Mac and Me (1988)

This review includes full spoilers. Proceed accordingly. For other movie reviews from me, click HERE:

Dusty: You know what I feel like?
Comment: A low budget E.T. ripoff made to promote McDonalds?
Dusty: The man’s psychic!

Rating: PG
Director: Stewart Raffill
Writers: Stewart Raffill, Steve Feke
Stars: Christine Ebersole, Jonathan Ward, Tina Caspary
Release Date: August 12, 1988 (United States)
Run time: 1 hour, 39 minutes

THE PLOT:

via wiki:

A family of aliens on a dying desert planet searches for subterranean water to drink through a straw. A NASA research probe lands and begins taking atmospheric samples via a suction device. The aliens are accidentally sucked into the apparatus, and the probe returns to Earth. The aliens escape from a government base with their ability to manipulate electricity and destroy anything they touch. While three of them run off into the desert, the smallest one breaks away and hides in a passing minivan occupied by single mother Janet Cruise and her two sons (younger son Eric, who uses a wheelchair, and elder son Michael) who are moving to a new home near Los Angeles following the loss of her husband. Shortly after the move, a series of strange incidents cause Eric to suspect the alien’s presence. The next morning, he finds that it has trashed most of the new house and sees the creature face-to-face for the first time, but Janet blames both him and Michael for what has happened. After noticing the alien outside, Eric tries to catch up to him but ends up rolling down a hill in his wheelchair and falling into a lake, where he nearly drowns but is rescued by the alien. He is not believed at all when he tries to tell Janet and Michael about its actions.

Later that night, he sets a trap with the help of his new friend, Debbie, the girl next door who has also seen the alien. They trap him inside a vacuum cleaner, which malfunctions and causes the entire neighborhood to suffer a power surge. After the alien is released, Michael now believes Eric, but it leaves before Janet can be convinced. Eric’s behavior toward the alien, which he names MAC (short for “Mysterious Alien Creature”), changes after the alien fixes all of the damage he made to the house and leaves behind several newspaper clippings that Eric believes are an attempt to communicate. Meanwhile, FBI agents Wickett and Zimmerman track MAC down and begin spying on the Cruise residence. Eric disguises MAC in a teddy bear suit and takes him to a birthday party at a local McDonald’s, where Debbie’s older sister, Courtney, works. Wickett and Zimmerman follow, but MAC starts a dance number as a distraction and escapes with Eric on his wheelchair. After Wickett and Zimmerman chase them through a nearby neighborhood and shopping mall with additional help, Eric and MAC are rescued by Michael and Courtney. Janet, having witnessed the chase while in the mall, catches up to Wickett and Zimmerman and inadvertently learns from Wickett that MAC is indeed real.

Eric, Michael, Debbie, and Courtney decide to help reunite MAC with his family, who are lost in the desert without sustenance. Following MAC’s directions, they travel to the mountains on the outskirts of Palmdale, where they find his dying family and rejuvenate them with Coca-Cola. The group stops at a gas station and goes to a nearby supermarket to buy more Coca-Cola for the aliens. The restless aliens climb out of the minivan and enter the supermarket, causing a panic. After MAC’s father steals a firearm from a security guard, the police arrive, and a shootout takes place in the parking lot, which results in an explosion destroying the supermarket and Eric being killed by a stray bullet. Once Wickett, Zimmerman, and Janet arrive by helicopter, MAC and his family use their powers to revive Eric. For saving his life, the United States government grants them American citizenship, with the Cruise family and their neighbors, as well as Wickett and Zimmerman, in attendance at the ceremony. MAC’s family, dressed like Earthlings, drives off in a pink Cadillac, and MAC blows a gum bubble that reads “We’ll be back!”

MY REVIEW

Before I further spoil things, let me recommend this movie as something that is so horrendous that it becomes entertaining.

This review requires a bit of autobiographical backstory. When I was in college, my roommate was a theater major – and not surprisingly he loved movies. We put together a bad movies film festival in our apartment called (forgive my language) The Crapdance Film Festival. He played a lot of horrible movies and we had our friends over to watch them. It was a special time. Of all the movies featured on our weeklong apartment television event, none stands out more to me in hindsight than Mac and Me. This movie is completely bonkers, with scenes of horrific comedic violence inflicted on a kid in a wheelchair, the most blatant and brazen product placement you’ve ever seen, an alien (a visual cross between E.T. and Yoda, with the voice of R2D2) that is supposed to be cute but is actually terrifying to behold, and it concludes in a way that makes no sense while promising a sequel that as of yet has not arrived. Some time after our little film festival, Paul Rudd began bringing this movie into the public consciousness as well.

What can I say about Mac and Me? It’s a really bad, extraordinarily blatant E.T. ripoff that almost, but doesn’t quite, embraces being an E.T. spoof or satire. It’s not just a ripoff of E.T. though. It also rips off Back to the Future‘s various and sundry “Marty escapes from Biff on a skateboard” sequences, with Eric doing it via wheelchair instead. The musical score even mimics BTTF score in that scene. I think the film could get away with all the overt idea theft if it really leaned into being a parody, but it does not. That failure to really commit to being a comedy makes watching the movie an almost uncomfortable experience in some spots.

The movie also set a standard for product placement that has never been matched since. Why is that? The film was made in partnership with Ronald McDonald House Charities, with a profit sharing arrangement in place. Unfortunately, it did not generate profits, grossing $6,424,112 in the U.S. against a $13 million budget. Hopefully the charity got some help anyway.

The movie is so bad, and so blatantly a ripoff of other movies, and so unashamedly a vehicle for product placement, that it almost completes the circle, moving from awful to highly entertaining again. The famous wheelchair off the cliff into a lake scene follows a scene wherein Eric, the kid in the wheelchair, gets blamed by his oblivious mom for trashing their house (the alien did it.) This is the morning immediately after he warned her that he thought someone was breaking into their house. Also… he’s paralyzed. After the kid in the wheelchair goes into the lake, we get a scene wherein the child alien tries to search out his extra-terrestrial family from behind the wheel of a toy car, only to be run off the road by trailing barking dogs. As the humans who now believe he exists look for him, a sad ballad about loneliness plays while the alien watches them from the top of a tree. One scene in particular, a dance party scene inside a McDonald’s, is so ludicrous, so much the stuff of nightmares (Ronald McDonald in his every day apparel, MAC in his teddy bear costume), that it’s hard not to accidentally take pleasure in what is happening. It begins to feel like an honor and privilege to sit through something so artfully terrible.

I’m definitely going to tell my descendants that dance parties at Mickey D’s were what Peak America was like. Weep and mourn over what was taken from you!

To complete the bizarre story, after wheelchair bound Eric DIES IN A HAIL OF BULLETS while trying to protect the aliens from the police, the aliens resurrect him. This act of goodness leads the U.S. government to inexplicably grant them citizenship… because of course. We even get to witness their citizenship ceremony, with the previously naked E.T.s now wearing human clothes for the first time in the film. Their swearing in is attended by a large happy crowd. The aliens then begin the process of blending in with humans, with the movie promising at its end that a sequel was coming. The movie bombed and that planned sequel was cancelled. One can only hope that someone revives the dormant franchise and finishes this important story.

Anyway, if you are in the mood for a movie that is so bad that it becomes entertaining, I fully recommend Mac and Me. As for me, I have an inexplicable craving for McDonald’s French fries, a coke, and an impromptu dance party with all of my friends in the lobby.

Have you seen Mac and Me? Why? What did you think?