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12th December 2018
11:58am GMT
It's almost three decades old but the minute the calendar flicks over to December, shortly after playing 'All I Want For Christmas Is You', the next thing on your mind is when you're going to fit in the first Home Alone.
Watching Home Alone 1 and 2 is a given during the festive period - don't even ask me about the last two movies in the franchise or you will be excommunicated immediately.
What makes Home Alone so watchable year after year? It gets mediocre ratings to this day despite being a Christmas classic and upon its release in 1990, it was bashed by critics too.
And the amount of people who still watch it to this day.
The music is iconic, we are able to rehash the lines at will and alongside Richie Rich, it propelled Macaulay Culkin into stardom.
But he hates it and apparently, here's why you should too.
Culkin revealed that he can't sit down and watch the film in full telling Ellen that "I don’t really watch them all that often."
In fact, when the cast reunited for a 15-year anniversary of the first movie, it was the first time Culkin had seen the film since the early 90s.
“It’s background radiation at Christmastime. I’ve had people who want to sit down and watch it with me, which is both flattering and creepy," he added.
"“I’m remembering that day on set, like, how I was hiding my Pepsi behind the couch. I can’t watch it the same way other people can.”
But, is it really that iconic of an image considering that it's fake? Sure, the aftershave wouldn't have burned at all because Kevin didn't actually shave anything off...
There's no doubt in Culkin's mind about which of the two Home Alone's that he despises the least.
"The first one was more fun because we didn’t know what we were walking into and it was a lot less flying all over the place. It was all in Chicago. It also had 100% less Donald Trump."
We'll take it that the US President's cameo in the second movie is something that does not sit well with the actor and doesn't really sit well with most people watching it nowadays.
And what makes it worse is the fact that he was never supposed to be in it. Apparently, there was a bizarre clause that Trump had that meant if you wanted to use one of his buildings, he demanded that a part was written for him.
Normally the scenes would later be cut out of the final edit but Home Alone 2 left it in.
The movie is an open book for discussion and you can't analyze it without picking at the fact that Kevin's family are absolute dicks to him at Christmas time.
If this sort of behaviour was included in the likes of Fair City or the Eastenders Christmas special, there'd be an outcry on social media for little Kevin.
He acts the way any eight-year-old would act around Christmas time but how is he treated, he's forgotten about, shouted at, giving out to and made sleep in the fecking attic.
His parents ate him for a shortcut for destorying shite around the house despite the fact that they must have been MULTI-MILLIONAIRES.
View this post on InstagramHome Alone and it's unrealistic financial expectations.
A post shared by Claudia Oshry (@girlwithnojob) on
Owning a house like that, treating your family AND your extended family to a holiday at Christmas time.
What did Peter do?
And once you think about it, that changes everything in your mind about when Kevin is reunited with his family. Fair enough in the first movie, you could root for the reunion because you might think 'that'll make the family change their stance on "the annoying twerp"'.
But it doesn't, at the start of the second movie, Kevin falls victim to a prank by Buzz but somehow still turns out to be the bad guy and is left sleeping in the attic.
Sidenote: With all those insults, this one is probably the best to have ever featured on a screen, ever.
We could talk about how The Wet/Sticky Bandits withstood all that dogged abuse on their bodies but it is after all a movie and it would have been no fun if the ball had burst after the first plan of action.
But there's absolutely no respect thrown Kevin's way for stopping two professional burglars who bombard his house. He's still treated like an idiot by his family despite saving their belongings in the house (and thrashing a few items along the way).
But, as Macaulay pointed out to Jimmy Fallon in 2017, there's one big "plot hole" in Home Alone that makes the movie absolutely pointless.
"Looking back, is there any question you have about the movie?” asked Jimmy Fallon.
“Well, this kid’s a really clever kid, right? Like, these guys are about to break in, why doesn’t he just call the cops?
“He makes a master plan, he uses Micro Machines but for real, there’s a landline – he could have called the police.
“I think that’s the only thing and I think that’s an enormous plot hole.”
Fair point and that's another thing that makes it hard to watch Home Alone in this modern day and why the movie didn't work past the second film.
Mobile phones were a massive thing in the late 90s and if the McCallisters were as rich as the movie makes them out to be, the parents would have surely had one and could have rang the landline to see what the craic was.
Or, you know, they should have realised that the poor babog wasn't along with them in the first place.
Home Alone would've been over in like 20 minutes if they were able to text. pic.twitter.com/GXx0A5vtam
— Rōb Fëė (@robfee) December 15, 2014
And it wasn't just Kevin who was frightened and attacked in the movie, Macaulay himself had the shite scared outta him by Joe Pesci in real life.
Pesci who played Harry - a role that was turned down by Robert De Niro - avoided Macaulay on set so that the young actor would actually be petrified of him.
And you know the finger biting scene? Well that actually happened for real in rehearsals...
“In the first Home Alone, they hung me up on a coat hook, and Pesci famously says, ‘I’m gonna bite all your fingers off, one at a time...and during one of the rehearsals, he bit me, and it broke the skin.”
Flippin' hell.
And the final nail in the coffin that will make you never watch Home Alone in the same light again is the movie that Kevin watches by himself in the background.
The movies: 'Angels with Filthy Souls' and 'Angels with Even Filthier Souls' are not real but rather a parody of a movie called 'Angels With Dirty Faces'.
So iconic lines like:
"Hey, I tell ya what I'm gonna give you, Snakes. I'm gonna give you to the count of 10, to get your ugly, yella, no-good keister off my property."
are fake.
It's understandable why Macaulay Culkin hates Home Alone but we're sure he doesn't hate the big fat royalty check he gets every December because of it.
And although it'll be hard to watch these movies after this, we're still going to and enjoy every minute of it.
After all, it's not really Christmas until you watch this, after playing Mariah Carey that is.
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