The final installment to "The Lord of the Rings" trilogy will surely be
one of the more memorable moments in my movie viewing history. Not only
is it on my personal list of top ten most memorable films of all time,
but it was funny, thrilling, scary, epic, sad, uplifting - everything a
cranky, picky, overly critical movie buff like me would want from a
movie short of having some blonde hand models feed me Jujubees with one
of my wrists hooked up to a watered-down soda IV.

But that's not what made "The Return of the King" so memorable for me.
Years from now when my family (gets a reprieve from the Governor long
enough for "Family Movie Night") and they ask to watch the last "Lord of
the Rings" movie, I'll think back and remember the family of morons
sitting behind me who were the most annoying group of morons ever to
wander into a movie theater.

Every imaginable distraction or disturbance you could experience in a
movie theater sat a row behind me. Plus, "The Return of the King" is
approximately three hours long, which is fun to watch if you're with
a group of friends or your family who enjoy going to the movies,
but feels more like there's a tiny nail that's being pounded once every
five minutes in the back of your head just at the point where your spine
and neck meet the brain.

Of course, now that I think of it, most of the movies I've featured in
this column give me the same feeling, but this nail feels more like a
two-foot iron railroad spike dipped in liquid salt.

It really ruined the experience because each family member had an
assigned role in the annoyance mission. The second youngest daughter
could not sit still through the entire film so she shifts and squirms in
the seat loud enough to make the guy in the projection booth yell at her
to sit down or he would personally duct tape her to the seat. The oldest
son cracked dumb jokes and made really stupid sounding fart noises at
every opportunity. The youngest daughter, practically an infant, cried
and whimpered more often than Tammy Faye Baker during a Barbara
Walters interview. The father talked back to the screen analyzing the
reality of a "fantasy" film. And the mother tried to correct their behavior
by slapping them all in the face at volume levels usually reserved for
exploding M-80s.

Nothing could shut this family up. Aragorn could emerge from the screen
and cut their heads off with his gigantic broadsword and the disembodied
head of the father would still keep blabbering away, "Oh yeah like I'm
really dead now that Aragorn has emerged from the screen and cut my head
off."

The oldest brat I wouldn't have minded as much if the jokes he made were
funnier and the fart jokes didn't sound like untied balloons flying
around a room. Heck, I used to act that way with my friends in movie theaters
and we were annoying but if the movie was bad enough, at least we were
entertaining.

Case in point "Air Force One" starring Harrison Ford

(An opening scene in which paratroopers carrying laser scope weapons
shoot security guards standing on a roof, a close shot shows a laser aiming at
a soldier, the weapon fires and a guard drops dead)

DANNY IN THE BACK ROW AT AGE 15: "Laser Tag gone horribly wrong"

Ok, so I wasn't Meca-Buddy Hackett as a teenager, but it was
something to do while having to sit through that. After all, who's
got their own humor column here?

But out of the entire moron clan, the parents annoyed me most of all
because they brought an infant with them. I realize that the little
schnookums is too young to understand when she screams for a bottle
at the top of her lungs, she's driving people around her to kill
against their own will. But parents should have enough gray matter to
realize that a kid no matter how old they are is never going to sit
quietly for three hours even if they feed them all the Sno-Caps their
stomach can hold.

I wanted to stand up and scream at them as loud as I could, "Listen you
Jerry Springer rejects! Some of us have paid to see a movie, not to
listen to you and your waterheaded cracker spawn put on your own show
because your Mommy and Daddy couldn't give you enough chromosomes
when you were born to develop a decent attention span."

But I held back not because I thought it was inappropriate or wrong to
yell at them. Chances are someone would've shushed me because I was
annoying them.

Oh, and how does all this relate to the notorious bad sci-fi film "This
Island Earth"? It was featured in the "Mystery Science Theater 3000: The
Movie" in which two puppet robots and a human crack jokes throughout the
whole film.

If you can think of a better way to link a movie to that experience, go
get your own column.

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©2003 by Danny Gallagher

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