13 Movies You Loved As A Child (But Hate As An Adult)

3. Jumanji (1995)

90s classic Jumanji follows the plight of young Alan Parrish after he unearths a mysterious board game and discovers that every roll of the dice unleashes a new horror that can only be stopped by playing through to the bitter end. Unfortunately for Alan, he has to wait 26 years before he can finish playing, as his first roll traps him inside the jungles of the evil game. For a PG movie, Jumanji was actually pretty scary, with the movie's main bad guy Van Pelt particularly terrifying for younger viewers, and it's not hard to see why the film's thrills landed so well when it came out. Watch it back, however, and it isn't the child killer that has you hiding behind your hands, but the maddeningly wooden characters he ends up pursuing. In fact, by the end you find yourself almost rooting for the crazed hunter. Fuzzy special effects do little to paper over the cracks, and watching Jumanji as an adult reveals a subtle racism that you almost certainly never noticed as a child - a quite deliberate exploitation of Western phobias about Africa in the form of giant mosquitoes, rabid monkeys and killer stampedes.