4. Mac & Me (1988)
Cashing-in on superior products is one of the great human impulses, so you can't exactly blame the makers of 1987's
Mac & Me, who saw Steven Spielberg's classic
E.T. and thought: "Let's exploit everyone." This happens all the time, of course, with varying degrees of success. But
Mac & Me completely throws out the good intentions associated with Spielberg's alien story and replaces them with blatant corporate advertising, bad special effects and a script that Uwe Boll would find offensive.
Mac & Me tries to tell the heartfelt tale of a wheelchair-bound boy without a friend in the world who comes into contact with a family of aliens. The government is after them so they hi-jack a camper-van and hit the road. But the aliens are plain weird - long, green, puppets that look like melted-down Jim Henson prototypes. Their faces don't change expression. Their limbs fly about in seemingly random directions. For a children's film, there are some seriously strange moments: one sequence depicts the wheelchair-bound boy flying off a cliff into a lake -
in his wheelchair - until the youngest alien jumps in to save him. Another scene involves the daddy alien wandering into a store with a handgun and firing off into the crowd. It's scary.
There's also a entire scene set in McDonald's for no reason. Everybody dances together (Ronald McDonald is there, too, of course) and has a great time, but what about the story and the characters and stuff? "Don't worry about that," a McDonald's executive might tell you. It's no surprise to learn that McDonald's pretty much funded the whole debauchery and requested that a scene be set within the walls of one of their culturally resonant fast food restaurants. The main character is also called Mac. As in, Big Mac. Get it? Yeah. If ever there were a cautionary tale to be told about the pitfalls of taking the most popular film of the decade and ruining everything about it with your own personality,
Mac & Me is that tale. The moral of the story, I think, is that McDonald's can do anything they want.