Mountain of Madness (aka I Got Cabin Fever, It's Burning In My Brain...)

The DVD commentary for The Simpsons' "Mountain of Madness" (episode 4F10) is a bizarre one for sure - and not because of the presence of a layperson who's sitting in on the recording because he won a contest (it's actually quite charming to hear this guy, who sounds nervous as hell when he's introduced, come out of his shell and interact more with the crew as the commentary goes on). We learn that this episode had a troubled development at the scripting stage - it made it to air on February 2nd 1997, but only after being subject to an "infamous rewrite", necessitated by what showrunner Josh Weinstein describes as their mishandling of the "finely tooled crazy German machine" that is a John Swartzwelder script. It's observed that the episode has "a really crazy, crazy plot", and yet we're told that it could have been crazier still. The story underwent a continuous revamp, with Burns and Homer's hallucinations going to considerably more feverish places in intermediary drafts, yet for as infamous as this rewrite purportedly was, it seems that no one who worked on it can remember what those preliminary efforts were all about. When we get to the scene where they trapped individuals have dressed a couple of snowmen in their own outer garments, there's a LOT of hushed murmuring about the "big crazy thing" that was supposed to happen around this point, but no elaboration on what that big crazy thing actually was. That is, until Weinstein concedes, "I think it was so crazy that I banished it from my brain." Swartzwelder himself has this thing about not doing DVD commentaries, so it doesn't help that he's not there to weigh in on his original vision. "Mountain of Madness" once reached deep into the mouth of insanity, but it was an insanity the world was clearly not meant to know.

It's funny really, because from my perspective "Mountain of Madness" has always been one of the more moderate entries of Season 8, which I don't exactly mean as a criticism. It's a solidly entertaining episode, there's absolutely nothing wrong with it and it yields more than its fair share of classic Simpsons moments. But given how experimental and, at times, borderline dangerous this particular season was determined to get, "Mountain of Madness" feels like The Simpsons working squarely within its comfort zone. I would have guessed that it was purpose-designed as a safer installment right from the start, to balance out the more daring likes of "You Only Move Twice" and "The Simpsons Spin-off Showcase". The basic trajectory is easy enough to predict, the premise is an all-purpose one that could have fitted in with just about any season (although the climactic detail with the so-called rocket house bursting from the snow is very much of the latter half of Weinstein and Oakley's era), and we don't learn anything radically new or interesting about the characters along the way (with the possible exception of Lenny and Carl). It has a reassuring air of familiarity, playing as it does like a variation on the Season 1 episode, "The Call of The Simpsons", which also had the family breaking off into different splinter groups whilst enduring the perils of the great outdoors. If anything I'd say that "Mountain of Madness" tones down the absurdities of its Season 1 counterpart, which by its third act has swelled into a pure farce - there's nothing quite as outrageous in here as Homer being mistaken for Bigfoot, or as bizarre as that subplot with Maggie being adopted by a sleuth of grizzly bears. Instead, "Mountain of Madness" approaches its scenario from a darker, more sinister angle, and to that end its understated hand proves a sensible choice. The central breakdown of sanity isn't oversold to us, manifesting not as a collection of wild hallucinations, but as a creeping sense of apprehension that's at once patently silly but also genuinely eerie. The finished script gives us all the claustrophobic fun of a classic cabin fever set-up while keeping a beady knowing eye on its numerous contrivances.

"Mountain of Madness" opens with the Springfield Nuclear Power Plant running a fire drill, and it becoming painfully apparent that, if this were a real fire, everyone except Burns and Smithers would have been toast. Burns concludes that his employees are lacking in a sense of cooperative spirit, and remedies this by ordering them to attend a corporate retreat at the Mt. Useful National Park. There, the full personnel is divided off into pairs via a random draw and challenged with hiking to a cabin located somewhere up in the mountain, with the carrot that the cabin contains a buffet of sandwiches and moderately priced champagne, and the stick that the last pair to arrive will be fired. A slight flaw in the arrangement is that the plant has an odd number of employees, with Smithers being left without a partner while Homer is paired up with Burns. Burns, naturally, has no intention of playing fairly at his own game - he and Homer arrive at cabin well ahead of the others, off the back of a formidable bit of teamwork that consists of Burns proposing that they cheat and Homer falling in line. (It's not clear if Homer is actually won over by Burns' "cheating is a gift Man gives himself!" spiel or if he's just saying what he thinks his boss wants to hear; either way, we get this underrated exchange: "You know, Simpson, you're not as objectionable as you seemed when we first met." "No sir, I am not.") The two of them get to lounge around and sip champagne while everyone else is out there struggling, but their ill-gotten comfort becomes a deathtrap when an avalanche has them snowed in, leaving them enclosed in one another's company and with nowhere to go except down the rabbit hole of delusion and paranoia. Meanwhile, the rest of the Simpson family have been left to amuse themselves at the park's visitor centre, but are subsequently dragged into the action. Bart and Lisa are playing outside when they run into Smithers and offer to accompany him to the cabin, while Marge and Maggie, propelled by Bart and Lisa's apparent disappearance, end up on a chair lift with an ostensibly square park ranger who doesn't have a clue what he's doing.

I have my own theory about what might have changed during rewrites - were Marge, Bart, Lisa and Maggie intended to tag along from the beginning? This is a story that shouldn't logically involve them, a point the final script is fairly upfront about. Homer brings them to the mountain on a misunderstanding that's explained in the most arbitrary of terms ("I thought I was supposed to"). It's interesting, because the basic premise could, theoretically, have worked without them - the rest of the family does nothing to influence the resolution to the A-story of Homer and Burns being trapped in the cabin. I've a sneaking suspicion that the episode might have been pitched as one focussing exclusively on the plant personnel, only for the family to be worked in following a sentiment that the plant personnel were not developed or defined enough to carry an episode as an ensemble. Perhaps even more importantly, the presence of the other Simpsons allows for a small but critical emotional beat that might otherwise have been lacking, in having someone with a vested interest in ensuring Homer is found (Burns of course has Smithers to be concerned for him). True, you might expect Lenny and Carl to be at least a little worried about their friend and colleague, but they're clearly too wrapped up in whatever it is that's going on with them. When Lenny and Carl tell Smithers that Homer and Burns are unaccounted for, their phrasing is ominous but their tone entirely casual, as if the implications haven't fully sunk in.

The theme of the episode is teamwork (at least on the surface), and the narrative structure is basically an excuse to get the characters divided off into various duos and threesomes and see what hilarious interactions ensue. Homer and Burns aren't such a novel pairing - only last season we had "Homer The Smithers", which for a large stretch was practically a two-hander between Homer and his tyrannical boss. There is even a precedent for the two being able to enjoying one another's company in a more casual setting, in "Dancin' Homer" of Season 2. It is, though, unusual to see Smithers having any kind of prolonged interaction with the Simpsons children. He's met them on enough prior occasions, and he's even been an unlikely source of help to them, as seen in "Lisa vs. Malibu Stacey" and "Sideshow Bob Roberts", but this is the first time he's been in a situation where he's effectively responsible for them. Again, nothing overly dramatic or unexpected comes of it - Bart and Lisa predictably prove more of a hindrance than a help, and Smithers, who's clearly not used to dealing with children but has too much of a moral compass to leave them out in the wilderness, gets increasingly exasperated by their antics - but their dynamic is nice and entirely natural, serving as a lighter counterpoint to the creepier stuff going on in the cabin. Smithers needs the order and structure of an office environment (or else Burns' mansion) in which to thrive; as alien to him as the chaos of children is the chaos of nature, to the point that the abundance of disordered mountain wildlife Lisa keeps bringing to his attention seems symptomatic of some kind of wider cosmic malfunction. This whole subplot culminates in a fittingly quirky gag, with Smithers expressing his resignation to the disarray by standing by as a moose goes up in flames (albeit a stuffed one). Lisa, by the way, is the episode's MVP, for facilitating The Simpsons' first ever onscreen sighting of a shrew. Shrews are a hugely underrated animal, and I wish we saw them represented in animation more often.

The characters who have the most intriguing arc going on, however, are Lenny and Carl, who were paired up in the random draw - much to the chagrin of Carl, who spends the episode cheesed off with Lenny for reasons that are never explained. This is where "Mountain of Madness" does get slightly radical, since it attempts to delve a little deeper into the dynamics of Homer's two most prominent co-workers and allow them some one-to-one interaction time. Up until now, Lenny and Carl weren't given massively distinctive personalities; they were a duo who'd largely blended into one another, and they nearly always had Homer to bounce off of (often they played the comparative straight men to his cruder foibles). There was some precedent for making Carl the tetchier of the two and Lenny the more guileless (see "Homer The Great" of Season 5), but "Mountain of Madness" saw the origin of a running gag that deliberately played on how much we don't know about these characters. We'd be seeing a good deal more of Lenny and Carl in the years to come (much like Moe, they were beneficiaries of Barney's soft retirement as Homer's best friend), and in a few seasons' time this joke was taken to greater extremes still, with gags based around the implication that Lenny and Carl had this really complicated, emotionally-charged relationship, the nature of which wasn't entirely clear. Were they friends? On and off lovers? Heterosexual life partners? What was evident is that they had a prevailing co-dependency, stemming from the arch observation that they were seldom seen apart. The real theme of "Mountains of Madness" is characters being stuck together and getting on each other's nerves, and Lenny and Carl have been joined at the hip in a meta sense for quite some time; their mysterious head-butting in this episode warrants no deeper explanation than that. This non-stop discord doesn't prevent them from being a functional duo - it's noteworthy that Lenny and Carl would have been the rightful winners, since they were the first pair to make it to the correct location without cheating, not realising that the cabin had been buried in an avalanche. They were also the first pair to scout out the incorrect cabin, the ranger station that everyone convenes in when it transpires to be the only visible building in the mountain (were they disappointed by the lack of sandwiches and moderately priced champagne?). Clearly, Lenny and Carl are a formidable team, whether they're at ease with that or not. It adds an extra layer of injustice to the ending, when Burns fires Lenny for being the last to make it inside the cabin (even if it doesn't stick) and Lenny winds up at the bottom of a hole. That's the other major gag that "Mountains of Madness" gets off the ground - the one about Lenny being a victim of endless physical misfortune. That much he endures without Carl's camaraderie.

The cleverest stroke of irony, in an episode centred on the havoc that arises when trust and cooperation break down, is that the avalanches are triggered by instances of Homer and Burns being perfectly in sync - firstly, when they chink their champagne glasses, and secondly when, having tunnelled their way through the snow pile caused by the previous avalanche, they high five one another in celebration, only to be buried underneath an even deeper pile. It's as sure a sign as any that the alliance is an unholy one. In Homer's case, it's practically Faustian - notice how, at the peak of their delusions, Burns has assumed an uncannily devilish look, complete with fiery red attire and a pointed poking device? Burns was the one who lured Homer over to the dark side, promising him champagne and job security in exchange for twisting the rules; entrapment with his boss becomes a chilling wake-up call as to what kind of innately treacherous being he was cozying up to this entire time. You could apply a similar reading from Burns' perspective, with the avalanches being a karmic retribution for his lowering himself to Homer's standards - the fateful chink was, after all, in response to Burns' gratitude for learning Homer's trick for retrieving a bowl of dip from further up the table without having to get up (by stomping his foot on the table and moving it with the vibrations). If you ally yourself with a boor, you'll get boorishness. Each man regards the other as a ticking time bomb, although we mostly see the situation from Homer's point of view. Clearly, Burns is the more dangerous because he's the more susceptible to cabin fever (presumably because he has a lower threshold for goodwill to begin with). As was noted when I covered "Homer The Smithers", one of the refreshing things about the Burns-Homer pairing is that Burns tends to be so out of touch that he sometimes gives Homer the chance to be the (comparative) straight man. Homer manages to stay grounded for much of the ordeal, and he proves the more adept survivalist; it's off the back of his labour that they're able to tunnel their way out of that first snow pile, something to which Burns is too feeble to contribute. While they have a joint hand causing in the avalanches, Burns has a far more poisonous influence on their deterioration inside the cabin, twisting Homer's innocuous suggestion that they keep themselves occupied by building snowmen into the megalomaniacal endeavour of building "real men, out of snow!" Why go to the lengths of constructing elaborate fantasies when you can convey Burns' slide into insanity through subtler, more unsettling means, such as his grotesque observation on having assembled his so-called real man out of snow: "206 bones, 50 miles of small intestine, full pouting lips...why, this fellow is less a snowman than a god!"

"Mountain of Madness" is at its best wherever it's able to suggest a vague but pervasive sense of the weird and the sinister that goes hand in hand with the monotonous and the mundane. Despite the ranger's insistence that "budget cutbacks have forced us to eliminate anything in the least bit entertaining", the second and third best gags of the episode both involve the collection of hellish exhibits at the park visitor centre. The second best is that Smokey the Bear animatronic that asks visitors "Only WHO can prevent forest fires?" and is apparently programmed to tell them they're wrong no matter what answer they pick. The third is that ancient park film featuring the incomprehensible narration of naturalist John Muir (or, more accurately, Marge's quietly perturbed reaction to it). My pick for the episode's zenith, however, is a moment that I rarely ever see brought up in discussions - when Burns tries using a telegraph machine to contact the outside world, only to get through to a machine housed in yet another hellish exhibit, this one in the Springfield Museum (which is as deserted as ever), alongside a neglected mannequin of Samuel Morse. The specific detail that sells this gag for me, more so than the mannequin's lifeless eyes and the cobwebs dangled across its shoulders, is that static smile visible behind its slightly misaligned beard and moustache. That's a smile that really haunted me in my youth, seeming to greet Burns' unheard distress call with equal parts obliviousness and taunting. What better face for the rescue that will not be coming, from a town that packed all functional communication into a museum exhibit and forgot about it long ago?

In fact, there seems to be something of a running theme about human (or bear) shaped objects taking on a mocking life of their own. The snow gods that Burns and Homer build (and dress in their own clothing) have the same uncanniness:

Homer, who at this point is still hanging onto some fraying line of sanity, reminds us that they're only snowmen. Burns, though, insists that there's more going on behind those button eyes: "Snowmen have peepers. Peepers to watch for a moment of weakness and then BAFF! Comes the knock of the wood on the head and we're down!" If Burns is sounding oddly convincing it's because in a way, he's right. The snowmen have become monstrous reflections of their decaying mental state; Burns senses that things are bound to get ugly because he's projecting onto the snowmen his own escalating desire to put a block of wood to Homer's skull at his first sign of weakness (and his suspicion that Homer would like to do the same to him). Homer asks what they should do; Burns indicates that their alliance is off, with the ominous response: "Oh, wouldn't you like to know..." And just like that, Burns has slipped into the well of raving paranoia, and he's taken Homer down with him.

This is hair-raising stuff, but at its heart it knows how silly it is. The situation hinges on a string of absurdities that are either casually hand-waved or played at as low-key a level as possible. Firstly, it is a bit daft that the avalanche should be activated by a small chink of champagne glasses, when Homer's repeated pounding on the table just a few moments prior wasn't enough to tip the snow over, but I suppose we've already accounted for that in a symbolic sense. Just as convenient is that no one else climbing the mountain should notice these avalanches or be affected by them in any way, something the script cheekily breezes past by including a brief, knowing moment with Lenny asking Carl if he heard something, and Carl churlishly suggesting that Lenny might be schizophrenic. The biggest contrivance, though, is one that's never made even vaguely explicit, which is that Homer and Burns couldn't have been stuck inside that cabin for more than a few hours maximum. Most of the episode takes place in the course of a single day, and there's not even a hint of the skies beginning to darken by the end. I'm sure your perception of time is going to differ when you're trapped indoors with minimal stimulation and you can't even see if it's still daylight out or not, but nevertheless, it didn't take Homer and Burns long to crack, did it? All this fuss because they couldn't tolerate a single afternoon in each other's enforced company.

The crisis intensifies as Homer and Burns enter into a stalemate of silent, mutual suspicion. Homer thinks that Burns is trying to hypnotise him (but not in the good Las Vegas way), while Burns assumes Homer must be plotting to murder him. (More specifically, he thinks Homer wants to kill him so he can ride his corpse down the mountain to safety. A deliriously absurd notion, and yet Homer did in fact ride a corpse down a mountain a mere season later in "King of The Hill". Both scripts were written by Swartzwelder, so I'll assume either he took inspiration from his earlier work or he has an unhealthy obsession.) As each looks into the other's eyes, what he's really gazing into is the abyss of his own brain-rotting paranoia. The "Congratulations Teamworkers" banner hangs in tatters in the backdrop; strip away the tenets of civilisation and it really is every person for themselves. By now, the script has exercised enough restraint to finally allow a dash of feverish fantasy to mingle with the cold realities. Burns openly declares his desire to vanquish Homer, and is perceived by Homer as having amassed his own army of pickelhaube-wearing snowmen. Homer desperately counters that he has powers of his own - political powers! - whereupon Burns perceives him as being flanked by the likes of Abraham Lincoln, Mahatma Ghandi and what I'm guessing is Tutankhamun. The two armies advance on one another, but of course Burns and Homer are the only ones there. After a spectacularly uncoordinated tussle, Burns manages to rupture the propane tank that's heating the cabin, causing it to ignite and propel the entire building out of the snow. At which point both men immediately, almost incongruously call out to one another for reassurance - all it took was the awakening of an external threat to remind them that there are bigger, more destructive forces out there than the two of them. Meanwhile, everyone else has arrived safely at the ranger station and finally realised that Burns and Homer are missing. They are about to organise a search party when the rocket house suddenly comes hurtling in their direction. A brutal collision seems all but inevitable, until the propane abruptly burns out and the cabin glides to a gentle halt. Burns and Homer emerge in one piece, dishevelled and thoroughly humbled in front of everyone who managed to make it to the cabin (albeit the wrong one) off the back of honest teamwork.

Burns, though, isn't willing to let his ascendancy go - as Homer heads outside to embrace the family he feared he'd never see again, he stays put inside the cabin, managing to claim its cursed confines as his trophy by reasserting his condition that the last employee to enter gets fired. Lenny has the misfortune of being right at the back of the ensuing stampede, although even Burns seems to realise the pettiness of this move, since he rescinds it immediately after, thus keeping the status quo safely in order. (In truth, it was a stroke of good fortune that Lenny fell down that hole, otherwise he might have mouthed off at Burns and not been so easily forgiven.) The final sequence is another variation on a Simpsons standard (previously observed in "Black Widower" and "So It's Come To This: A Simpsons Clip Show"), in which characters laugh in exaggerated ways that barely disguise the traumas of the preceding 20 minutes - an apprehension made all the more salient by having Homer and Burns intermittently stop laughing to glower warily at one another. There's also a bit of sly meta humor in Burn's observation that, "When you've been through something like that with a person, you never want to see that person again." By the next episode, he'll have memory holed the entire affair, as he has every prior Homer encounter, and from his perspective it will be as though he and Homer never met. It's one way of protecting yourself from dealing with the lingering psychological horrors. Still, he's right to be leery, since there's is no escape from the broader entrapment that will make Homer a source of trouble for him again before too long. Sorry Burns, but you're stuck with Homer. No one heard your SOS.

Bushwhacked (aka The Thin Khaki Line Between Morality And Depravity)

I can't be the only person who sincerely wanted the Wet Bandits from the first two Home Alone movies to have a happy ending. Those guys had already suffered enough, you know? They endured the wrath of Kevin McCallister and his custom-made torture devices, and what's more, they endured it twice, the 1990s being a time when sequels weren't expected to do much more than recreate the most popular beats from the previous film, only bigger and louder, and go to the city. Here's something I'll forever say in defence of Harry and Marv - they were not, initially, the kind of villains who'd set out to be cruel or violent toward a child. Kevin provoked that behaviour out of them later on with his own extreme cruelty, but the scene where they narrowly avoided running Kevin over and were shaken up about it clearly established that they had some moral boundaries in the beginning. They were not sociopaths, which is more than we can obviously say for Kevin himself. That kid had an uncanny talent for torture; he could be John Kramer in the making. To a point, I can understand why he didn't attempt to get the police involved, as they had already proven themselves incompetent. But if he was really that much of a prodigy when it came to devising booby traps, then couldn't he have found a way to snare the burglars humanely and with minimal pain? The cruelty, for Kevin, was precisely the point. He revelled in it. His cruelty didn't come from nowhere - he had his own problems to deal with, in the form of an obnoxious and abusive family who, owing to Hollywood superficiality, are forgiven way too easily at the end. Harry and Marv were merely the sacrificial lambs in that most heinous of processes. There's an observation in the Virgin Film Guide review of the original Home Alone that I feel hits the nail right on the head: "This could be the first comedy - it's certainly the first holiday film - which focuses on child abuse. As Kevin shoots pellets into the intruders and takes a blowtorch to their heads, he's directing the hostility he feels toward his neglectful parents at these two guys." (4th edition, p.346-47) Harry and Marv were no angels, but there were greater evils than them at work in this world. Cut them a little slack, alright?

Which is what makes Bushwhacked, an unassuming family comedy from 1995, so very important. The film stars Daniel Stern, better known for playing Marv, the more guileless half of the Wet Bandit duo. Here, he plays a character named Max Grabelski, who heavily recalls his earlier shtick as Marv, and it turns out there might - might - be a wonderful reason for that. For a long time, whenever this film was brought up in online discussions, Dame Rumor was abuzz with the hearsay that this was was originally conceived as a Home Alone spin-off chronicling Marv's further adventures after his traumatic run-ins with Kevin. Somewhere down the line he apparently attempted to go straight, got a job as a courier and, through a string of wacky misunderstandings, was mistaken for a renowned scout master and saddled with a troop of over-inquisitive charges. Seems like a logical progression for a thwarted housebreaker. That the names "Marv" and "Max" are so similar is certainly enough to fuel suspicion. Oh, and get this - Stern's Home Alone co-star, Macaulay Culkin, was to have made a surprise cameo, as the punchline of the entire piece. He'd have shown his evil smirking face, just as Marv had rebuilt his life and salvaged his self-esteem, to remind him that there were some demons he had still yet to conquer (it was around about this time that Culkin took his lengthy hiatus from acting, so in another universe this might even have been his last appearance as a child actor). Sadly, Dame Rumor is frequently full of shit, and what we're largely hearing now is that this was never more than hearsay, with "Max" being scripted as a separate entity from Marv all along (the film's Wikipedia and IMDB pages previously stated the abandoned Home Alone connection as fact, but both have since backed down from that position). Yeah, I feel your disappointment, but we shouldn't let that stop us. I'm all in favour of making Bushwhacked a canon Home Alone sequel anyway. 

It just makes perfect sense to me. If only one Wet Bandit could end up happily, you would want it to be Marv, wouldn't you? Harry was played by Joe Pesci, and as such he was always going to exude some level of that Goodfellas-grade intimidation. Marv, though, was way more of a child than Kevin was - remember when Harry was talking about all of the stereos and expensive jewellery they might find in the McCallisters' home, and Marv's eyes lit up at the thought of all the toys? And when Harry reminded him that he was afraid of the dark? And how, during that how escapade in New York, he just wanted to make it to Central Park Zoo? Marv was the closest thing to an innocent in the Home Alone equation (an equation in which just about everyone, children included, are complete and utter dickwads). He was precious and should have been protected, and what better way to accomplish that than to give him his own movie where he's lost in the wilderness and gets mauled by a grizzly bear? You don't even have to squint too hard to see how this movie would have functioned as a vehicle for Marv - it's hardly surprising that the rumor, irrespective of how much merit it actually had, gained as much traction as it did.

If we are to accept Bushwhacked as a legitimate extension of the Home Alone continuity, then the most obvious question is where is Harry in all of this? Presumably the Wet Bandits (or Sticky Bandits, as Marv later attempted to re-brand them) have disbanded, and it wouldn't surprise me if Harry had initiated the break-up - when you're in the cat burglary game, Marv maybe isn't the hottest wingman material, owing to his annoying tendency to voluntarily confess when apprehended, and his prioritising of notoriety over discretion. Eventually Harry would get sick of it, and Marv clearly wouldn't be able to mastermind these ambitious plundering schemes on his own, so getting a real job would be his only recourse. The second biggest question is why is he now calling himself Max? Well, given his criminal history, it figures that he might want to create some distance from his former identity. Speaking of which, Marv's tendency toward voluntarily confessing might well have worked in his favour, enabling him to cop some plea bargain that had him back on the streets less than three years after the events of Lost in New York. You see, just about everything here is watertight. In the end, we're left with only one plot detail that requires any particularly substantial suspension of disbelief. Following his experiences in Home Alone and Lost in New York, I would fully expect Marv to have PTSD flashbacks on finding himself surrounded by children. He's not thrilled at being stuck with them, sure, but he doesn't seem in the least bit wary of anything the kids themselves could potentially do to him. He possibly appreciates that Kevin McCallister was an abnormally sociopathic child and that kids in general are harmless, but still, after two pictures of extensive punishment at the hands of a grade schooler, you might have anticipated a slightly more visceral reaction. But then the Home Alone series in general called for copious amounts of suspension of disbelief, particularly the second one. The notion that the McCallisters would lose Kevin all over again and that he would end up in New York City, where he would just so happen to cross paths with the Wet Bandits, out of all the places in America they might potentially have fled to, was one hell of a contrivance to swallow. Anything that happens in Bushwhacked is peanuts by comparison.

And again, it's all so intuitively correct. If Marv was to have his own redemption story, then doesn't it only seem fitting that it should entail him forging a connection with a group of children? Under a different set of circumstances, Marv could have been really good with children, given that he is such a child at heart himself. It seems a tragic twist of fate that his former life was derailed through his enmity with an unnaturally diabolical child; for him to find renewed purpose and fulfilment through his friendship with a much nicer set of children frankly feels like the cosmos balancing itself out. As a premise and as a sequel, Bushwhacked is absolutely sound.

Having established all of that, how does Bushwhacked hold up as a film on its own merits?

(I know trailers routinely borrow themes from other movies, but that use of the Back To The Future theme is weird.)

The term "product of its time" would not be an unfair assessment. Even without its alleged connection to the Home Alone cinematic universe, Greg Beeman's film feels unmistakably like the kind of family picture Hollywood favoured in the years immediately following Home Alone.  Oh baby, did Home Alone have a lot to answer for. The surprise success of the Culkin flick led to a barrage of like-minded comedies centred on cunning kids having the upper hand over bungling adults - from your Dennis the Menace (1993) to your Baby's Day Out (1994), to your Blank Check (1994), the early-90s truly were the age of the idiot adult. By the time Bushwhacked came along the formula had inevitably worn out its welcome; the film did little to impress critics and left nary a dent in zeitgeist. (I'm not sure if Bushwhacked even got a theatrical release in the UK; if it did, then it must have been an extremely low-key one. I personally didn't know of the film's existence until the early 00s, when it showed up routinely on Sky television.) The thing is, Stern is an exceptionally fun idiot adult, and Bushwhacked will always have that in its favour.

The premise of Bushwhacked has Marv - or "Max", as he'd sooner we now call him - framed for the murder of millionaire Reinhart Bragdon (a cartoonishly oily Anthony Heald), to whom he'd been delivering a succession of shady packages, and evading arrest by FBI agent Palmer (Jon Polito). Knowing that a final package is still due for delivery at Bragdon's cabin in Devil's Peak, Max flees for the mountains in the hopes of intercepting it and clearing his name - only for things to get all the more complicated when he's mistaken for an expert survivalist hired to accompany a Ranger Scouts troop on an overnight hike, and forced to accept six young travelling companions so as not to blow his cover. Pursuing him all the while is Palmer, who has joined forces with seasoned outdoorsman Jack Erikson (Brad Sullivan), the actual person hired to lead the troop. Needless to say, Max is as out of his depth in the wilderness as he is everywhere else in the world, and the kids begin to have their doubts about his credentials when he makes such potentially lethal rookie mistakes as attempting to pet a young grizzly bear and confusing a bee hive for a pine cone. As you probably expected, there are multiple set pieces that involve Max enduring some manner of physical punishment for his idiocy. The script (earlier drafts of which were reportedly penned by the Farrelly brothers, but their names were taken off the final product) also incorporates a few instances of edgy scatological humor, notably a sequence where Max gives the kids an enthusiastic pep talk on the art of pissing out of doors: "Eat your veggies, eat your starches! Lean back, boys...GOLDEN ARCHES!" You won't feel proud of yourself for laughing at much of Bushwhacked, but that's par for the course with this type of movie. Did you feel proud of yourself for laughing when Kevin fired his pellet gun into Harry's testicles in Home Alone? Or when Baby Bink kicked Fat Tony in the groin?

Bushwhacked is crude and lowbrow, but it's nowhere near as viciously mean-spirited as Home Alone, and that much puts it at something of a disadvantage if we're determined to view it as a furthering of the Home Alone universe. After all, we've already seen Max (Marv) take on worse. Once you've endured Kevin McCallister's labyrinth of horrors twice over, what terror can the wilderness possibly hold? A tenderfoot? Not this tiger! As I recall, his bare feet were on the receiving end of some of the most horrifying traps in that kid's arsenal and he just kept walking. Bushwhacked is a relatively gentle adventure, right down to the fairly agreeable bunch of kids Max has to contend with, none of whom are anywhere near as horrible as Kevin, or indeed any of the children in the McCallister household. It also has to be said that none of them have the same force of personality as Kevin either. The child actors all do a good job, and their chemistry with Stern is likeable, but somewhat inevitably for a script that's having to juggle with six different kids at once, there are points where their personalities appear to blend into one another. The kid with the most distinct presence is Milton Fishman (Ari Greenberg), the bookish nerd of the group who's constantly consulting the scout manual for guidance and is in one scene tasked with overcoming his fear of plummeting off of a rope bridge. Another child, Kelsey Jordan (Janna Michaels), is notable for being the troop's sole female, although her personality never much transcends her designation as token girl. Then there's Gordy (Blake Bashoff), who I think is supposed to be the lead kid, and whose mother (Ann Dowd), manages the troop's activities at their suburban base. Otherwise we've got the kid who takes the occasional ribbing for his weight but is really efficient in an emergency, the pint-sized Scrappy Doo type with the over-protective father who wouldn't sign his permission slip, and Gordy's sidekick whom I'm forever confusing with Gordy himself. Not the most distinguished young assembly, but tolerable company for ninety minutes.

Max, naturally, isn't keen on having them for even five. The kids could only be dead-weight on his mission to Devil's Peak; they also come dangerously close to exposing him as a fraud straight off the bat when they insist on calling him "Spider", understanding this to be the nickname of their scout leader, and then immediately demand to know the backstory. (Max: "Because I once killed a kid who dropped a spider onto my face who called me "Spider" one time too many!") He attempts to ditch the troop, but quickly discovers that the wilderness is scary and that he cannot go it alone. A role reversal occurs, in which Max becomes dependent on the children's expertise for his own survival. Meanwhile, back at civilisation, news reaches the parents that the man with whom they entrusted their children is really a suspected killer on the run from the law, and they handle it as calmly as you would imagine. Like Home Alone, Bushwhacked deals humorously with situations that reflect a parent's darkest nightmares, and are really chilling indictments of their own failure to keep their guard up at all times about the whereabouts of their children and the company they keep. Max might not be a killer, but he's probably not the first person you'd want as a role model for your kids. He's a few dirty habits, including that he's a smoker (something that Marv was not, although he did share Max's gum-chewing habit). He knows all those vulgar pissing chants, he's obviously sleazy enough to endanger the children by duping them into accompanying him to Devil's Peak, and he's made some questionable choices in life. Even if we don't take into account his possible history as a career cat burglar, we know that he willingly entered into a crooked deal with Mr Bragdon (for which he cites boredom as his primary motive). The adult community routinely dismisses him as a lowlife, from Erikson's relatively genteel assessment that he's an "inconsiderate person" when he catches Max's vehicle in a disabled parking space, to Bragdon's more damning opinion (when it's revealed that he faked his death to cover up his money laundering, and purposely set Max up to take the fall) that Max was the perfect patsy because he's a loser and expendable to society. The kids offer judgements of their own when Max opens up to them about how he came to be involved with Bragdon (albeit framing it as a hypothetical scenario); they note that the situation was blatantly a trap, and the terms "criminal", "sleazeball" and "sucker" get tossed around. Nevertheless, when Bragdon moves to have Max killed, the kids decide that they like him regardless and come to his aid. He has, after all, provided them with a valuable crash course in the messiness of adulthood. Which is the real wilderness we're traversing here; by comparison, the ravines and the grizzlies are a doddle.

Obviously, a big part of the appeal of those Home Alone wannabes that cluttered the family cinema of the 90s lay in their being simple exercises in table turning. Among other things, adults are prone to condescending children, so what could be more cathartic to a child than seeing adults getting their comeuppance precisely because they underestimated children? But they were also tales about the fallibility of adults; the gruelling physical humiliations inflicted on the grown-ups therein were reminders that adults are a foolish, chaotic and ridiculous bunch, and this has ramifications for how children are expected to relate to them and to cope with their foibles. Even the ones whom we're encouraged to think we can trust, like our own family members, can't always be counted on to make the right calls. Home Alone itself stands out because it is such a bitter concoction, part nightmare scenario, part escapist revenge fantasy (Lost in New York doesn't work half as well because it's too much of the latter, not enough of the former). Kevin copes as well as he does with his abandonment, we suspect, because this is all just business as usual to him. Ignored by his parents, except when he is the cause of trouble, and antagonised by his older siblings, he's already accustomed to surviving in a world where he is fundamentally on his own. Kevin does not even construe his family's disappearance as abandonment, but as the overcoming of adversity on his part - they were never his protectors, just obstacles to be removed. Kevin spends much of the film grappling with a paradox - he's been forced to become an adult so early in life, and yet he still feels all of the vulnerabilities he erroneously assumes to be unique to children. Eventually, he decides that he misses his family, in spite of their failings (a development that's completely unmotivated, unless Kevin was moved by something in that Johnny Carson sketch), and tries bargaining with a higher power (a grotto Santa) to have them restored. He makes his peace with the fallibility of adults by coming to understand the ways in which they remain as vulnerable as children, both in a physical sense (through the torture he inflicts upon Harry and Marv) and emotionally (his conversation with Old Man Marley, whose estrangement from his son echoes Kevin's own feelings of alienation within his family). For its astute recreation of a child's-eye perception of life's injustices, Home Alone is really an impassioned plea on behalf of adults, for kids to accept that they can't be perfect and to love them anyway (unless they're designated bad guys, in which case vent your repressed hostilities like there's no tomorrow).

Still, there was one aspect of adulthood toward which Kevin maintained his innocence, or at least his indifference, that being the matter of sexuality. That was something that interested his loathsome teenage brother Buzz, who wanted to know if the Parisians went in for nude beaches, but that Kevin himself couldn't begin to comprehend. There's a scene where, exploring the forbidden items in Buzz's bedroom, he happens across a copy of Playboy magazine and briefly turns the pages, before tossing it aside with the indignant verdict, "No clothes on anybody! Sickening!" This is not so with the children in Bushwhacked. They already have a nascent interest in sexuality - one of them has even snuck along a copy of said magazine on the trip - although their understanding of how sexual intercourse works is poor, and Max proves his value to them in being the one to explain it, when they convince him that sex education is part of the scout master job description. In the film's second most infamous scene (after the pissing one), Max talks to the children about the birds and the bees using Barbie and Ken dolls that Kelsey conveniently brought along as props, in a move that reads less like the violation of childhood innocence than the uncomfortable admission that these innocuous toys were avatars for certain thorny realities all along. A moment in which the parents freak out about what this homicidal weirdo might be doing to their children is intercut with this very sequence; the real danger, it's implied, is in the initiation into the adult world, with all of its messy, awkward and confusing habits and inclinations (things that Kevin's odyssey never even touched on). Max is the very walking embodiment of that chaotic adulthood, dangerous because he doesn't always know where to apply a filter when dealing with children. Even when he's attempting to do right by them, he can't help but threaten to push them over that rockiest of edges - for example, he encourages Fishman to counteract his acrophobia by proclaiming himself a "super stud". As Erikson suggests to Palmer, there is a thin line between morality and depravity, and Max spends much of his adventure straddling it.

The children nevertheless respond to Max's unorthodox approach; his daffiness and his forthrightness cut through the adult facade and make the prospect of coming of age more accessible to them. They also learn that the greater peril lies not with adults who don't necessarily present as upstanding role models, but with adults who pretend to be upstanding as a ruse. The story's bombshell betrayal comes not with the revelation that Bragdon set Max up - that much was always patently obvious, and Max is hilariously obtuse in coming to realise it - but that Agent Palmer, an authority the kids and adults alike presumed they could trust, was in cahoots with him the whole time. In Home Alone, Harry and Marv were easily coded as the designated bad guys, because they were obvious outsiders to the McCallisters' swanky lifestyle and familial domesticity (Harry does appear to be wearing a wedding ring, and I would love to know the story behind that, but the script never goes into it). Their sacrificial lamb-iness lay in sentiments that were frankly not far-removed from Bragdon's judgement that Max is a loser and fully expendable. Bushwhacked, by contrast, extends a hand of acceptance to the unkempt misfit living somewhat beyond the pale. That's why it's so appealing to read this as Marv's redemption story - it feels like a deliberate loosening of the rules that disqualified him from the magnanimity the first couple of times around. The villains here are the law enforcer and the guy who lives in the decadent mansion; the inversion is simply delicious.

So Max becomes a metaphor for the sinuous trajectory into ripeness that lies ahead of these kids - dubious, volatile and at times beyond all comprehension, but ultimately worth embracing. Their newfound willingness to get to grips with their impending puberty is no better typified than in a sequence where the kids fight back against Bragdon and Palmer by using Kelsey's training bra as a slingshot (again, Kelsey's function is to supply all the story's best props). On that same token, Max's journey into the wilderness presents his own opportunity to come to terms with those elements of adulthood that still confound him. His problem up until now is that he has been too childish in his perspective on life; he got into his predicament with Bragdon because he treated it as a game, and not as something that could potentially get him into trouble. Having a bunch of pubescents in tow naturally teaches him a thing or two about responsibility, and as the kids rally around him with their unwavering loyalty, he responds by stepping up and aspiring to be the leader and protector they need. In one scene, he even carries the weight of all those kids upon his back (albeit not all at once) by using his own body to bridge a gap in the mountain and enabling the whole troop to pass safely across. Eye-popping physical punishment thus becomes redemptive, as an opportunity to test one's endurance, rather than a means of cutting down a would-be authority. Together they foil Bragdon and Palmer, and also save Gordy's mother, who'd gotten herself kidnapped by said villains just to up those third act stakes. In the final scene, Erikson is awarding the troop badges of honor for their heroism, including Max, who becomes a fully ordained scout leader. Max is excited to learn that his first assignment will be to accompany the kids on a camping trip to Yosemite, until Erikson specifies that he won't just be supervising his own troop, but every kid in the ceremony hall, at which point they all at rush a horrified Max and we cue the obligatory freeze frame ending. As per the old rumor, this is where Kevin McCallister would have shown up, as one of the new scouts Marv was about to have his hands full with. In another, better universe I'm sure there's even a Bushwhacked 2 where Marv persuades Harry to join them for an overnight in Death Valley, and hilarity ensues.

Bushwhacked won't impress all sensibilities, but I'm happy to live in a world where it exists. I'd be happier still if it were an official Marv adventure, but conditions are thankfully amenable enough that I can comfortably headcanon it as such (although I will stop short of attempting to mentally insert Kevin into that final stampede, since I think Marv's earned the right to be free of that little sociopathic shit forever). Would it be a controversial opinion if I admitted to regarding it as a better Home Alone sequel than Lost in New York? At the very least, I'm sure most of us can agree that it's better than Home Alone 3 (if you know me, then you'll know the one thing I obviously do love about that movie - but trust me when I say that it's the only thing).

The Ghost of Crashes Future (Let's Go Feed It!)

I've been on a TAC binge lately, but the last thing I want to do is ruin anyone's December by delving into any of their Christmas campaigning. I can't say it represents their best work - TAC had a tendency toward heavy-handed displays of emotion at the best of times, and if anything was guaranteed to tease out their worst excesses, it was the festive season. Thus, I will spare you the vomitous ice slurry that is "The 12 Days of Christmas" and instead look to another purveyor of Australian road sense, the Road Safety Commission of Western Australia, for this year's dosage of seasonal safety awareness. The twist being that this particular campaign, "Ghost" (circa 2003), wasn't technically a Christmas outing. It isn't set at Christmastime, nor do I have any evidence of it doing its rounds during December. It is, however, conspicuously modelled on Charles Dickens' A Christmas Carol, so I'd say that it's eligible for a spot in our Yuletide line-up. Variations on A Christmas Carol, that instantly-recognizable tale of short-sighted decisions and their potentially grave consequences, are something I'm frankly surprised we don't see more often in these kinds of safety campaigns, but then they possibly require a more complex narrative set-up than most 60-second ads have time for. Those who prefer their safety campaigns to be grounded in thoroughgoing realism (TAC included) would presumably also sooner stay away from anything so fanciful. RSC, though, were able to work dark magic with the concept - "Ghost" is eerie, offbeat and a wickedly good ride. It deserves a more prominent spot in the televised trauma hall of fame.

"Ghost" opens with our Scrooge stand-in, Pete, getting an unwelcome wake-up call from a sinister looming figure who identifies, somewhat sardonically, as "The Ghost of Crashes Future". This grinning spectre is intent on dragging him out of bed and taking him for a midnight drive, ostensibly to feed his need for speed, but actually to issue a stark warning about the crash Pete's habitual speeding will cause in the near future - a crash that will claim the life of his passenger and best friend Jez. Cue the cemetery shots and window-side peeping into the wrecked lives of grieving relatives.

A Christmas Carol isn't the only major influence I detect in "Ghost". The premise of an undead entity with an array of gruesome lacerations dropping in on a naive protagonist to peddle a chilling vision of the carnage to come also bears a striking resemblance to John Landis's 1981 comic horror An American Werewolf in London. Honestly, it's the American Werewolf influence that gives "Ghost" that additional zing as a safety spot - it's not afraid to get ghoulishly, almost gleefully macabre. The visual appearance of the Ghost of Crashes Future seems designed to compensate for the fact that we don't actually see the crash itself, giving us our quota for abhorrent imagery. His own backstory is never expounded on, although judging by his carved-up features, it seems an obvious conclusion that he himself exited the mortal realm via a harrowing crash. The Ghost is, I'd argue, a really good, really underrated PIF antagonist (I will stop short of calling him a villain, because much like the ghosts from A Christmas Carol and the undead Jack from American Werewolf, he is technically on the side of good). He's not quite as psychologically scarring as the Spirit of Dark and Lonely Water (because very few things are), but he is right up there with the inexplicably malevolent narrator of the Drinking and Driving Wrecks Lives installment "Mark". He's as effective as he is because there is something fiendishly, markedly inhuman about him, even before he shows his face and reveals his purpose. The opening frame, which depicts him as an imposing silhouette hovering over Pete's bed, is already an uncanny imagine enough in itself, but his baleful nature becomes exceptionally apparent in that discordant combination of chipper demeanour, malignant grin and heavily mangled face. The objective of his visit might be to impress on Pete the error of his speeding ways, but I've a hunch that this Ghost is in the haunting business because he gets off on the horror and misery. When he takes Pete to the house of Jez's mother to steal a quick glance into her grief-induced insomnia, capping it off with the observation "Nice work, Pete, real nice", the sarcasm and disdain in his voice are unmistakable, but so is the perverse relish he's evidently reaping from his assignment.

All of which plays into the campaign's key strength, which is that it is legitimately spooky. The Ghost of Crashes Future is an undiluted creep, but he's also the kind of spectre who only calls on you because you unwittingly invited him. He is but a grotesque manifestation of your degenerate willingness to endanger yourself and everyone around you with your reckless habits. Being whisked down a dark, deserted highway with only his company, and other glaring reminders of your misdeeds, is a compelling shorthand for being made to reckon with the hair-raising horrors embedded in your own nature. Horrors that arise not out of malice but from wilful ignorance - Pete's indifference to the ramifications of his everyday choices might be less openly aloof than that of his Dickensian counterpart, but the impact proves every bit as catastrophic to the lives he touches.

"Ghost" was originally designed to be shown in two 45-second halves, spaced out across a single ad break, a popular strategy at the time for road safety campaigns broadcast on Australian television (a full 104-second version combining both installments and some additional material^[1] was also screened in cinemas). After the set-up, in which Pete learns of the terrible consequences his actions will bring, viewers could stay tuned for the thrilling conclusion, in which Pete is called to confront what went wrong and why his speeding was the critical factor. As noted, the crash itself is not shown, which is in keeping with the source material (the Ghost of Christmas Yet to Come did not show Scrooge such tragic events as Tiny Tim's death or his own lonely passing as they occurred, just what followed in the aftermath). Instead, the Ghost takes him to the scene of the crash and lays out exactly what will happen. Pete will be driving 10-15k over the speed limit, as usual, when a ute (utility vehicle) will suddenly pull out in front of him and he'll be unable to stop in time. It becomes apparent that Pete's critical malfunction is his inability to accept responsibility for his actions - though he was purportedly receptive to understanding the cause of the accident ("Tell me"), upon learning that another vehicle was involved he immediately seizes the opportunity to lay the blame on someone else ("So it's the ute's fault?"). The Ghost then tells him to wake up, and he does - in bed, and in a cold sweat. Meanwhile, his girlfriend kipping next to him doesn't even stir.

Technically it's an optimistic ending. Pete literally awakening from the nightmare can be interpreted as symbolism for his waking up to the reality that he had the power of life and death in his hands all along; with any luck, his visitation from the Ghost of Crashes Future has left him with the foresight to drive within the limit and prevent the lethal crash from ever happening. Still, we don't get the kind of reassurance as we did in Dickens' tale about the long-term survival of Tiny Tim in Scrooge's new improved timeline, leaving the ad on a note of unsettling ambiguity that, ingeniously, puts the final outcome in our hands. Whether Pete has taken on board the message and will abide by the closing instruction to "Slow down, save lives" hinges on whether we the viewer have done the same. The onus to save Jez is now on us. Did the Ghost of Crashes Future make a ghastly enough impression?

 [1] The full cinema cut is the only version I'm presently able to find, so alas, I'm in no position to comment on what was missing in the television presentation.