Thank you everyone for your suggestions of the worst films ever made, I now have the dubious pleasure of reviewing a list of absolute disasters. Right at the top of that list (or bottom, depending on your point of view), lies Mac and Me, a 1988 children’s sci-fi that sought to tread the same path as ET and The Last Navigator. Did it live up to these noble forerunners?
No.
No, this one has a 7% audience score on Rotten Tomatoes for a reason.
With that warning, let’s dive in! The film opens on a moon of Saturn, with a group of aliens who perpetually look like they’ve just sharted. They’re dying, but find a NASA robot, and… somehow get sucked up by its probe? Makes a difference from the trope of aliens coming and probing us, I guess. Somehow, this rover returns to earth (sucks to be you, Curiosity), without the aliens needing to eat, drink or breathe on the 1.4 BILLION km journey. The aliens reconstitute themselves, wreck the NASA base and escape. Apparently being from planet Bad Puppetry gives you the power to smash through security glass with rubber fingers. Anyway, the little baby alien is separated from his family, walking into traffic and getting by a truck. Unfortunately for us all he survives, contorting like a leprous Stretch Armstrong before taking refuge in a passing car.
This introduces the Cruise family, moving to California, including a mother and two sons, the Bro-tastic older Michael and younger wheelchair-bound Eric. While the family move in, the alien baby moves through a bustling house, including removalists, IN BROAD DAYLIGHT, and is never seen by an adult. Eric suspects something is up when his electronic toys come to life but cannot find the culprit, even the strange footprints disappearing as the boy begins to feel scared.
Now I get it! An alien no one can see, coming to earth to stalk a terrified prey? This isn’t a family film, it’s a PG version of Predator. Predbaby (as he shall now be called) continues to hunt Eric, finally luring the boy out before attempting to put an industrial drill through his head then getting up and close and personal with a circular saw. Predbaby also wrecks the house, which Eric is blamed for – and Predbaby watches as the now-isolated prey is lured out onto a slope and falls OFF A CLIFF. Let’s sidestep the fact that falling of a cliff in a wheelchair would have snapped Eric’s spine like a twig – why the hell did the mother buy a house, with little too no fences, on a steep slope, overlooking a cliff? The 80s were wild, there’s absolutely no occupational health and safety requirements.
Eric decides to go full Arnie, minus the slathering mud onto a bare chest and holding a torch while roaring into the night, but does manage to set a trap for Predbaby, briefly imprisoning him in a vacuum cleaner. Eric and Michael try to explain it to their mother that there was an intruder in their house and “we sucked him in but blew him out again.” Someone actually sat down and wrote that.
The next day, Eric and his mother go out for some exercise (set to some weird montage music) while Predbaby watches, even following on a bright yellow toy car which again, absolutely no-one sees. The exception is the NASA scientists, who have finally tracked down the alien. In response, Predbaby, who can now apparently read and understand English, recruits Eric and Michael to help it escape. By dressing as a robotic teddy bear so it can be smuggled out through a MacDonalds. Yes, that is an actual plot point.
Ok, so the Predator theory didn’t pan out. However, once the story hits the MacDonalds, we have a full-on, colourful party, complete with choreographed breakdancing on the floor and tables, and even out on the street where the NASA types are following.
Now I understand! This wasn’t Predator – it’s High School Musical. This includes Tedbaby now dancing up a storm on the counter and FLYING. Again, no-one ever thinks to question this. When the NASA agents break in, there’s another car chase scene, culminating in Eric wrapping up the alien in a white piece of cloth and sitting it in front of him while they race away. At this point they should have just gone all out and had the wheelchair fly in a silhouette over the moon.
Eric and Michael take the alien baby so it can track down its lost family, and now it’s a freakin’ roadtrip movie, complete with bad soundtrack and a scene of wild horses running next to the car. Honestly, I can’t keep up. The only thing I’ll point out here is that they feed the alien baby copious amounts of coke (seriously, they must have been a major sponsor of this movie considering how much screentime each can seems to get), as well as giving him skittles. How does the baby eat skittles? It literally doesn’t have a jaw!
They find the missing alien family hiding in a mineshaft and try to get them some nutritious, life-giving Coca-Cola, but the crowd at the supermarket freak out, culminating in a LOT of security guards and police materialising out of nowhere. They appear to be armed with portable nuclear warheads because the moment they shoot at the alien the ENTIRE SHOPPING COMPLEX EXPLODES. Eric is seemingly killed in the blast, but at the last moment the alien family walk slowly out of the flames, utterly unhurt, and coldly impervious to the hail of bullets.
So, it’s not a roadtrip movie, it’s the goddamn Terminator series.
Now comes the weirdest part of the movie. The alien dad summons some kind of life-giving energy to bring Eric back to life. WHY DIDN’T THEY DO THAT AT THE START OF THE F***ING FILM??
Ok, so this is apparently enough for the massive amount of property damage and casualties to be forgiven, and the final scene is the aliens now being heartily accepted into the US as new citizens. If they did a modern remake I’m assuming this scene would play out very differently…
This film was almost painful to watch, with a meandering, pointless story, lack of any kind of character development and plot holes you could drive a bus though. But as per last week’s review, I put the question to my girls. Their answer?
“Dad, I don’t know what’s going on here at all!”
Don’t worry honey, the scriptwriters didn’t either….
That’s it for this week, tune in next time for another review!
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