Once set up in their new digs, the Cruise clan is subject to a series of weird “alien interventions,” such as when the little guy inexplicably decides to replicate the wooded area outside - in the living room of their house. If you think that’s too harsh an assessment, I assure you it’s not, and offer this mercifully brief “plot” synopsis as proof : wheelchair-bound youth Eric Cruise (played with an annoying level of over-sincerity, but no discernible talent, by Jade Calegory), his older brother, Michael (Jonathan Ward), and their mom, Janet (Christine Ebersole) are in the midst of a cross-country move from Chicago to California when an alien who was literally vacuumed aboard a NASA planetary lander along with his the family he’s now separated from stows away in the back of their mini-van after escaping government custody.

I mean, I saw it as a kid, but I remember being fundamentally unimpressed by it even then - and now I remember why : it’s basically a 90-ish minute McDonald’s (and Coke, and Skittles - but mainly Mickey D’s) commercial strung out over the barest skeleton of a script. rip-off Mac And Me until it turned up as the first “episode” of the new “season” of Netflix’s Mystery Science Theater 3000 revival. I admit, I’d blissfully forgotten about director Stewart Raffill’s godawful 1988 E.T.

Mac and me 2