(The following is a nonprofit work of fanfiction and is outside of the original canon. All names, characters, businesses, places, events, and/or incidents of any kind depicted within this story are being used for entertainment purposes only.)
(The Loud House and all related characters were created by Chris Savino and all rights belong to Nickelodeon.)
- Chapter Eighteen -
A Very Rude Awakening
The next day…
Friday, July 17th…
What could be just as fun and exciting as going to the local arcade, having a sleepover with your friends, celebrating your twelfth birthday, hanging out at a theme park with your family, and visiting your grandfather at a nursing home? Why, the prospect of going to see a movie at your local theater, of course. Any kid will tell you how fun it is to be taken out into town to watch a flick up on the big screen. It was always quite the experience for me growing up. The movie posters, the popcorn, soda, snacks, finding the best seat in the room, you name it.
The last time we went to the movies was back in June, and what we saw was the new Spaceballs, a space opera parody directed by Mel Brooks, the man responsible for such classics like Blazing Saddles and Young Frankenstein. We saw it just three days after my disastrous sleepover. And let me tell you, I had never laughed so hard in my entire life. A few times, it felt like I was on the verge of peeing my pants. Quite a few times, we had to cover our ears whenever the rest of the cast were about to say a bad word, and I also remember nearly retching at the sight of the character Pizza the Hut.
I was surprised that I hadn't lost my appetite for pizza afterwards. If I had to choose a favorite part, I say it would have to be the scene where John Candy and Bill Pullman were at the diner, where the little alien creature—an obvious parody of the xenomorph from Ridley Scott's Alien—danced and sang to the song Hello! Ma Baby, just like the frog from Looney Tunes, right down to using the exact same audio.
Since that day, none of us could stop quoting the now famous line, "May the Schwartz be with you!".
Heck, I even bought the movie's official soundtrack on cassette tape at the nearest K-Mart the day after. Although, it was mostly because I wanted to repeatedly listen to the sixth track; Spaceballs by The Spinners, the song that played during the self-destruct sequence and at the end credits. You're no doubt wondering as to why I failed in even mentioning having gone to the movies earlier that summer in the first place. All I can say is in my defense; it genuinely slipped my mind.
So, that's pretty much my bad.
Anyways, moving on...
There I was on that Friday afternoon, sitting on the couch in the living room watching a rerun episode of Perfect Strangers as my father sat in his favorite recliner chair with Lily on his lap, reading to her one of his book from The Railway Series we had gotten for him earlier on Father's Day—That last part also slipped my mind. Once again, my bad. As I stared at the screen of the old Zenith, a feeling of excitement began to fester inside me, my mind getting caught up with going to the movies later. I almost became so in my own head that I almost didn't hear Dad say my name.
"Lincoln, could you turn the TV down a little bit?" he asked me. Complying, I picked up the remote from the coffee table and turned the volume down by a couple of bars. Decidedly, I got up from the couch and sat on the floor cross-legged, getting just a little closer to the TV to try and heat it better, my back just a few centimeters from touching the edge of the coffee table. After a short while, I began to suck in my bottom lip, that same excitement still growing inside.
From the coffee table, I grabbed a piece of the morning's newspaper, and scanned down at one corner which had a list of movies playing. One of those movies was Jaws: The Revenge, which was going to start playing at three-thirty. I glanced down at my wristwatch, and it virtually filled me with dread. Within two minutes, it was going to be three o'clock.
They should be already here by now, I thought almost impatiently. What the heck is taking them so long? As if Fate itself was reading my thoughts, I suddenly heard the sweet sound of a car's horn from outside. My heart nearly jumped, and a smile widened across my face. Finally, my ride was here. I quickly got to my feet and put on my socks and shoes. Once I had everything I needed, I was about to race out the front door until Dad called out to me.
"Have a good day at the movies, son!" he said cheerily. "Let us know how it goes!"
"Bye, bye, Winky!" Lily called out as well in her cute toddler voice, waving her little hand.
"See you later, guys!" I said back before closing the door and racing down the patio through the front yard.
A minivan—more specifically, a 1984 Dodge Caravan, was parked closely up against the curb in front of my house. The minivan was colored a buttermilk tan with dark wooden side paneling, and it looked like it had recently gone through a car wash, not one trace of dirt or grime to be found. Very impressive if you ask me. Making my way across the yard, I opened the front passenger door, and saw a mature-looking teenaged girl in the driver's seat. She looked in my direction and smiled.
"Hey, Lincoln," she greeted chirpily. "You ready to go?"
"Oh, you know it, Carol!" I answered, my shoulders scrunching together in excitement.
Carol Pingrey was a young teenage girl who closely appeared to be the same age as Lori, even having a matching height as well. In an odd sort of way, she somewhat resembled Lori in certain areas, except Carol's blond hair was more yellow, longer, and more feathered with a purple headband. She was dressed in a white short-sleeved polo shirt and a purple-colored argyle sweater vest, including a pair of high-waist, light blue jeans, and brown loafers.
She was practically the living image of the girl next door.
And yes, you read that earlier part correctly. Her last name was Pingrey, the same one as Conner. One fun fact you should know about Carol; at one point in their respective childhoods, she and my sister Lori were former rivals. Although, to be very honest, it was more of a one-sided kind of rivalry, mostly because Carol didn't even know about it until a bit later in their teenage years. After that was all cleared up, she and Lori became good friends.
Just try to imagine the stunned look on my face when Conner first told me his full name and clarified his possible relation to Carol. How very peculiar that my sister's former childhood rival never once mentioned having a sibling or two before later in life, let alone one of them being the same infamous bratty kid who tried to steal my box of cereal the year before. And for this day, Carol was going to be our chaperone, which she had no problem volunteering for at all.
At first, we tried to get Lori to do it, but she and Leni had other plans—which unsurprisingly involved shopping at the mall with their friends. Thus, making Carol the only one who was available for the job. After having climbed into the front passenger seat next to Carol, I whipped my head around to look towards the back of the Dodge Caravan and saw Clyde and Stella, sitting restfully in the first back seats, and Rusty, Zach, and Liam were located in the far back of the minivan, practically squeezing beside each other.
However, I noticed that there was just one other person who was missing. I glanced back at her with a raised eyebrow.
"Where's Conner?" I asked curiously. "Isn't he coming too?" Carol answered by shaking her blond-haired head.
"I'm afraid he's gonna be staying home today," she said, much to my disappointment.
"Why is that?" I asked curiously as I fastened my seatbelt across my waist. "Did he get in trouble or something?"
"No, nothing like that," Carol dispelled. "He woke up with a bad cold this morning." I couldn't help but cringe a little bit after hearing that.
"Oh." I simply vocalized. That stinks. No doubt he's miserable beyond belief right now. Hope he gets better soon.
"Hey, Lincoln," Clyde piped up directly from behind me. "Isn't Lynn coming with us?" I shook my head at his question.
"Nah, Mom had to take her out to karate practice today." I explained.
"Trying to be like the Karate Kid, eh?" Rusty teased from the far back. I brushed this off with a dismissive raspberry.
"Pfft, more like trying to become a member of Cobra Kai!"
"What makes you say that, Lincoln?" Stella questioned, sitting precisely behind Carol. "I think Lynn would make a very tubular Karate Kid." I turned my head around to face my female friend with a deadpanned expression on my face.
"Stella, if I had a dollar for every time she shouted, 'No mercy!', I'd be the wealthiest kid in Royal Woods right now."
"Just like Donald Trump?" Liam asked, sitting between Zach and Rusty, his southern drawl strong as always. I thought about this for a few seconds before finally half shrugging my shoulders.
"Eh, probably wouldn't go that far." And with that, Carol maneuvered her family's Dodge Caravan out of the curb and drove down the road, leaving my house behind until we could no longer see it. After a short while, as we drove further into the downtown area, I took another glance over at Carol for a second, her gaze set firmly on the road in front of us. I couldn't help but smile just a little bit, admiring just how very pretty she looked.
She definitely reminded me a lot of the character Ali Mills, Daniel's first girlfriend, from The Karate Kid.
Carol is indeed very pretty, no doubt about that, I thought to myself. But she's nowhere near as close to being absolutely beautiful as Sam. In that very instant, the mentally created image of my said teenage crush appeared right in front of my mind's eye, flashing me that same cute smile of hers, followed by her equally heart-melting giggle.
"Oh, Linky! You're so totally handsome!" Imaginary Sam purred, before blowing a kiss and giving me a flirty wink. For that, I leaned my back against my cushioned seat, grinning really big like a dumb lovestruck goofball. I was so enraptured by my little fantasy that I almost didn't hear my name called.
"Lincoln!" Carol called with a slightly raised voice, nudging me on the shoulder to grab a hold of my attention. I fidgeted, my heart skipping a beat for a second, my mind coming back to reality. I turned once again to face her. "We're here."
Looking out my window, I watched with my own two eyes as the Royal Woods Cinema quickly grew bigger and bigger the more we drove closer to its general location. A number of other cars were parked around the vicinity, giving me the bad feeling that we would not be able to find ourselves an empty parking spot. Fortunately for us, Carol, with the eyes of an eagle, managed to spot one that was unexpectedly in front of the theater. Not wanting to take a chance, she carefully maneuvered the Dodge Caravan right into it, squeezing really tight between two other vehicles.
Once the minivan's engine was turned off, we almost immediately unbuckled our seatbelts and piled out onto the curb, our stomachs rising with mixed feelings of excitement, hope, and dread, all in that exact order. The Royal Woods Cinema was about three and a half floors high, with its name expanding across the building, surrounded by glowing lights. Also, on each side of the building, there were two ticket booths, one with a large number of people waiting in line and the other with a lot less so.
We couldn't have picked a far better time to come here. I thought. They're most likely watching the new Robocop. The gang, Carol, and I stood patiently in the much shorter line until we finally made it in front of the right-side ticket booth.
"Seven tickets for Jaws: The Revenge, please." Carol proclaimed, handing out her credit card. The ticket booth guy took the card, swiped in on a card swiper, and handed it back, along with each of our seven movie tickets.
"It'll be playing in theater 2," he explained rather boredly. With that out of the way, we made our way to the front doors.
The smell of buttered popcorn assaulted our noses the moment we walked inside, filling us with hunger and relaxation. There was just something about going to the movies and smelling that popcorn that just makes this experience a lot more sentimental. The interior looked a lot more colorful than it did on the outside. The black carpeted floor was decorated with stylized neon-colored squares and triangles, and the walls were painted blue with some pink and white.
Hanging on said walls were a number of movie posters that mostly consisted of recent releases like Revenge of the Nerds II: Nerds in Paradise, RoboCop, Adventures in Babysitting, White Water Summer, The Squeeze, Innerspace, a re-release of Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, and of course Spaceballs and Jaws: The Revenge. There was even one old and faded poster for Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom. I smirked a little after seeing it.
It's still unbelievable that this movie was solely responsible for the creation of the PG-13 rating, I thought amusingly. Dead ahead of us was the front counter where they sold the popcorn, soda, candy bars, and other snacks that were very essential for the every day movie experience. Once again, we were forced to wait in line until we reached the front counter at last, and Carol went ahead in ordering our popcorn.
"Does anyone know what time it is right now?" Zach asked curiously, scratching his curly redhaired head. I took a quick glanced down at my wristwatch.
"It's three twenty-six," I said before abruptly realizing what I just said. Everybody's eyes, except for Carol's, practically bulged out of their sockets.
"Three twenty-six?" Clyde almost exclaimed. "Holy smokes! The movie's going to start in four minutes!"
"We need to get there now, or else we'll lose some good seats!" Stella added sounding just as anxious.
"Yeah! And not to mention miss the previews!" Zach said. "I love seeing those! How will I know what movie to see next year if I don't see the trailers first?"
My sentiments exactly.
With this new information, the gang and I started to look and feel urgent, impatiently tapping our feet to the carpeted ground, becoming a bit more than agitated with how long it was taking to get our popcorn and sodas. As quickly as possible, we each got our soft drink of choice, and one large bucket of popcorn with extra butter and salt from the front counter, along with six little red-and-white striped paper bags, Carol not at all minding having to pay for everything from her own wallet.
When we truly had everything we needed, all seven of us made our way over to the left-side hallway until we came upon Theater 2. We hurriedly walked inside, all the while trying to careful not to drop or spill our sodas, and right before us were the six dozen seats and the giant movie screen that proudly displayed itself. There was hardly anybody in this room, which was a good thing for us. We eased our way down over to the fourth row and took our seats closely at the center. I always loved sitting in the middle when we go. That way I could see everything and not be forced to look at one side.
I was always pretty annoying when being made to sit in the far left or right side of a movie theater and keep your head turned to even see the rest of the giant screen.
Right on time, after having gotten each of our paper bags full of popcorn, the lights in the room quickly dimmed, and the giant screen brightened in an instant. One by one, we saw the trailers for upcoming movies such as Dirty Dancing, Plains, Trains, and Automobiles, Hellraiser—that one we were forced to close our eyes from seeing—The Monster Squad, The Lost Boys, and then The Princess Bride.
That last one looks like something Lori, Leni, and even Carol would totally love to watch, I thought, taking the first large bite of my fresh popcorn. And then, when the classic logo for Universal appeared on the giant screen, I felt my back sink into my cushioned seat. We all looked at each other and held our crossed fingers up, the same exact thought playing in our heads. Clyde licked his lips unsurely, leaving me with a less than positive feeling in my stomach.
Something tells me that we've made a terrible mistake. I mentally said.
And boy howdy was that quite the understatement because the movie itself ended being possibly the worst thing I had ever seen in my life, much to my growing shock and disappointment. For the next one hour and twenty-nine minutes, we all stared at the giant screen flabbergasted. The plot, the dialogue, the quality, even the animatronic shark itself, it was all wrong. Although, I will say the one part which actually made me shiver was the beginning when the shark attacked Sean Brody out on the docks at night. Nothing was scarier than the whole idea of being attacked by a predator in the darkness—I mean, just ask Freddy Krueger.
However, the rest of the movie after that was pretty much all downhill. There was nothing that made it redeemable. Like, none at all. Period. But what especially confused the living daylights out of me was when the shark literally—I kid you not when I say this—followed after the Brody family all the way down to the Bahamas. How in the world was that even possible? There was no logical way that a great white shark would survive out in a really warm climate like the Bahamas.
If Lisa had gone with us that day, she would no doubt be totally angry and go on and on about how it was scientifically inaccurate—which I strongly concur. I then remembered what she said the other day, about this film finding better success than Jaws 3-D to be implausible. Oh, how right she was. I glanced over at Carol, who stared at the screen with her brows furrowed in confusion, seeming to have forgotten about the half-empty popcorn bucket she still held in her lap.
At some point, a little halfway towards the one-hour mark, I wanted very desperately for this travesty of a movie to be over already so that I could go home, run upstairs to my room, and just cry myself to sleep. Eventually, when the movie was FINALLY over, after they killed the shark, the gang and I remained totally silent.
None of us uttered a single word, not even as we stood up from our seats and walked out of that theater, not even bothering to finish the rest of our popcorn and half-drunk soda, which we promptly threw away into the nearest trash can. It was not until after we made it back outside and stood there out on the sidewalk like mindless zombies as Carol went to unlock her Dodge Caravan that we were able to find the ability to speak again.
"Dude..." Clyde uttered, being the first, a horrified expression on his face. "I... I don't know what to say."
"I do..." Stella said, her eyes looking like she was just a moment away from welling up. "That... was without a doubt... one of the most terrible movies... I have ever seen... I my entire life."
"This... This is worse than Jaws 3-D!" Zach spoke dreadfully, looking down at both his hands in utter disbelief. "I didn't think such a thing would actually be possible. But... But..."
"I think somethin' had gone and died inside me." Liam added, clutching at his scrawny chest.
"Man, I want the one hour and twenty-nine minutes of my life back!" Rusty grunted in frustration, stomping his left foot to the ground, and crossing his lanky arms.
"I'm surprised that we even managed to sit through the whole ding dang thing and not leave halfway," I managed to say, massaging the bridge of my nose. "And boy is Conner lucky not to be here with us right now. Guess one good thing came out of that cold of his."
"Yeah. Talk about a blessing in disguise." Clyde groaned. After Carol had unlocked the Dodge Caravan, we piled inside, re-buckled our seatbelts, and drove away—as far away from that theater as possible. After a while, we finally came back to my house just in time to see Mom and Lynn having just pulled up into the driveway with Vanzilla. Back from karate practice, no doubt. When Carol parked the minivan up against the curb, I unbuckled and climbed out not before waving bye to my friends.
In that moment, Lynn popped out of Vanzilla, still dressed in her white karate gi, and approached me.
"Hiya, bro!" she exclaimed, slapping me hard on the back, which only caused me to let out a very annoyed groan. "How did the movie go?" I turned my gaze to meet hers, giving her the most unhappy frown I could ever make.
"I don't wanna talk about it," I groaned, arms drooping from my shoulders. My sister wouldn't take that for an answer.
"Come on, Lincoln! Was it good? How was it? Is it actually better than Jaws 3-D?" I knew for a fact that Lynn was not at all going to stop until I gave her a proper response, so I swallowed a hard lump and took a deep breath before opening my mouth to speak.
"Lynn, I really don't wanna go into detail about it," I managed to vocalize. "But I will say that you should count yourself luck that you didn't come with us." At this, my sister made a frown of her own, knowing very quickly what I was saying.
"Oh man," she murmured, following me up to the front porch and into the living room. "Was it really that bad?" I looked at her like I was about to cry before turning away.
"It was horrible!" I whined, covering my face with my hands. "It was worse than Jaws 3-D!"
"Yeesh," Lynn muttered, with a pitying tone in her voice.
"And in case you might be wondering, Conner didn't go with us either," I explained. "He had to stay home because he woke up with a cold this morning." My thirteen-year-old jock for a sister cringed a little when she heard that, just like I had done when Carol told me the same news.
"Wow, sounds like he really dodged a bullet there." Lynn said. If only I could say the same thing for the gang and myself.
"You're telling me," I replied with a frustrated groan, scratching the back of my head. "Now, if you'll excuse me, I'm gonna go upstairs, take a hot shower, and then cry myself to sleep." And with that, I slowly walked up the stairs, feeling like my legs were being held down by weights, with Lynn following right behind me. As she went into her and Lucy's room, having decided not to ask any further about the movie—thank goodness—I made my way over to mine to grab my towel and loofah.
"I just hope the Garbage Pail Kids Movie fairs better." I whispered to myself.
Little did I realize that my cinematic suffering was only the beginning...
Man, this chapter was pretty fun to write. Lincoln and his friends were definitely not at all expecting the new Jaws movie to be absolutely terrible, were they? It sure makes it all the more hilarious, while it also made me feel bad for them too. You never really know what to expect when it comes to going out to the movies.
Now that that's out of the way, I can finally make my announcement. I'm going to be putting this story on hiatus. But don't you guys worry, it will only be a temperory one, for I still plan on coming back to it in the closest future. The reason why for the hiatus is because I want to give my creative muscles a break for a little while before I can hop back on the saddle.
I've been writing this story since last April in 2023, so I think it would be nice to let myself relax so that I can rejuvinate myself for when I come back. The last thing I want is to become burned out and no longer inspired. And on top of that, my family vacation is coming up later in about a couple of months, so the timing couldn't be any more perfect.
So, until then, have yourselves a good Memorial Day, and I'll see you guys later.
Peace out...