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).