What The Film?! is a weekly column exclusive to Under The Gun Review that brings to light the plot holes Hollywood hoped you’d never notice. Written by comedy writer Dane Sager, this column shows no mercy to films that try and pull the proverbial wool over our eyes.

If you know a film with major plot holes that you feel needs to be exposed, tell us! Email utgjames@gmail.com with the subject “What The Film” and we’ll try to get your suggestion featured on the site.

This Week’s Movie: 1988’s Mac And Me (suggested by Brandon Danowski)

I have never hid my love of bad movies. They’re amazing. Bad movies are like crazy exes, you know you shouldn’t, you know better, but you go for it anyway. Movies, similar to people, have many levels of crazy badness. You can argue that a lot of awful movies have redeemable qualities (like the special effects in the Alien Versus Predator movies, or Nicolas Cage’s Nicolas Cagedom in anything), but some movies are just beyond redemption, they are the most insane of all exes. Some movies are the girlfriend who poked holes in the condoms because she wanted to prove how devoted she is by getting your abortion. Mac And Me is that type of movie.

So you don't really need a condom at that point, I guess.

Mac And Me’s biggest annoyance is its over abundance of product placement. Product placement has been a long standing tradition in Hollywood. It can be used effectively, creating a sense of reality in the movie or it can be abrasive and in your face (2004’s I, Robot). In fact, some of the James Bond movies have been paid for entirely by product placement. Ford even spent a ludicrous amount of money to have James Bond drive a Ford in Die Another Day, Casino Royale, and Quantum of Solace. Product placement isn’t going away.

In Casino Royale, he drove the elegant and slightly larger Focus; the Mondeo.

Judging by what I’ve seen in the movie, I can confidently say that Mac And Me had their budget compiled entirely by McDonald’s, Sears, and Skittles. The movie is literally a two hour commercial for those products. I have never forced myself to continue watching a movie before this one. Every part of me wanted to turn this movie off but I forced myself to continue watching it. This isn’t a How Bad Is It?! column, I don’t have that luxury. (Editor’s Note: Suck it, Dane!)

The commercial begins with a NASA Space probe landing on a far away planet, where it is 100% clear that life cannot be sustained there. To my surprise, life is found there. They most horrific, ugly, and retarded aliens I have ever seen in media ever live on this planet. They look as if you designed bipedal scrotums. Lord only knows how they could survive. The aliens begin poking the probe with sticks till a vacuum on it sucks them inside it, ultimately taking them to Earth.

God, it's like my nightmares are having nightmares about flesh.

Once on Earth, the aliens escape captivity by their cunning strategy of just walking away. The reason why this strategy works is because everyone on the Army base (why did a probe get taken in at an army base?) decides to stay back and not get close. This is even said out loud, as a command. They just let them walk away. The youngest of the aliens (named “Mac”) sneaks into a family’s automobile while the rest of Mac’s family is shown dehydrating in the dessert despite that desert they’re currently found themselves in being much more habitable than their home planet is shown to be.

As it turns out, the station wagon that Mac sneaks into belongs to a family moving across the country due to the single mom’s fancy new job. When the family arrives at their new home, Mac sneaks into family, destroying everything mechanical he touches. This is a family trait, as every mechanical thing any of the aliens touch instantly gets destroyed or glitches up something fierce. This actually kind of works for the movie, whenever the aliens do something incredibly stupid that doesn’t make any sense whatsoever, it’s okay because they already established them as idiotic creatures that evolution is trying to phase out.

What? No! You're talented! What are you doing here?

Eric, the youngest in the family, is wheel chair bound, paralyzed from the waist down. He soon discovers that the house his mom purchased is on a massive hill, ending in a cliff. At this point, one wonders if his mom was trying to kill his wheelchair bound son by having the most deadly home for a person who has to rely on wheels for locomotion. This results in the best scene in the entire movie.

Yeah, that’s worth the price of admission.

If this were reality, rather than a commercial, his mother would be in jail right now, instead of working at their neighborhood Sears! Yes, a job at Sears was the reason the family moved across the entire country. Sears. Sears. One more time for the kids at home: Sears. When the family arrives at Sears to drop Mom off, they have a conversation about how great Big Macs are. Yes, that’s natural believable dialogue right there. It’s like the entire movie was some weird piece of art house cinema where each scene is a metaphor of various drugs.

Eric, his brother Michael, and the neighbor girl Debbie soon trap Mac in a vacuum by using Coke-Cola in a McDonald’s cup as bait. Mac soon escapes the vacuum and into the night despite his crippling retardation. Mac and Eric quickly befriend each other after many montages of stupidity including a sequence where Mac outruns a pack of dogs in a Power Wheels.

Let me tell you, Mac can Tokyo drift like a mother.

Mac (dressed up as a teddy bear), Eric, Debbie, and Michael all meet up at a local McDonald’s for a birthday party, which breaks into an elaborate dance sequence for absolutely no reason. Government agents promptly show up to abduct Mac (oh hey, irony, right?) but their efforts are squandered by the large dance sequence. They soon chase Eric who is holding Mac (who is out of his teddy bear disguise suddenly) down a hill. This chase results in many car accidents, clearly killing at least one or two people.

The chase continues through the very Sears that Eric’s Mom works at. Mac destroys every television there, which explode in a violent fashion. The amount of collateral damage in this movie is just as high as a Lethal Weapon movie. After evading the Government agents, the kids decide to take Mac to his family in a long car ride where they feed him Skittles, Ice Cream, and Coke. It’s as if the kids want to give this thing Space Diabetes.

There is also a scene where wild horses flank their van.

This movie is continually surprising, but not in a good way. This isn’t BBC’s Sherlock where each twist or reveal makes me gasp out loud, this movie gets exponentially worse as it progresses. The kids eventually find Mac’s family, dying in a cave, despite being in conditions infinitely more habitable than where they came from. No, it’s not because they’re aliens on a strange planet, because Mac has been with us the entire movie and it’s been shown that he needs the same habitat humans need, more or less.

How do they heal Mac’s family? With refreshing Coke-Cola, of course! It’s like that Michael Crichton book where he tries to disprove global warming with absolutely no relation to the plot or that Stephen Colbert joke where he wrote a book about the healing powers of cigarettes. Wait, no, it’s not like that, it is exactly that except not a joke.

“Sup, want some melon?”

Mac, Debbie, Michael, Eric, and the rest of the alien family end up at a grocery store that explodes for absolutely no reason at all. Seriously. Eric is apparently killed in the explosion, but not really because this is a kid’s movie. Maybe they should make him drink Coke-Cola. The aliens team up and revive Eric because that’s how science fiction works (or really any movie with a gentle but misunderstood protagonist). The movie ends with the alien family who destroys absolutely everything they touch being sworn in as official American citizens despite this being incredibly dangerous. This is shown by putting the Scrote-Faced-Idiots in stereotypical American garb. The father is in a blue suit and tie, the mother and daughter are both in dresses, and Mac is in a McDonald’s branded polo shirt.

This movie has to be a joke. It has to be. This was the single most painful movie I’ve ever seen (and I’ve seen the latest Twilight movie). Mystery Science Theater 3000 couldn’t make this movie tolerable. It’s almost like some sort of public service that was created so children would never want McDonald’s, Skittles, or Coke-Cola ever again. It definitely worked on me, I won’t be indulging in any of those for a long time.

Luckily, they weren't.

Dane is the best there is at what he does, but what he does isn’t very nice. You can follow him on Tumblr and Twitter!

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Dane Sager

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