I know that I have already mentioned this about 200 times (actual count: twice), but in the fall of 1991 I spent a week working as an extra in the anti-Semitism football drama School Ties...which led me to falsely believe that I was about to embark on a highly successful silver screen career. That someone was going to watch School Ties and say “hey, who was extra #179 in the bleachers during the Thanksgiving Day football game? That kid's a STAR!!” Over the next few years I went full court press trying to get myself cast in every flick that was filmed in the state of Massachusetts. And I rolled snake eyes every damn time. Steve Martin’s Housesitter? They wanted a blonde kid. Alec Baldwin’s Malice? They wanted an older kid. By the time Good Will Hunting came to town I had already permanently folded up my tent. Although Ben Affleck DID film a scene for The Town at the restaurant I was working at...but I was in New Mexico at the time...and wouldn’t have been invited on set even if I hadn’t been in New Mexico...so that totally doesn’t count for anything. One of the gigs I went out hard for was the 1993 Macaulay Culkin-gone-nasty thriller The Good Son, which I saw in theaters when it came out and have thought about zero times since. But the other day while I was out thrifting for VHS, I came across a copy of The Good Son and was fairly shocked to see that the film was written by Ian McEwan, a British author known for penning highly acclaimed novels like Atonement, Amsterdam, Saturday, and a bunch of other awesome books with one word titles that I’ve never heard of...and not at all known for writing crap ass, Z-grade potboilers. I suddenly had a lot of questions and Wikipedia had a lot of answers. You see kids--The Culkin clan had one of those classic dickhead showbiz dads named Kit (Culkin, obvi). Pop Culkin was jazzed when his 10 year-old boy became America’s favorite angel-faced cherub with an asking price north of $4 mil a pic. And really--who wouldn’t be?? But then old Kit promptly started acting a fool. He told Twentieth Century Fox that he wouldn’t allow Mac to reprise the Kevin McAllister role in Home Alone 2 unless they cast him as Henry, the demon child uber villain in The Good Son. Fox eagerly acquiesced because what would Home Alone 2 be without Macaulay Culkin?? A Donald Trump cameo and not much else! The folks over at The Good Son were about to go into production with Heathers director Michael Lehman behind the camera and the kid who plays Kid #1 in Prancer in the Macaulay role. Then the Culkin’s blew into town and burned it to the ground. They neutralized the cast and had Lehman replaced with the hacky director of Julia Roberts’s Sleeping With the Enemy. Kit Culkin demanded McEwan revise the script to his liking and McEwan was like “sod to you, mate--I’d rather go write me some award winning novels instead.” So that's what he did. Although he retains sole screenwriting credit, what ended up onscreen was stitched together by hired guns. Kit also insisted on a plum role for his daughter Quinn, the rare Culkin child who is completely bereft of any and all acting-related skills. The Good Son opened in September of 1993 and did medium business. Just one year later, Macaulay severed ties with his father and left his budding acting career at the altar. While his younger brothers have continued to rack up impressive acting resumes over the last 30 years, Macaulay has seemed content doing fuck all. He eventually grew comfortable with his legacy and appears to have a good sense of humor about things. How else does one account for the fact that he spent a few years fronting a pizza-themed Velvet Underground cover band called Pizza Underground!? I’m Waiting for Delivery Man?? I’m Beginning to Eat the Slice!? I’m cracking up right now just thinking about it!! When the PU announced a tour I immediately bought tickets...and immediately started to wonder why I had done so. I mean--that shit is funny on paper...but funny enough to leave your house for? Mac and his bandmates apparently felt the same way because the tour was cancelled and the band broke up shortly thereafter.
Anyway, what happens in The Good Son is this: I know I’ve repeated this ad infinitum...but it is always a terrible sign when a film that runs less than 90 minutes has an extended opening credits sequence. Unless, of course, the credits sequence is animated (see: Mannequin or Madonna’s Who’s That Girl. Or better yet—don’t!). These movies will likely still be awful but at least the animation is something to look at. The Good Son opens with five minutes of just names against a black screen. I haven’t even seen the movie yet! Why would I give a shit who WHOA...Elmer Bernstein composed the score?? He of Ghostbusters and Animal House fame?? That’s wild! We fade in on a soccer field somewhere in the southwestern United States, where we meet 12 year-old Mark, played by Forever Young star and man whose hand I shook on two separate occasions at the 2006 SXSW Festival Elijah Wood. He looks like an average kid doing average kid things...until glowering character actor David Morse materializes at the edge of the field. Mark sees Morse and a frightful look crosses his face. He’s probably thinking exactly what I’m thinking: where’s your prison guard uniform, bro!? When is David Morse NOT playing some sort of law enforcement enforcer!? Right away—something is rotten in Denver. Morse is Jack, Mark’s dad, and he ain’t there to check out his son’s slide tackle. Turns out Mark’s mom is laid up with the cancer and has gone from sick to quite sick. Mark rushes to her bedside, where she promises him she will always be with him. Literally. And the kid? He believes her! Since impossible to keep promises are the order of the day, Mark turns around and promises his mom that she will not die. He will not allow it!! Cut to: her funeral. Folks, best not to write checks that cannot be cashed, capisce? So Mark is shit out of moms but that’s cool cuz his dad vows to step it up in the parenting department to help fill the blast crater left by the loss of his mother. Just kidding! Jack has a two week business trip to Japan on the books and that shit CANNOT be rescheduled for nothin’. Luckily....or actually...unluckily...Jack has a brother up in a part of Maine that is totally Rockport, MA. He decides to drive Mark all the way up to New England...figuring they can spend some QT tearing down the highway in Jack’s Wrangler, bereave-ing and listening to Sting. Unfortunately, Mark spends most of the ride staring glumly at his Gameboy. Jack says “you’re gonna miss out on a lot of life glued to your device like that.” How prophetic! Jack asks Mark if he’s upset about his dead mother and he’s all “not really—she promised she would come back as something other than herself.” Hey—remember when Prince wrote a song about how he was going to come back as a dolphin? I wonder if that actually happened. Is there a dolphin somewhere that can dance AND shred ass on guitar? That’d be the dolphin who is now Prince. Anyway, Jack is like “you know that Mom isn’t for real coming back as a pigeon tho, rite?” Mark hears this and completely melts down. He jumps out of the jeep and runs screaming through the desert...where he is eaten by the Tremors monster from Tremors. Not really, though.
Mark and Jack finally arrive at Jack’s brother’s spot...and it’s one of those sprawling Colonial’s that sits on a rocky private promontory that juts into the Atlantic. So Mark’s uncle is rich as balls then, eh? Some plain yogurt yuppie grillionaire who’s married to the mom from The Santa Clausesssses. Also known as: Mark’s Aunt Susan. Mark is introduced to his cousin Connie (the aforementioned 8th most talented Culkin sibling, Quinn). While they’re exchanging pleasantries, another child in a Michael Myers-ish mask leaps from the stairs and starts to “cha cha cha kill kill kill.” Mark is about to soil his drawers but this pint-sized ghoul pulls his mask off, revealing himself to be Macaulay Culkin!! (slaps cheeks...screams). Mac plays Mark’s other cousin, Henry, the titular good son. The whole fam damily decide to choke down a couple hundred bux worth of chicken lobsters before Jack catches his flight to the far east. At dinner, Henry eschews the traditional shellfish cracker and opts to smash the lobster claw apart with his bare fist so right away we know that he MUST BE A PSYCHO!!! While Henry mutilates his lobster and unplayfully kicks Mark under the table, the adults sip chilled Puligny Montrachet and discuss how they’re going to send Mark to a local therapist while his old man is out of town. That’s cool--it only took me THREE YEARS to find a therapist...but when you have private island money you can get a therapist faster than regular folks can get a pizza delivered. How it makes sense for this kid to start seeing a therapist when he’s only in town for a fortnight, we do not know. What I do know is that there’s already only, like, 45 minutes in this movie, which just isn’t enough time for anything substantial to happen! Not anything that makes sense anyway. And so it goes...
Morning #1--Mark wakes to find his Aunt Susan has laid out a SPREAD for him. Farm-raised deviled eggs, artisanal cheeses, house made breakfast links, bagels and Nova Lox from the local bakery, and freshly squeezed OJ to wash it all down with. Mark cleans a plate or two before heading out to play with Henry. Susan tells him not to be late for lunch, which promises to be just as epic (oysters with Gloucester scallop ceviche...that’s my guess). Rich white folks do three hots and a cot real proper like! Henry and Mark toss around the pigskin but Henry quickly grows bored and leads Mark to a dilapidated treehouse that’s perilously perched atop the tallest tree on the east coast. Mark slips off the wonky ladder and nearly falls to his death but Henry grabs a hold of him in the nick of time. Instead of pulling Mark to safety, though, Henry asks him if he believes he can fly. Umm...this kid believes his mother is going to be reincarnated as a Springer Spaniel soooo. Henry eventually pulls Mark into the treehouse and they have a tickle fight so no harm, no foul so far, right? After the treehouse incident, Henry brings Mark to the cemetery where they were simultaneously filming scenes for Hocus Pocus. They walk over to a well and Henry pulls out a pack of Parliament 100’s and fires one up and COME ONNNN!!! It’s little baby Macaulay Culkin! No WAY this kid rips butts, dude. He’s about as edgy as a balloon. Henry starts asking Mark questions about his dead mother. Wants to know if he saw her die and if it was gross and whatnot. Henry says that his little brother drowned in the bathtub and that he totally messed with his body after he died. Posed it and took selfies with it and shit. When Mark tells Henry that he’s uncomfortable with this line of conversation and that he would prefer not to discuss the condition of his dead mother’s corpse, Henry threatens to throw Mark down the well. So there’s that.
When Mark isn’t in session with his thoroughly useless therapist (who also lives in a sick seaside crib, natch) he mostly hangs out with his cousin doing normal cousin-type stuff, like provoking a foul-tempered pit bull into chasing them around a boat slip before returning with a homemade crossbow that Henry modified to fire BOLTS and murdering said pit bull. Hey...I get it. I spent a lot of time with my older cousin Nick while I was growing up and we were known to wild out! Our summers were spent listening to the Randy Rhodes Tribute album while blowing up my dad’s empty beer cans with firecrackers...when we weren’t busy peeping his porno mags, that is! What we mostly did, though, was sit on the couch and eat Smartfood and watch Remo Williams on VHS. We sure as shit didn’t murder any animals! That’s a bridge too far! Speaking of bridges--one afternoon, Henry drags Mark out to his little backwoods Jeff Dahmer shed and introduces him to an adult-sized dummy in a horror movie mask. Mark is all “what’s all this now?” and Henry says “It’s Mister HIghway Man!” Henry tells Mark they’re gonna take him for a walk and I ALREADY KNOW where this is going….and not because I saw this movie one time 28 years ago. He isn’t Mr Netflix and Chill Man! Sure enough, the boys find themselves on a bridge overlooking Route 128. Mark is all “ha ha...Mr Highway Man likes to watch the cars and trucks whizz by on the highway, right? RIGHT!??” Henry says “mmmm...not exactly!” before heaving that dummy right off the overpass. Mark stands frozen in horror while Mr HM falls in front of a speeding Winnebego, causing it to roll over. A 300 car pile up ensues. Mark is all “dude, what the FUCK!?” but Heny is mad chill about this potential mass casualty event he just caused. He tells Mark that he doesn’t know how to have fun and that “once you learn that you can do anything, you can FLY!” Like...literally fly!? I have so many questions!! Like how did NO ONE notice this little Henry fucker was a ticking time bomb before the events of this movie?? Was he just playing it cool all those years...hoping that one day some rando cousin would come sleep over and light his fuse? Were Henry’s parents too busy doing rich people things like shopping at farmer’s markets and going to boozy key parties down in Ipswich to notice that they had a 10 year-old Patrick Batemen under their roof?? I bet the answers are in Ian McEwan’s screenplay that they made meatloaf out of. That McEw...he would’ve explained this shit to us. He’s a deep thinker, that guy.
So now Mark is officially ALL SET with his crazy cousin. Before the highway incident Mark thought maybe Henry was just some jerk ass kid who might still turn out alright after a stint in juvie like Mark Wahlberg or whatever. It’s not looking good, son. Right after the highway massacre (note: no one actually died) Aunt and Uncle Oblivious decide to leave the kids home alone (!) for the night and Henry goes right off the fuckin’ rails, dudes. He tells Mark that he maybe/definitely caused his little brother’s death. He then decides that he would like to be an only child and starts stalking his poor little sister, who never even wanted to be in this movie in the first place! When Mark tries to intervene Henry says “do you REALLY think I would hurt my own sister??” Dude...fuckin’....YES!! Have you not been paying attention to the movie?? Mark has to sleep on the floor next to Connie’s bed to protect her from certain death. The next morning, Mark discovers Aunt Susan crying in her dead son’s bedroom. Mark consoles her. Tells her it’s not her fault. She says “I know.” Mark says “no...kid...it’s not your fault.” And so forth. Aunt Susan tells Mark that he’s a sweet kid. She also tells him that Henry took his little sister ice skating on a pond. OH NO, y’all!! Mark sprints to the pond where he discovers Henry towing his sister around the pond like a disabled Miata. It actually looks like they’re having a good tim...OPE!...scratch that! Henry grabs his sister by the puffy jacket and launches her onto the roped off, paper thin section of the ice. Even though she weighs about 39 pounds the ice around her cracks and she falls into the drink. Henry comes to her aid but only pretends to try to pull her to safety. Meanwhile, THREE HUNDRED skating townsfolk just stand there and watch. Eventually some off duty firefighters show up. They hack the ice apart with their fire axes and manage to extract Connie but she’s already a popsicle. OH WAIT! She still has a pulse! She’ll prolly be fine after she learns how to walk/talk/speak again. It’s hard to say with any certainty as she is never seen again. That’s a forever wrap for Quinn Culkin! She hasn't acted since.
Mark follows his Aunt Susan to her special secret cliff, where she likes to go to stare at the ocean and think about her dead child and her newly half dead child. Mark decides that it’s time to lay his cards on the table. He tells her that her remaining unspoiled child is a no good goddamn murdering son of a bitch asshole jerk. Tells her that Henry killed a dog and caused a 600 car pileup and tried to murder his own sister...all in the last 48 hours!. Aunt Susan says “what did you just say!!??” Mark says “what I said, yo!” Aunt Susan winds up and cold-cocks poor little Mark! Just throws a haymaker right at his grill. Jesus Christ, man--If I were Mark I’d run away to Boston and check into the Hotel Buckminster. Maybe see if pops will set him up with a tab at Locke Ober. When Mark finally manages to fish his dad out of a Roppongi karaoke bar and get him on the horn, he explains that cousin Henry is cuckoo for cocoa butter. Jack tries to feign concern but is mostly like “just tell your therapist and I’ll be back from Japan in 8 days.” Mark follows his dad’s advice and goes to see his therapist...where he finds HENRY telling the shrink that it’s actually Mark with the violence problem! Can just anyone walk in and have a session with this therapist!? Jesus. So that door is closed. When they exit the therapist’s office Henry reminds Mark that his mother is “maggot food.” He also looks him dead in the eye and says “Hey Mark (pregnant pause) don’t fuck with me.” Ohhhh...Macaulay Culkin dropped an F-bomb!!! There’s your R-rating right there. (Note: all other dialogue recreations wherein characters use profanity are inaccurate and were fabricated by the author of this article...who has a legendarily filthy mouth).
Mark is left with few options at this point. He basically has to ride out the week and pray his cousin doesn’t slip a blade in his side...and that his aunt stops punching him in the face. One night, Mark suspects that Henry may have poisoned the family’s food supply so he wakes up in a frenzy and tries to jam the entire contents of the pantry into the garbage disposal (Note: I’m not sure why Mark thinks this. I may have briefly stopped paying attention at this point in the movie). Aunt Susan is so pissed at Mark that she locks him up in their Kevin McCallister attic for the night. The next morning, though, Aunt Susan creeps out to the Dahmer shed and starts to poke around. She finds the rubber ducky that her dead son was playing with pre-drowning! Henry shows up and is all “what are you doing in my murder shed, lady!?” She’s not falling for those baby blues this time, y’all. She asks Mark why he has the rubber ducky and he's like “I dunno…’cuz he’s number one?” Susan says she will be taking the rubber ducky. Henry says that she will not. Henry’s voice drops like six octaves as he growls “YOU CAN’T HAVE IT” before ripping the rubber ducky out of his mother’s arms. Finally, this lady is SUS...PICIOUS!!! Henry returns to the house and starts some shit with Mark, who looks like he wants this movie to be over just as bad as the rest of us do. They tussle it up and Mark manages to pin Henry to the bed. He grabs a pair of scissors and aims the tip at Henry’s jugular. “Go ahead,” Henry says, “jam it in!” Come on, Mark--you heard the kid!! Unfortunately Uncle...Uncle...shit, the Uncle is such a Non-character that I can’t even remember his first name! Grayson?? Carlton?? Ahh, who gives a shit. Anyway, the Uncle sees his boy about to have his windpipe sliced out and is like “whyyyy did I have children?!!” He pulls Mark off of his kid and locks him in his office and tells him he’s going to call the therapist. “Hi therapist? My nephew just tried to murder my son with a pair of shears. Anything you can do for that?” Dude, maybe call the police?? Could they not afford to cast any law enforcement agents in this film??
While all of this is going down, Aunt Susan heads out to her thinking cliff to, you know, think. When Henry shows up she point blank asks him if he killed his little brother. “And what if I did?” Henry asks. Aunt Susan explains that he will only be in medium trouble if he fesses up because they are wealthy white people who don’t have to follow the same rules as everyone else. She says that he might have to “get help” but he certainly won’t have to go to prison! That’s for poor people and reefer addicts! Henry weighs his options and quickly decides that his best course of action would be to get a running start and push his mother off the goddamn cliff. So that’s what he does. It’s cool, though--she manages to catch a branch on her way down. Henry looks down at his mother dangling off a 120-foot cliff and smiles as he admires his latest handiwork. But wait! Somehow Mark managed to free himself (totally wasn’t paying attention when that happened either)! He shows up at the cliff and tackles Henry and they start to brawl it out again. Aunt Susan crawls back to the top of the cliff but then the boys, both of ‘em, go tumbling off the edge! According to the Good Son VHS box, this climactic scene was “shot completely without visual effects...and was actually performed by stuntmen AND the movie’s young stars!” I mean--what other options are there?? I didn’t think it was fuckin’ Mickey Rooney up there on that cliff! So the kids go over, but Aunts Susan catches BOTH of them. She’s got a kid in each arm and I’m thinking she’ll have to drop at least one of them. I don’t know--the ads promised a “shocking climax.” Maybe we’re about to find out that Macaulay Culkin is actually Keyser Soze? No, they both beg to be rescued but Aunt Susan looks down and figures that she has a choice: The Pizza Underground or The Lord of the Rings trilogy. She chooses wisely. Henry plummets to the rocky shore below. He dies. Aunt Susan looks at her son’s mangled corpse and says “keep the change, ya filthy animal.” The end.