Retro on Retro: Mac and Me

If you’ve never seen the 1988 film Mac and Me before, it’s what you get when you combine a Spielburg blockbuster hit with a grotesque amount of advertising aimed at young children. In other words, it’s a hot steaming mess.

Mac and Me is a film about a wheelchair bound boy named Eric (Jade Calegory) who befriends a voyeuristic alien named Mac (Mysterious Alien Creature) after losing control of his wheelchair and falling into a lake. While evil government agents pursue Mac, Eric, and his friend, Debbie (Lauren Stanley), must hide their alien friend until Mac and his family can be made American citizens. Confused? So are we. 

The film also follows almost every plot point of ET. These include the unbreakable bond between a young child and an alien, hiding said alien from adults, fleeing from government agents that want to take away the alien, flying through the air on a wheeled vehicle (a bicycle in ET and the Eric’s wheelchair in Mac and Me), and the resurrection of the human boy from death by the alien.

Many people who grew up in the time where ET: The Extra Terrestrial was  new and prevalent in pop culture might remember an incredibly successful product placement that made Reece’s Pieces synonymous with this heartfelt, family film. The similarities in Mac and Me and ET don’t stop at an almost one to one plot copy. Mac and Me attempted to even copy the wild success of ET’s product placement. The producer of the film, R. J. Louis, adamantly denies any funding from McDonald’s despite his previous work on advertising campaigns for the brand.

Aside from the corporate influence and the obvious attempt to create an ET rip off, it’s hard to pinpoint the worst aspect of this film. Is it the soundtrack filled with eighties pop music that no one has ever heard of? Is it the overwhelmingly cheap special effects that are so awful that you’ll break a rib laughing at it? 

Perhaps, the worst aspect of the film is the design for the aliens. There was a clear attempt to make the aliens look somewhat adorable and loveable with big eyes and a small mouth. However, what resulted was something that looks like a sleep paralysis demon you’d find at the end of your bed. Mac and his family have the same soulless eyes that are the size of golf balls, and their mouths are stuck in a perpetual tiny “O” shape. Their skin is gross too. It resembles a used, melted, wrinkled, and diseased condom that was stretched over a semi-human form. The film desperately tries to get you to feel sympathy towards Mac and his family, but it’s difficult because they look so distractingly ugly and terrifying. At best, the audience feels indifferent. At worst, disgust. 

Regardless of how poorly a movie does at the box office, and how scathing the critic reviews are, it can still become a cult classic. Mac and Me is a shining example of that, and can join other so-bad-it’s-good films, such as Tommy Wiseau’s The Room, and Claudio Fragasso’s Troll 2. We recommend that you watch Mac and Me with really close friends who have similar tastes in bad movies, so that you can all point and laugh at it together.