

He said he'd let us watch the end in the morning. And he did.

Big mistake.

Get up. Get dressed. Have breakfast. Go to school. That was the drill in the morning in our house.

Nowhere was "catch the last ten minutes of the video nasty you were watching the night before" part of the agreed routine. Mum came home during the said ten minutes and all hell broke loose - not because we were watching people getting shot, maimed and burnt alive by unrelentingly violent LA (?) gang members. But that the "proper" schedule wasn't being adhered to.

God she was angry. She was particularly angry at my dad. She was seriously, seriously angry.

The strength of her disapproval and the enormity of the conflict between my parents that the situation had created caused me a level of gut-twisting anguish that I have always, in a pavlovian fashion, associated with that movie.

I wasn't able to watch it, or consider watching it, without feeling a little (or a lot) of that gut-twisting anguish, for something like 25 years.

It's not actually that good a film.