Defending Trash: In Defense of Mac & Me (1988)

I love Mac & Me. No, really. I love it.

Yeah, I know. It has been pilloried and ripped to shreds countless times. We covered it on Torture Cinema. Paul Rudd has made a joke about it for years (the Rudd Roll, if you will). And I will even admit that it is a ridiculous film that by most standards would be considered legitimate “trash.”

But I love it nonetheless, so much so that I appeared on Fine Beats and Cheeses in April 2025 to talk about it with the fine hosts of the illustrious show. For years, I’ve made fun of so-called “bad movies” on The Skiffy and Fanty Show, from Plan 9 from Outer Space to Birdemic, from Batman & Robin to The Black Hole. The whole point of the Torture Cinema podcast is to give films most people think are terrible a humorous-but-critical look with the understanding that film criticism is often subjective. Sometimes a film doesn’t deserve the hate it receives (and vice versa).

Ultimately, I think we ought to give trash movies a bit more love. After all, some of the most enjoyable movies of all time aren’t exactly good. Even the editorial team at Rotten Tomatoes has a list of bad movies they actually love. The Mummy (1999) is one such movie; it has a 62% critic rating on Rotten Tomatoes (it was lower when I started writing this), and I’m told that David Annandale despises it with a passion not seen since the Pharaohs actually lived. Yet, audiences rather like that film, and its reputation has spawned amusement park rides, miles of merch, numerous sequels (and a spinoff of sorts), and 1999’s most important eye candy in the form of Brendan Frasier’s Rick O’Connell (seriously, he’s so pretty). Of course, the popularity of a thing doesn’t tell us whether the thing is any good, but I also don’t think the popularity of a thing can be dismissed.

Here, I think there is something in the “feeling” a movie gives you that overrides whether a movie is actually good. We might be fully capable off recognizing that a movie is objectively not very good while still finding within that movie the kind of pleasure we might associate with so-called “good” movies. Beyond those feelings, they might also provide an avenue for critical exploration — of film history, production, theme, and so on. Sometimes a good, close look at a good bad movie can get you to think hard about why you are so attached to the trash.

With that in mind, I’ve decided to start an irregular column entitled Defending Trash. The goal of this feature is to explore some of the bad movies I actually love, sometimes with what I think are good reasons, sometimes by pointing out what we can learn about it, and sometimes with lots of Feelz™. Part of this is a response to myself as a staple on Torture Cinema, where we are often more critical than introspective simply because of the design: it’s a comedy show. I want to turn the tables a bit to focus on what makes so-called bad movies sometimes quite compelling and worth watching.

First up — a childhood favorite:  Mac & Me. I love it. Let me tell you why!

Mac & Me is part of a class of rip-off films that blatantly borrows ideas from other (usually recent) films, slaps on some lower quality production values, and says “good enough.” At their best, these sorts of films are created by people who have at least some knowledge on how to make a film work on shoestrings. But Mac & Me is unusual. Superficially, of course, Mac & Me shares many similarities to its predecessor, Spielberg’s superb E.T. (1982). Unlike its predecessor, however, it wasn’t cheaper to make. E.T. cost Universal Pictures $10.5 million and earned the studio roughly $797 million in ticket sales; even with the fuzzy math of the film industry, that is an obvious box office success. Mac & Me, however, cost Orion Pictures $13 million and earned the studio a paltry $6.4 million, and yet none of that budget shows in the production ¹. The aliens are creepy and stiff, the sets are simple and relatively uncomplicated, and the cast is composed of largely unknown talent. Despite all this, there is much to love about the film.

Like 1982’s E.T., 1988’s Mac & Me is about a single-parent family trying to make ends meet and about what happens when that family discovers that aliens are actually real. The aliens arrive from a planet that looks suspiciously like Mars (it isn’t for some reason), having been sucked into a NASA probe by an overcharged vacuum. While the film never tells us explicitly, we’re led to assume they are the last of your kind. On Earth, the alien family escapes and the youngest (dubbed MAC for “Mysterious Alien Creature”) is lost. Through a childish set of traps, Mac is captured by and falls under the care of the Cruise family: Eric (Jade Calegory), Michael (Jonathan Ward), and their mother, Janet (Christine Ebersole). This being a film for kids, Mac develops a particular affection for Eric — a young man who, like the actor that plays him, has Spina Bifida and uses a wheelchair (a very important detail) — and his (new) friend, Debbie (Lauren Stanley) — a precocious neighbor who speaks her mind and acts as one side of the film’s moral compass. Naturally, befriending an alien that has escaped from a government facility leads to altercations with federal agents, who are alarmingly aggressive and do accidentally kill Eric, who is mysteriously resurrected by Mac because the aliens have magic powers for some reason. In the end, the aliens are all granted U.S. citizenship in an understandably bizarre and cringe-worthy display filmed at Los Angeles City Hall, and all of them drive off in a pink 1957 Cadillac (which lends some interesting color to the classic Bruce Springsteen tune).

A lot of this you can blame on producers Mark Damon, William B. Kerr, and R.J. Louis and on McDonald’s. Mac & Me is notorious for its ad placements and corporate pandering. In fact, the film was embedded in corporate shenanigans from the start: Louis negotiated a contract with McDonald’s to use their brand and iconography in a film as part of a cross-promotional endeavor. He had good motives, of course: he had a strong association with the Ronald McDonald House Charities and saw Mac & Me (or what would become that film) as a gateway to bringing the charity some money.

In a lot of ways, Mac & Me was a doomed film. As we discussed on Torture Cinema, so much of its questionably-managed production shows throughout, from the absurd plot (a consequence of the script not being finished before filming began) to truly absurd ad placements for McDonald’s and Coca Cola (a consequence of Louis’ strong advocacy for corporate funding) to weak direction (again, a consequence of an unfinished script, which the director, Stewart Raffill, has discussed).

And yet, I still love it.

Nostalgia Beans

Let’s take a quick detour to the world of nostalgia. I was born in 1983. By 1988, the year of Mac & Me‘s release, I would have been just the right age to see this film, though I’m pretty sure we first watched it on VHS sometime in 1989 or 1990 (on a copy that we owned). And like many of the films I saw as a kid that involved some kind of “creature,” Mac & Me scared the hell out of me.

Can you blame me, though? The aliens are creepy as hell. It isn’t just their shoddy, ripping-off-E.T. design. They’re weirdly pale, have giant eyes and bizarre sucking O mouths, walk in the weirdest way, and do some terrifying whistling thing to communicate with one another (the aliens demonstrating no obvious form of language at any point in this film).

Terror is one of the defining “feelings” behind the films I remember most from my childhood. So many films from the 80s and 90s stick with me because something in them scared me, and yet I returned to most of those films because something within them compelled me. This is true of Flight of the Navigator and The NeverEnding Story, both films I have returned to over and over because I find them captivating in their creativity, wonder, and, yes, terror-inducing worldbuilding.

But as an adult, it is easy to see why some of those other films of my childhood are worth returning to. The NeverEnding Story is one of the most visually creative films of that era, and some of its most defining moments continue to haunt us today (I’m looking at you, Gmork). Mac & Me, however, is not like those other films. As I noted at the beginning of this adventure, it is a film that has been regularly ridiculed, not in a playful homage as you might see in a post-Matrix SNL skit but in a brutal attack on the film as a piece of “bad cinema.” And in many respects, it isn’t good cinema, as I’ve readily acknowledged.

So what does nostalgia have to do with why Mac & Me deserves a bit of defense? Unlike The NeverEnding Story, I don’t return to Mac & Me primarily to relive my experiences of childhood nor as a hybrid experience of the child and the adult. I return to Mac & Me as a critical adult, one that isn’t looking to relive the adventure but looking for what makes the film tick and what makes it interesting. Within that, I remain aware of my childhood experience, but rather than let the suck fairy ruin that experience, I’ve moved on to a different one: What makes this film worth watching today?

I have three main answers.

Community, Family, and American Myths

It’s not surprising to see family themes in a family-friendly film. If anything, it’s almost expected. But Mac & Me has these themes on multiple levels.

The first and most obvious treatment is the aliens themselves. Unlike the human Cruise family, they embody the nuclear family perfectly: mother, father, little daughter, and Mac, the little son. They fulfill this role in its idealistic form. The mother and father are shown as loving and caring, both for their own young and the youth of the community, as evidenced in their resurrection of Eric. In turn, the children show deference to their parents, fulfilling the full circle of the nuclear family unit.

The Cruise family, meanwhile, is a “broken” family, though the film takes care to make this a consequence of death rather than moral indiscretions. Janet Cruise, thus, takes the role of widower who now must take on the daunting task of raising two sons all on her own. This family, too, is remarkably loving (and accepting), such that the viewer is given two distinctly positive family portrayals with contrasting degrees of familial trauma — the loss of a father for the Cruise family and the temporary loss of a son (and the more permanent hypothetical death of a species) for the aliens.

It’s important to note that both of these families are effectively in want of something, but they don’t realize that there’s a solution to that want which will be far more satisfying than the most obvious solution. The aliens need a community because whatever community they had on their home world seems to have vanished (along with all the water they need to survive). It would be safe to say that the aliens aren’t actively searching for community because their primary motivations seem to be “find their child” and “survive.” But once those two wants are met, the film’s ending loosely implies that the next step is not “go back home” but “can the aliens stay here.” It probably helps that the aliens love Coca Cola, an American standard bearer.

However, the Cruise family are positioned as a grieving family. Their father/husband is dead, and with that comes all the pain of trying to find a way forward. Their immediate solution is the initial setup for their characters: move somewhere else. Naturally, this won’t be the satisfying solution to their problem. The real solution will come through Mac, who provides a focus point for Eric and his brother (and, later, their mother). In the final act of the film, Eric and Michael (and friends Debbie and Courtney) decided to reunite Mac with his family at great personal cost to themselves. Of course, the Cruise brothers know exactly what it feels like to lose a member of one’s family, so by helping someone else reunite with theirs, they unknowingly participate in their own healing (figuratively and literally). This all leads to a final culture clash, wherein the alien family cause havoc in a supermarket and unintentionally instigate a violent confrontation with police (waving a gun around tends to do that), causing Eric to be killed by a stray bullet and the supermarket to explode. Thus, the film comes full circle: the grieving family that tried to help another family remain intact is again wrenched apart by death, only for that other family, also grieving in their own way, to use mystical alien powers to undo the death of a child. It’s almost beautiful in its circularity.

All this dovetails perfectly into what I think is the most interesting aspect of Mac & Me. From top to bottom, this film drips with layers of American mythology. At its core, this film is about the United States of America and an idealistic understanding of its people and institutions. It’s about the myths this country tells itself manifested in cinema. Even the altercation with the police is weirdly idealistic, as the one death caused by the incident is accidental rather than deliberately homicidal, and the shootout with the police, despite causing a supermarket to explode, is otherwise bloodless (and, again, the cause of a misunderstanding because an alien waving a gun around would raise eyebrows). And looking back on this film today — the same day as Congress passed Trump’s budget — this feels remarkably more propagandistic than it did when I watched it again as an adult in the 2000s (and any other time since). Compared to the reality we’re in now, this film’s 1980s treatment of American ideals feels especially fantastical…

Let’s start with one of the most pernicious American myths about the corporation as a force for good. I don’t need to give a long lecture on corporate power, the concentration of media sources in a smaller set of corporate hands, the squeezing out of non-corporate economic power through deceptive and unfair business dealings, and on and on and on. These were not new in the 1980s, and they are infinitely worse today. Yet, this film, no doubt due to its financial links to McDonald’s and other corporate sponsors, unabashedly presents these companies as forces of communal good.

This is blatant in the infamous McDonald’s scene, where the golden arches are presented to us as a hub for communal engagement. Shortly after being shown an array of children and teens from a range of races, genders, ages, and social backgrounds (football players, break dancers, contemporary dancers, etc.), the entire building erupts into spontaneous dance numbers. This scene portrays another American myth: the melting pot. Here, children (and probably some adults parading as children) of many backgrounds collect together, their differences on display as much as their sense of unity. McDonald’s, the American institution, becomes the physical representation of American ideals here, presented to us with the celebratory tone of a dance number. Of course, none of this is true of the real world, but it is true of the internal world of Mac & Me, where Americans of all shapes and sizes are always one dance number away from selling us the melting pot idea. While I wouldn’t expect a film for kids to lay into the social problems of 1980s America, it is hard to notice how hard it reaches in the opposite direction, as if to say that none of the problems of 1980s America are present. Even the main conflict of this story — that of government agents trying to hunt down escaped aliens — is one rooted in misunderstanding, and that understanding is cleanly wiped away because the aliens turn out to be the opposite of a threat (they can heal you, folks).

That idea gets its most potent image at the end of the film when the aliens are granted citizenship (alongside a human mother and her daughter) and drive off in a classic pink Cadillac. There’s no discussion about why the aliens are granted citizenship, something almost no immigrants are granted in this country even under less xenophobic governments. The best answer would be: they resurrected Eric after an unfortunate accidental shooting on the part of the government, which suggests some face-saving on the government’s part. Regardless, their clean induction into the “American family” in a crowded Los Angeles City Hall, followed by their clean exit on Los Angeles streets in a classic car (1957 Series 62) all signal to the viewer an absurdly fanciful vision of American exceptionalism and cohesion. Even Men in Black (1997), which at its core is optimistic about humans and aliens living alongside one another, isn’t so brave as to imagine Americans as unnaturally accepting. Yet Mac & Me imagines an America already primed to accept difference and so open to it that no discussion is needed about whether strange aliens from a mysterious other planet should be granted citizenship or sent out to live among us (or if a young man who uses a wheelchair can be a legit hero). They simply get their classic American car and their classic nuclear family attire (sundresses for the girls and suits for the boys — though what is gender to a bunch of aliens whose culture we don’t even understand…) and are sent off into American society to thunderous applause.

I can’t help loving the absurdly optimistic vision of my home country that this film offers. No part of this makes much sense from a narrative perspective, but it does make sense from a cultural one. While the film isn’t explicitly didactic in approach, one can read this ending sequence as a clear lesson: this is the America that should be. We should accept everyone, no matter how different. They can use wheelchairs, dance to hip hop, be quirky neighbors, or even be from another planet. Everyone should be accepted. And we’ll prove how accepted you are through spontaneous dance numbers and naked displays of American iconography (in paperwork, car, and clothing form).

And as an adult American in the hellscape that is 2025, I can’t help but find something warm and fuzzy about that. Not so much the corporations having their fingers in such messages or the reinforcement of heteronormative nuclear families but the core idea that an America can exist somewhere out there that is so radically accepting that even weird aliens from another planet can be included into this experiment. And more, that weird aliens from another planet will become part of this community while being met with applause. No protests about their person-hood (or humanity, whatever that means for aliens). Raw, joyful acceptance.

It’s a fantasy, sure. But finishing this piece in 2025 is filling me with a longing for a fantasy that isn’t so full of hate and dread.

Critic’s Choice

It should be clear by the end of this that I’m not approaching the films for this feature from a typical reviewer’s perspective. If I were take that view, I’d call this film trash, as the title suggests, and move on. For me, that would be deeply unsatisfying. I would be dismissing the themes and narrative choices that produce fruitful analysis. And for me, that is sometimes a far more satisfying avenue for exploration.

What I hope you’ll take home with you today is that some of these so-called trash films have something interesting going on under the hood. You may never love a film like Mac & Me the way I do, but you might come to appreciate it for what it is and what it has to say.

Now I turn it to you. Have you seen this film? What do YOU think about it?