Mac and Me (1988)
Every so often a film comes along so brazen in its theft that you almost admire the nerve. Mac and Me is one of them: an E.T. knockoff so shameless it makes you wonder how it was ever allowed to reach a cinema. Stewart Raffill's 1988 "family" film swaps Spielberg's stranded, soulful alien for a rubbery creature fleeing across suburban America with a family in tow, and it is, by common consent and now my own, one of the worst films ever committed to celluloid.
I came to it through family lore. My parents tell me that as a boy I would beg them, every single week, to rent this from a video van that used to trundle round our town, and on learning that, I thought I owed it a revisit. I remembered almost nothing beyond a vague sense of an E.T. clone, so I went in close to blind, the dismal ratings nagging at me the whole way.
They were not wrong. The effects are shoddy and, oddly, quite unsettling for something aimed at children. The alien's face is the stuff of small nightmares rather than wonder, and I say that as someone who has a reasonably high tolerance for dodgy creature work. I think of something like The Witches, a film that genuinely frightened me as a kid but in a way that felt purposeful and earned. There is nothing purposeful about the horror on display here. It is just bad design dressed up as charm.
The story is nonsense from start to finish, but the real offence, the thing that makes this film genuinely difficult to sit through with a straight face, is that it is less a film than a feature-length advertisement. Chiefly for McDonald's, complete with a full-blown dance number and a beaming Ronald, plus generous helpings of Coca-Cola and Skittles along the way. The clue was in the title all along: Mac and me, and I am faintly ashamed it took me until now to twig it. At no point does the film even try to pretend otherwise. Ronald McDonald turns up like a co-star. Scenes appear to have been constructed specifically to linger on signage and product. It is audacious, really, in the worst possible way.
Which is what stings, given the film it is so nakedly cribbing from. Where E.T., a film I hold dear enough to have handed to my own children, reached for genuine childhood wonder, this one reaches for the drive-thru. The warmth Spielberg conjures through simplicity, through a boy on a bicycle and a creature who just wants to go home, is nowhere to be found here. In its place you get corporate cheerfulness and a plot that has no idea what it wants to be.
I know it is a kids' film, and I know you are meant to temper your expectations accordingly. I try to be fair about that. But even by the most forgiving measure this is a slog, and a cynical one at that. There is a difference between a children's film that is simple and a children's film that is condescending, and Mac and Me falls firmly into the second camp. Kids deserve better. They always did.
The strongest thing I felt by the end was not nostalgia but guilt. That my poor parents had to endure this, week after week, for years on end, all because a small boy wouldn't be told. One star, and a belated apology to Mum and Dad.
Rating: ★ | Year: 1988 | Watched: 2026-09-07
Where to watch
Watch in the UK
Stream: Amazon Prime Video · Amazon Prime Video with Ads
Physical: Amazon UK · Zavvi
Watch in the US
Stream: Amazon Prime Video · Amazon Prime Video with Ads
Physical: Amazon US
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