Could The ‘Home Alone’ Burglars Really Survive Kevin?
Keep the change, ya filthy animals.
Our Movie Mythbusters series answers the age-old question, “Okay, but could that actually happen in real life?”
It’s Christmas season: time for “Home Alone” to make the rounds on cable TV and streaming services. We think of Chris Columbus’ 1990 blockbuster as a lighthearted, occasionally touching and very funny holiday romp. Macaulay Culkin turns in a career-making performance as 8-year-old Kevin, the neglected and abused runt of a huge family that forgets to bring him along on a Christmas trip to Paris. He does what any kid would do: He sleeps in his parents’ bed, eats all the ice cream, orders pizza and stays up late watching TV.
Never mind that, as critic Roger Ebert points out, a real kid might have been far more scared, or that John Hughes’ unlikely plot rests on lame contrivances like the phone not working, and the fact that his family, once they realize he’s been left behind, don’t immediately fly home, and “find it impossible to get anyone to follow through on their panicked calls — if anyone did so, the movie would be over.”
No, let’s talk about that third act.
Kevin, in a “stand your ground” moment the National Rifle Association must be proud of, sets a series of booby traps for the “Wet Bandit” burglars, played by Joe Pesci and Daniel Stern. “Honest Trailers” says by this point, Kevin’s behavior exhibits classic sociopath tendencies:
“Witness years of neglect and abuse take their toll on this small child as he shows all the signs of becoming a sociopath. Like manipulation, talking to himself, and trapping two nonviolent criminals inside a sadistic world of torture from which there is no escape.”
The home invasion sequence led “Honest Trailers” to call the film “the most violent kids’ movie ever…one part ‘Ferris Bueller,’ one part ‘Saw.’” Kevin’s horror-movie gauntlet, surpassed only by “Looney Tunes’” Road Runner sequences in violence and incredulity, consists of “the kinds of traps that any 8-year-old could devise,” says Ebert, “if he had a budget of tens of thousands of dollars and the assistance of a crew of movie special effects people.” Numerous doctors and nurses have diagnosed the injuries that befall Harry and Marv. Here are some of the worst.
Marv falls down concrete steps.
Marv begins his odyssey of pain with a tumble down a flight of iced steps to the basement.
“You don’t get up from a fall like that,” ER physician Seth Brenner told Distractify. “Busted ribs, pulmonary contusion, splenic laceration, kidney injuries.” Dr. Julie Fridlington predicts the result would be “peeing and pooping from bags, pushed around in wheelchairs in some sort of chronic care facility.” But Kevin’s just getting started.
Harry grips a red-hot doorknob.
“If this doorknob is glowing visibly red in the dark, it has been heated to about 751 degrees Fahrenheit, and Harry gives it a nice, strong, one- to two-second grip,” Dr. Ryan St. Clair of the Weill Cornell Medical College tells The Week.
“By comparison, one second of contact with 155-degree water is enough to cause third-degree burns. The temperature of that doorknob is not quite hot enough to cause Harry’s hand to burst into flames, but it is not that far off.”
“We’re gonna need to, like, remove parts of his skin with this thing that looks like a cheese cutter,” ICU nurse Holly tells Distractify, “and then they’re gonna need to graft it onto his hand.”
Harry stands under a blowtorch.
Harry opens the door and his head is bathed in the blue-yellow flame of a rigged blowtorch. Instead of backing out of danger, he inexplicably stays put for like, seven seconds before reeling out into the snow, his head actually on fire.
“What was likely a simple second-degree skin burn is now a full-thickness burn likely to cause necrosis of the calavarium (skull bone),” says St. Clair, adding that Harry will now need to have the top of his skull replaced.
Marv and Harry each take a paint can to the face and fall down the stairs.
“Marv and Harry each take a roughly 2 kilo-newton hit to the face,” says St. Clair. “That is easily enough to fracture multiple facial bones, and is probably going to knock you out cold.”
Another doctor tells Distractify, “If you get a bleed in there, and especially a fast bleed where it starts taking up space quicker, it pushes on the brain so that it stops functioning, and leads to death.”
Marv hits Harry with a crowbar. A lot.
Seeing the tarantula on Harry’s chest, Marv freaks out and smacks him in the center of his chest.
“That sternum is cracked,” says Dr. Brenner. “That sternum is screwed. You can open up their aorta or their central veins and they can bleed to death like that,” he says, with a snap of his fingers.
By this point, Marv has also stepped on a nail, walked barefoot over broken glass Christmas ornaments and been hit in the face with a hot iron. Kevin’s shot Marv and Harry in the face and nuts with a BB gun. By the time the old man next door hits the bandits with an aluminum snow shovel, the surprise is not that they are instantly knocked out, but that they weren’t dead in the first place.
Or, as St. Clair concludes, “Kevin has moved from ‘defending his house’ into sheer malice, in my opinion.”
Just wait till you watch “Home Alone 2.”
