HOME ALONE REVIEW

"Home Alone" is a superb movie title because it evokes all kinds of terrifying nostalgia. When you were a kid, being left home alone meant hearing strange noises and being afraid to look in the basement - but it also meant doing everything that adults would tell you to stop doing if they were there. Such as staying up late to watch Johnny Carson, eating all of the ice cream, and sleeping in your parents' bed.

"Home Alone" is about an 8-year-old boy who does all of that, but he also single-handedly thwarts two house burglars by booby-trapping the house. And they're the type of traps that any 8-year-old could set.

John Hughes wrote the screenplay for the film, and he has a knack for remembering what it's like to be young. His best films, such as "Sixteen Candles," "The Breakfast Club," "Ferris Bueller's Day Off," and "Planes, Trains, and Automobiles," manage to be amusing while remaining within the realms of remote plausibility. This time, he deviates so far from his original premise that the film suffers as a result.

The film begins in the Chicago suburbs, on the eve of a large family Christmas vacation in Paris. There are relatives and children everywhere, and when the family oversleeps and needs to rush to the airport, Kevin gets lost in the shuffle.

The house is empty when he wakes up later that morning. So he makes the best of a bad situation.

A real child would be more terrified than this movie character and would most likely cry. He could also try calling someone or asking a neighbor for assistance. However, in the fabricated world of this film, the only neighbor is an old coot rumored to be the Snow Shovel Murderer, and the phone is broken. When Kevin's parents realize they've forgotten about him, they find it impossible to get anyone to respond to their panicked phone calls - if anyone did, the movie would be over.