The Good Son
1993 Directed by Joseph Ruben
Synopsis
Evil has many faces
A young boy stays with his aunt and uncle, and befriends his cousin who's the same age. But his cousin begins showing increasing signs of psychotic behavior.
Cast
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In 1993 there was no more beloved child actor than Macaulay Calkin. The kid was a huge superstar who's movies always seemed to do well just because he was starring in them. He was about as cookie cutter as could be so I have no doubt that when the kid was presented to chance to shed that do-gooder image, or to at least stretch his acting chops as a bad guy he probably jumped at the chance when The Good Son came up.
The Good son is about a boy named Mark who's mother dies and is sent to live with his aunt and uncle while his father is on a business trip to Japan. While there he befriends his…
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In 'Home alone' MC played a enjoyable shit.
In this film he plays a nasty psychotic f****d up kid.
Very compelling film with a ropey ending but good enough to watch. -
If you've ever wondered what happened to Kevin McAllister after he stopped getting left home alone, then watch his psychotic epsiodes continue in this uneventful drama. His parents leave him without a babysitter in this one too, though the thieves have learnt to stay away by now.
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Home Alone will never be the same.
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Successfully acclaimed though adaptations of his own novels might be, Ian McEwan has found small fortune in the realms of screenwriting, his films Soursweet and The Ploughman’s Lunch very little-known works indeed. In the case of The Good Son this obscurity is for the better, its pitting of Macaulay Culkin and Elijah Wood against each other as cousins, one of whom is distinctly evil, yielding just a flaccid show of amateur horror and dull storytelling. The young Culkin and Wood show plentiful promise at this early point in their respective careers, but the material can only take them so far, McEwan’s plotting sapping the life from an already stilted, uninteresting story of juvenile malice. An overused staple of horror cinema, the enfant terrible requires far better motivation than McEwan ever manages to muster, leaving The Good Son a strangely pointless, narratively staid exercise that wastes the talents of its confident child actors.
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I don't often rush to see other social-media reviews before I write one of these summaries for a movie but this one gets some... interesting ones. Well, not really. It's all either "it's boring," "there's no motivation," or "Home Alone, Home Alone, Home Alone... Home... Al-one?" and how this either ruined people's warm, fuzzy memories of how much they enjoyed that movie or how it's a trip to see the kid turn evil. Oh, and occasionally, how this is a Bad Seed knock-off.
Let's see if we can't bulldoze some of this: it's not a Bad Seed rip-off. I've seen that film. You know (if you think about it) that the rubber duck wasn't the only reason Culkin killed the…
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This movie is fucked to the nth degree. It's one of those childhood guilty pleasures for me, made the year I was born, and some relative probably showed it to me for some bizarre reason that involved brainwashing me into becoming Macaulay Caulkin's "Bad Seed" throwback in this film.
The overall content is disturbing, and not in a good way. I feel like a stick-in-the-mud saying this, but seeing a child be this vicious with no real dramatic payoff does not appeal to me. It's a gimmick that was a lot more charming and a lot less violent when Patty McCormack did it nearly forty years before.
One of the most curious aspects of the film is the music by…
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In 1993 there was no more beloved child actor than Macaulay Calkin. The kid was a huge superstar who's movies always seemed to do well just because he was starring in them. He was about as cookie cutter as could be so I have no doubt that when the kid was presented to chance to shed that do-gooder image, or to at least stretch his acting chops as a bad guy he probably jumped at the chance when The Good Son came up.
The Good son is about a boy named Mark who's mother dies and is sent to live with his aunt and uncle while his father is on a business trip to Japan. While there he befriends his…
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Even when a film isn't great, I still love the psychopaths. A child psychopath - hell yeah!
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Home Alone will never be the same.
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This review reportedly contains spoilers. I can handle the truth.
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No
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If you've ever wondered what happened to Kevin McAllister after he stopped getting left home alone, then watch his psychotic epsiodes continue in this uneventful drama. His parents leave him without a babysitter in this one too, though the thieves have learnt to stay away by now.