11th October, 2008 Login • Register
Search This Site
Home Alone (1990) DVD Review
Home Alone (1990) DVD Credits:
Home Alone (1990) Directed by:
Chris Columbus
Home Alone (1990) Written by:
John Hughes
Home Alone (1990) Cast:
Macaulay Culkin, Joe Pesci, Daniel Stern, John Heard, Catherine O’Hara, Devin Ratray, Gerry Bamman, Terrie Snell, Hillary Wolf, Michael C. Maronna, Daiana Campeanu
Home Alone (1990) Released by:
Not available at this time
Region:
1
Home Alone (1990) DVD Release Date:
21st November 2006
Our Rating: Extras Rating:

User Rating:  Log in to rate this DVD
Home Alone (1990) Synopsis:

Eight-year-old Kevin McCallister (Macaulay Culkin) has become the man of the house, overnight! Accidentally left behind when his family rushes off on a Christmas vacation, Kevin gets busy decorating the house for the holidays. But he's not decking the halls with tinsel and holly. Two bumbling burglars are trying to break in, and Kevin's rigging a bewildering battery of booby traps to welcome them!

Home Alone (1990) DVD Review:

To say that Home Alone was a successful film would be a complete understatement. It was a phenomenon that launched Macaulay Culkin into absurd celebrity while creating a whole new sub-genre of holiday films. John Hughes wrote and produced it, giving the warm family film an untraditionally sweetness mixed in with enough inappropriate humor to keep everyone entertained. As well as bringing Culkin into celebrity, the film also stars Daniel Stern, Catherine O’Hara, John Candy, and Joe Pesci coming from his critically acclaimed performance in Goodfellas.

It is a simple Christmas story about a large family traveling during the holidays and leaving the troublemaker child behind. The child believes that he has struck gold living alone over the holidays until he begins to miss his family. To make matters worse there have been a string of burglaries in the neighborhood and they are targeting the child’s home next. Because of a freak accident with the phone lines and the parent’s difficult time trying to get home, the child decides to defend the home himself, using a method of pranks that he has developed as a trouble child.

The menus are kept really simple, just using a computer generated blue shadow of a house as the background, as is in the title sequence. It seems that they could have done something a bit more creative, or in the very least made it look better. The commentary track with Chris Columbus and Macaulay Culkin is uncomfortable because it was recorded long after Culkin passed the cute stage which eventually killed his career for a period. Something about his responses seems unusually positive and the stories get to be obnoxious. The commentary has mostly insight from Columbus with just random attempts at participating from Culkin. Some of the dialoguing includes strange bits of information in which Columbus accuses Pesci of being jealous onset of Culkin and at one point biting too hard on Culkin’s finger during rehearsal.

If Culkin is still fascinating to you, some of these features will go over well. There is footage that Culkin shot with a prop camcorder, which is basically a child’s version of behind the scenes action. The “Mac Cam” is like home movies at times, while there are other moments that fans of Catherine O’Hara might enjoy. Also included is a press featurette that was created in 19990 to help promote the film, and some original featurettes for the DVD. Here’s a featurette on the stunts in the film, with interviews with one of the stunt men and stories about progression of specific stunts. There is also a making of featurette, a featurette about the fake movie, Angels with Filthy Souls, with the footage presented. There are also deleted scenes and a blooper reel.

Our Rating: Extras Rating: User Rating:  Log in to rate this DVD

Home Alone (1990) DVD review written by: Ryan Izay

Content Management System provided by P J Thomson - Freelance Web Design - PHP/MySQL Development