"Mac And Me" (1998), Dir: Stewart Raffill
$13 Million in Budget vs. $6,424,112 in Gross
Watching movies from the 80s, I realize how it easy it was to sell things to children back then, or at least get children to convince their parents to buy it for them. But even back in the 80s, Mac and Me would be a tough sell, to anyone, including its sponsors and McAffiliates who abandoned the project shortly after it's abysmal inception. It's also become a regularly featured joke on Conan O'Brien.
Almost identical in plot and score to E.T., it's about a family of aliens (who get more and more frightening with every scene) that accidentally get sucked into the vacuum system on a probe (which happens more than once), and end up on earth. While on earth, they get separated from their youngest child (nicknamed Mac, I'm assuming after McDonalds because they were a heavy sponsor) as he wanders the country until adopting a human family. Eventually, Michael (Johnathan Ward), a wide-eyed young boy bound to a wheelchair, befriends Mac and decides to help him find his alien family. Sound familiar?
Yeah, well, that about sums up the plot or anything relevant that happens in the movie. The rest is just a string of events that drift from one product placement to another. For example, Mac leaving Coke cans with flowers in them for Michael to find. Subsequently, Michael starts noticing his remote control cars are acting strangely. When they discover Mac, he's ill and the kids have to nurse him back to health using -- you guessed it -- Coke. From there, they then dress him similarly to a Talking Teddy Ruxpin, if you remember those, and this all leads to the birthday party scene... Oh, the birthday party scene... set at the local McDonalds... featuring rappers dancing by the drive-through, Ronald McDonald himself, and a complex choreographed dance (contest) sequence that I'm sure the employees of McDonalds just winged, much like an 80s McDonalds Commercial. It's an appalling sequence that makes you feel... exploited. (As a side note, explain to me how an alien from another planet knows how to do the same f*&%ing dance as everyone else in the restaurant.)
From there, they rip off the famous flying bike sequence in E.T. with a wheelchair instead. This takes them to the Sears where Michael's mom works, and where more remote controlled cars are employed to distract the agents. Losing them, the kids drive Mac to the desert (explain to me how kids can drive a van across states and not be noticed) to find his family. When they do, the family (that looks like relatives of Sloth from The Goonies) are dehydrated and dying. But no worries! They got more Coke! And use it to revive Mac's creepy family... seriously.
**Spoiler Alert** To save you the pain of enduring the last twenty minutes of this giant commercial flop, the movie ends Mac and his alien family (dressed like suburbanites and even more terrifying now) being made into American citizens as appointed by congress and then driving away in a pink caddy with the tag-line appearing, "We'll Be Back." Thank God they never were! We can all just hope that that pink caddy crashed and then someone went to jail for thinking that aliens would somehow know how to drive a human car.
This movie is worth watching not to remember what it was like being a child, but rather to see how McDonalds, Coca-Cola, and countless toy companies viewed you at that age. And I'll repeat, the aliens are absolutely terrifying.
Yep. That's the trailer. And for your viewing displeasure, the infamous birthday party scene, which makes me realize now why nobody ever came to my birthday as a child. I didn't have no creepy dancing teddy bear.
No comments:
Post a Comment