All the best booby-traps from ‘Home Alone’
Today marks the 25th anniversary of Home Alone (1990), the quintessential Christmas movie that made a generation of kids slap their hands up to their face in excitement. Growing up, I wanted to be just like Kevin McAllister. He was smart, he was funny, and he ordered pizza all by himself with no grownups around. He was basically the ultimate ’90s cool kid. But the coolest part about Kevin as a character was his ability to set ingenious traps. As an 8-year-old, he might not have been strong enough to fight off burglars, but he was more than smart enough to trick them. So without further ado, here are the top five ultimate Kevin McAllister traps. Kids/nostalgic young adults: don’t try this at home:
The fake party
You’ve got to hand it to Kevin, he really tries to deal with the creepy grownups trying to rob his house non-violently (at first anyway). The best instance of this is definitely when he uses the weird mannequins in the basement, the Michael Jordon cardboard cutout, a record player, a train set and some rope to trick the robbers into thinking that his family was still home. The scene is so great, ingenious, and perfectly set to “Rocking Around the Christmas Tree.”
Using the TV to pretend to be a scary grown-up
Besides being home alone without his family and the very persistent robbers who have cased his home, Kevin’s biggest problem is the fact that no adult will take him seriously when he’s by himself. Whether it’s at the grocery store, or the convenience store, all grownups immediately want to get in his business and know where his parents are (except you know, the police apparently.) His best workaround for this is stopping and starting a chunk of dialogue from a film noir (a fake one called “Angels with Dirty Souls” that’s a send-up on the real movie “Angels with Dirty Faces”) on his VCR to pretend to be a big, dangerous grownup. This works well on the local pizza boy, but most importantly it buys him some time with the bandits, who are briefly convinced a gun-toting maniac lives at his house. (Note: this fake movie makes another appearance in “Home Alone 2,” for similar purposes) Keep the change, ya filthy animal.
The iron attached to the light bulb chain
This one is pretty simple compared to the other traps, but is still amazing. Kevin attaches a burning hot iron to the light bulb chain in the basement. The iron sits waiting on top of the garbage shoot. When Marv the robber walks into the basement and tries to turn on the lights, he gets a red-hot iron to his face. Ouch!
The old glue and feather trap
This trap isn’t violent as much as humiliating. Kevin taunts Harry the robber, and goads him into walking into a room where a sticky bit of saran wrap hits him in the face. Harry then unwittingly walks into a rope that triggers a fan blow feathers all over him, which of course stick to him because he is sticky. Although this ultimately isn’t very effective at slowing the robbers down, you do have to give Kevin points for style.
A home-made zipline
In the most daring and dangerous stunt Kevin pulls off in Home Alone (you know, besides the part where he fights adult criminals by himself in his house) Kevin uses a homemade zipline with string and some bicycle handles to zip out of his attic and into his tree house. Once he makes it across he waits until Harry and Marv try to get over to him on their own, and then cold as ice, cuts the line with some garden shears. They of course swing right into the side of the house, and fall pretty far to the ground.
Those are some of our favorite Home Alone traps, but the beauty of this movie is that there are so many more that we haven’t even touched on. But regardless, the moral of the story is: don’t mess with Kevin McAllister.
[Image via 20th Century Fox]
