Friday the 13th doesn’t scare me. Never has, never will.
What does scare me and has scared the bejesus out of me is the Honey, I Shrunk the Audience attraction at Disneyland.
Here’s the scene: Wayne Szalinsky (Rick Moranis) has obviously not learned from his past experiences. First, the guy shrinks his kids so small that they’re floating around in a bowl of (what appears to be, based on consistency) 2 percent milk and grasping onto Cheerios as life-preservers. When that clusterfuck was fixed, the guy goes out and enlarges his toddler to the size of Godzilla, and get this — he loses him. Where does the smart toddler go? Las Vegas. The National Guard, was obviously, called in to “handle the situation”.
Years later, the lawyers at Disneyland have overlooked any risk management issues, and decided to give the guy an award and his own theater in the smallest, overpriced, about to collapse and be bought up by Comcast Cablevision, amusement park ever. Right across from Star Tours (will they please retire that one already because it’s beginning to look like my stop-motion movies with my action figures) is the theater where (for some odd reason) Wayne Szalinsky will be receiving (get this) an award for his (malfunctioning) shrinking machine. As soon as you walk in and see the shrinking machine, you know there’s going to be trouble.
Cliff Notes’ version for those with a life: Amidst all the chaos, the shrinking ray turns on the audience and “shrinks everyone”. And then, Wayne accidentally shrinks a cart-load of rats. They go running off the stage and onto the theater floor. The darkened theater floor.
The floor that I cannot see because it is pitch black and I have just (supposedly) been shrunken down to the size of a rat-turd.
Here’s where the fear comes in. As the rats race under the seats of the theater — I feel them. I jerk my knees up so fast and so high that I slam them into my chin. A man with twelve digital cameras around his neck also jerks up, sending two of those cameras into a women on his left, still drinking a Slurpee. The Slurpee falls onto the ground, and I suspect — stains some of those rats blood-red. But I can’t see if that’s really happened because of…
The darkened theater floor.
Don’t rub my shoulder and tell me that it’s only a mechanism that shoots air and weird wiggly things at my ankles. There are goddamn rats running around my feet! I’ll scream.
I didn’t put my feet back down until I was returned to normal size and the lights came back on. I don’t plan on going near shrinking rays or Wayne Szalinsky anytime soon. (I don’t care if he also starred in SCTV, Strange Brew and Little Shop of Horrors. I don’t.
More scary than Friday the 13th, or knives and hatchets and a burnt-faced freak trying to kill me in my dreams, is the simulated feeling of rats running around my feet on…
The darkened theater floor.
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In other news — I found out today that I am allergic to (get this)…cattle.
Don’t ask me, ask my allergist.
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