#82 Mac and Me (Wes)

Mac and Me

When I first saw this list I was shocked to see this on there. I loved this movie as a kid and even had it on video. Thinking about it though, I couldn’t remember a single thing that happened in it, so was I looking at my childhood with rose-tinted glasses or did I just have terrible taste when I was little?

Mac (which stands for Mysterious Alien Creature) and his family are happily wandering around on their home planet when a NASA space probe lands to take rock and soil samples. Being curious beings they inspect the probe and somehow get sucked into it. Back on Earth, they escape from the probe and the military base in which it’s being inspected. However Mac gets split from his family and hides in a van with family Eric Cruise (Jade Calegory), his brother Michael (Jonathan Ward) and his mother Janet (Christine Ebersole). After initially causing chaos in their new house, Mac befriends wheelchair bound Eric who then, with the help of his brother and neighbours, proceeds to try to reunite Mac with his family, whilst the FBI pursue them.

Watching this movie as an adult is actually quite shocking. Not because it’s terrible, but because of the worst case of blatant product placement that I’ve ever seen (It actually has more than Back to the Future). Seriously, it’s worse than the toy commercials that passed as cartoons in the eighties, or George Lucas making a different clone trooper for every planet to sell more toys.

You can clearly see several brands throughout the movie (including Gatorade™ and Sears™ - which has possibly the biggest store sign I’ve ever seen), but this is nothing new in movies as many brands sponsor movies to subtly promote themselves. What is bad though is Mac exclusively eats Skittles™ and drinks Coca Cola™. To make things worse, when Eric and his friends find Mac’s family they are dying and they save them by feeding them Coca Cola™.

You may be now thinking that it can’t get any worse, but you can’t quite understand how wrong you are. At one point in the movie, Mac is taken to McDonalds™ by Eric (of course Mac is disguised as a teddy bear, which just reminded me that I've now actually seen The Avengers and life will never seem as bright again). Mac then proceeds to dance on the counter, whilst the customers of the restaurant spontaneously burst into a synchronised dance routine, and the staff happily clap along in the background. Just in case you was unaware by now what a happy place McDonalds™ is, Ronald McDonald™ also appears and joins in. I honestly can’t think of any more obvious advertising since  the Subway™ advert in Happy Gilmore.

As a movie itself, it’s just a second rate rip-off of ET. The story itself bears a lot of similarities, including a young boy befriending the young alien and the FBI and sheriffs department trying to capture the aliens (still at least nobody has gone back and digitally replaced the guns with walkie talkies). At one point they even do the ET healing Elliot’s injury scene (but instead of a cut finger, they actually bring Eric back to life. Beat that Speilberg!). ET even had it's own blatant product placement (although they were never mentioned, you can clearly identify Elliot using Reece's Pieces™ to lure ET back to his home).

The bike chase scene has been replaced by a wheelchair chase (without the flying), but at least I can applaud this. Too many films feature able bodied actors in wheelchairs instead of actually hiring an actual disabled actor (My Left Foot, Born on The Forth of July and Coming home to name a few). Jade Calgory actually used a wheelchair, and took part in many wheelchair races as a pre-teen, so he was well practiced for this part of the movie.

The aliens themselves just look like badly made puppets (correction: They are badly made puppets), and in the tradition of Star Trek are relatively human shaped. Unlike ET, they just aren’t cute though, and you can’t help but think the makers missed a trick with merchandising properties. They look like a permanently whistling Evan Davis, after he's been on a massive Burger King™ binge. There’s one point in the movie where Mac hits the Cruise family cars windscreen and looks like some sort of horrible Plasticine™ roadkill. It’s as though Tony Hart finally tired of Morph and decided to take him out in a hit and run “accident”.

The script itself is run of the mill (except for the blatant advertising, it even contains the line "Why don't you stop by for a Big Mac™?") and so is the acting. Although the obsession with sucking aliens into vacuum cleaners does seem a tad bizarre. I’m not sure that if I suspected an alien was living in my house, that I’d immediately consider getting out the Hoover™ and trying to trap it. I’m sure that my years of watching Scooby Doo cartoons would inspire me to create a trap involving a rug, furniture polish and a dog cage would create a much more effective, and humane trap.

So is it really that bad? Well, it is and it isn’t. I can see why I liked it as a kid. Strange looking aliens, a quite nicely paced film and the sort of humour that I liked when I was little. But watching back as an adult you can’t help but feel this is just a shameless feature length commercial. I’m just thankful that I can see through things like that nowadays. *logs off and drinks a nice ice cold Pepsi™*