Small Soldiers: The Night That RUINED My Life

6/14/26

Let me set the scene. It was an average night, my sister and I went to our babysitter's house as usual. Our babysitter had a bunch of VHS tapes for us to watch. Most of them were family movies like Matilda (1996) or kids TV shows like Rugrats (1991). Naturally, my sister and I got bored of watching the same tapes over and over again, so we went digging through the tape collection to find something that we hadn't seen before. My sister comes across a certain tape that didn't have a case on it. All we knew about this movie was that it was called "Small Soldiers" so it was probably about soldiers who were small but, without the case we couldn't figure out much more. I felt a bit iffy about the title because I really was not in the mood to watch a war documentary. By the way, I was 5 years old at the time. Anyways, my sister convinced me to let her put the tape in and the movie started.

I'm only going to give a general synopsis of the movie from my memory, not because I'm too scared to watch it now, I'm just too lazy to. Maybe I'll watch it some other time in the future idk. But basically this kid has like some toy set of these indigenous creatures or whatever. Then he ends up getting another toy set of these soldiers. That's where the title comes in. The movie is about small toy soldiers. Before I saw this movie, I thought it would be about soldiers who were very short. Back to the movie, the indigenous creatures tell the kid (yes, they can talk) that the soldiers want to kill them blah blah blah, they need to escape from the soldiers or they will all die, whatever. So, the small soldiers want to kill the other toy set, probably because they're racist, I don't remember but, the kid wants to stop them. Not only because he likes his indigenous creatures toy set but because, the small soldiers also did a bit of a reign of terror on the kids family, they tied some people up and left them in a closet or something. Anyways, the small solders all get brutally murdered and the indigenous creatures get to live in harmony. The End.

My sister begins to rewind the tape as we're preparing to leave and go back to our house. The entire time while this is happening, I'm kind of freaking out, and trying to calm myself down by reminding myself that it's just a movie and none of it was real. Also, Kirsten Dunst is in this movie. Just wanted to mention that, it has nothing to do with the rest of this story. We get back to our house and, my sister starts watching Beyoncé music videos on YouTube. I've never been a fan of Beyoncé, actually I used to HATE her during this time because I didn't like her music. After this night, I had an actual reason to dislike Beyoncé. She gave me PTSD. I definitely am exaggerating that but let me continue. My sister was watching the video for Countdown by Beyoncé and, I got a very unsettling feeling while the video was playing. Now, whenever I hear that song, I feel super uncomfortable because my mind goes back to how uncomfortable I felt when I heard that song like right after I saw a very terrifying movie for a 5 year old to see. I also feel very uncomfortable whenever I hear the song Wannabe by the Spice Girls but that's because the song actually plays in the movie.

So, the moral of this story is, never play Countdown by Beyoncé around me and never play Wannabe by the Spice Girls in front of me. I will freak out a little bit. Also, happy birthday to my sister!!