One odd thing about being a child of the 80s is that you learn movie history backwards. In watching anything from Animaniacs to Pulp Fiction, I became acquainted with references and homages to classical Hollywood cinema long before I ever watched the movies referenced or the moments paid homage to. Thus, my knowledge of cinema’s past was framed through cinema’s present: I learned about old movies because of what new movies did with them. One of the most formidable moments of this backwards cinematic education occurred in the late 1980s and early 1990s when major event kids’ movies became especially preoccupied with 40s film noir in movies like Robert Zemeckis’s Who Framed Roger Rabbit? (1988) or Warren Beatty’s Dick Tracy (1990). These movies embodied a world of double crosses, femme fatales, and cynical detectives without requiring their viewers, young or old, to have seen any of the films these genre tropes are indebted to. Thus, because of my exposure to new tweaks on an old form, conventions became familiar to me long before I could name the films from which such conventions originated. But one movie was exceptionally influential in formulating a distinct impression of film noir in my childhood imagination, and that movie was – oddly enough – Home Alone (1990).

Welcome back to Junkfood Cinema; this time we mean it. This is the internet’s biggest assault on health and public safety. Every week I carelessly brandish a loaded bad film in a crowded cyberspace with no regard to the welfare of impressionable young readers.

Drew Barrymore’s directorial debut is a fun blast of unabashed girl power, with great performances and an honest look at a mother-daughter relationship. But there’s plenty for men too.

While I’m sure I’m pretty lonely in the fan-boat of the 1984 B-Masterpiece C.H.U.D. there is at least one other person in here with me – Rob Zombie.