Buzz off, killjoys – sneaking into illicit films is a teenage pleasure

Plans to introduce Home Office-backed ID checks in cinemas are a wearying bit of state-sponsored joylessness. Let kids get their kicks

15- and 18-certificate films have always been gauntlets thrown down to younger teens, hurdles to be overcome when you’re barely rounding puberty. Sneaking in underage has been a rite of passage for generations, thanks to the lack of strict policing or ID checks by cinema employees – until now.

A new app under trial by the Home Office is set to be used as a digital proof of age, using uploads of a passport or other official document as the only way to unlock access to age-restricted films. Gone will be the thrill of getting into your first 15 when you’re technically still 12, or your first 18 a couple of years later. I remember dragging my mother, in 1992, to two violent classics she did not enjoy at all at the Showcase Cinema in Peterborough, on different weekends when I could bunk off from boarding school. The films were Reservoir Dogs, complete with ear-slicing, and Bram Stoker’s Dracula, complete with uncomfortable raunch when the vampiresses pounce on Keanu Reeves.

I was a lanky 14-year-old at the time, making the most of the growth spurt, and (perhaps thanks to dwarfing my 5’ 4” mum by half a foot) no one really batted an eyelid. Come Pulp Fiction, which I think I saw three times as a 16-year-old in cinemas, I’d begun treating 18s as a sure thing.

A trip for our whole extended family to True Lies, while on holiday in the summer of 1994, only posed some problems for my 10-year-old brother, since James Cameron’s film was a soft 15. There was a whole phalanx of us, including slightly older cousins and our parents, queuing up to get tickets for this long-awaited treat, but what to do with the one a head shorter than anyone else? We stuck a baseball cap on his head and hoped for the best.

It didn’t quite work. The person at the box office, more alert than some, scanned our faces. Spotting this pint-sized punter trying to look effortfully nonchalant, they instantly queried his age. My mum leapt forward to intervene in a harsh whisper: “Sssssh! He’s small for his year group and very sensitive about it.” That did the trick. The collective feeling of having perpetrated this tiny, middle-class heist gave the whole outing even more of a buzz – and this was only True Lies we’re talking about, not Showgirls.

Arnold Schwarzenegger and Jamie Lee Curtis in True LiesCredit: Getty

Of course, there’s no saying what happens in a multiplex after you’ve scanned your tickets in. For whole summers in the late 1990s, my two younger brothers and I would form battle plans to pay for one film and wind up watching three. Authorities at the AMC Century City in Los Angeles, a site we wouldn’t recognise these days, may be especially interested to hear this.

It was pretty easy to kick things off with something PG-13, check the times, and sidle into an R-rated horror right afterwards – or even during. There’s not much cinemas can do to prevent such manoeuvres, other than the impossible manpower drain of having ushers posted outside all screens for the duration of every sitting. You even have plausible deniability when slipping in and out, since one screen in these places looks very much like another, and you can hardly police people’s loo breaks.

Like anything based on trust, the idea of barring susceptible kids from corrupting bursts of sex and violence is only liable to see our more scurrilous youngsters gaming the system. If sensation-chasing teenagers were to find themselves refused entry en masse to the latest Blumhouse horror flick, like this week’s (fairly awful) Dashcam, you can guarantee someone in their circle will trawl the internet for an illegal torrent and just throw a sleepover.

Cinema owners and film distributors certainly won’t love this development. The entire industry has always been quietly complicit in turning a blind eye, within reason, while officially condemning such mischief as they obviously have to. Must smartphones end all our fun? There’s no cinema quite as exciting as cinema you’re not meant to see.