Recap / Film Reroll: Home Alone

You're gonna need some proper gear, Kevin. You're played by Joz Vammer now.^note Picture by Quirderph

Keep the change, you filthy animal.

Episodes 34-35 of Film Reroll. Based on the 1990 family comedy.

When the nine-year-old Kevin McCallister's family mysteriously disappears days before Christmas, life actually seems pretty good for the young boy. However, things soon turn ugly when two robbers — Harry and Marv — start showing an interest in the supposedly empty family house. Now it's up to Kevin to use all of his boy engineering skills — and recently purchased deadly artillery — to defend himself and his home from the intruders.

This is the first campaign since Frozen to feature Film Reroll's original four players. It's also the first true Player Versus Player campaign of the show. ^note  Jaws only had a single confrontation at the end, while Thelma and Louise was more of a battle of wits with no actual fighting between the PC's. Both of the campaigns also had the players working together for the most part.

Starring Jocelyn "Joz" Vammer as Kevin, Kara Strait^note  credited as “Pitr Strait” as Harry, Paulo Quiros as Marv and Jon Miller as the Dungeon Master.

Followed by Rogue One.

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Tropes:

• Acrofatic: Harry does a vault — described as "catlike" by DM Jon Miller — over one of Kevin's firetraps. Sadly, Marv wasn't watching.
• Adaptational Heroism:
  • When Harry and Marv believe themselves to have uncovered some political conspiracy, they actually plan to collect evidence for it and hand it over to the authorities, albeit only because they're expecting to get a hefty monetary reward for it.
  • Played Straight by Marv in the epilogue, where he turns over a new leaf and starts earning an honest living at the circus by showing off his ability to survive things which would kill a normal person.
• Alternative Character Interpretation: On the topic of Angels with Filthy Souls, the rerollers reinterpret Uncle Frank as a movie snob who's super into Film Noir. He didn't let Kevin watch it due to it being an adult film, but rather because he was gatekeeping Kevin.
  Paulo!Frank: You wouldn't understand!
  Kara!Frank: Kevin, you're not a real film noir fan if you've never seen Angels with [Filthy] Souls, okay, don't even talk to me right now. Oh, you like movies, Kevin? Name four classics from the 1940s.
• Apologetic Attacker: Variation: As Kevin is trying to trick Marv into walking out onto the front porch, Joz briefly apologizes before announcing that Kevin is about to light the motor oil he dumped onto the porch.^note Luckily, Paulo decides to make an IQ check to prevent Marv from falling for it.
• Ax-Crazy: Jon and Joz's incremental excitement over all of the various things Kevin decides to grab while in the army surplus store can best be described as two kids set loose upon a candy store.
• Bear Trap: One of Kevin's protective measures. Naturally, it is Marv who triggers it.
• Blatant Lies: In the middle of the trap setting montage, when Kara and Paulo are called in to roll in order to see how much more time Kevin will have to plan, Paulo claims they're having sex in the next room.
• Brutal Honesty: "Well, look... I would've preferred to kill both of you. But, I suppose I'll settle for just killing Harry."
• Call-Back:
  • Near the beginning, when Kevin is wishing his family would all disappear, Paulo starts interpolating the goblin voices from Labyrinth. Also an Actor Allusion to Joz, who played Sarah in that campaign.
  • The players are disappointed to learn that the police officer Harry and Marv encounter isn't Jeff.
  • Kara Strait desperately tries to connect the campaign to Halloween by suggesting that Harry rose from the dead and became Michael Myers (despite the fact that Halloween was set before Home Alone.)
• Cat Scare: Kara almost does a Rage Quit when her character springs a trap where a saw blade is swung at her face, but it ends up hitting her with its broad side, so she makes it out alive with only a knocked-out tooth and a small concussion.
• Chekhov's Gun: In the first episode, Kevin "fixes" a leaking tap by plugging it up with a piece of cloth. In the next episode — 48 in-game hours later — the leak explodes, flooding the master bedroom and collapsing the entire back entrance of the house.
• Comedic Sociopathy: Given that this is a Home Alone campaign, this is naturally prevalent.
  • The players feel that the original movie was so full of this that it already feels like a Film Reroll version of a far more wholesome film. (They also theorise that the filmmakers watched a lot of Looney Tunes growing up.)
• Convenient Misfire: Kevin tries to shoot the bandits with a BB gun, but it turns out to not be working.
• Crosscast Role:
  • Joz Vammer plays Kevin. She considers it handy that he already Screams Like a Little Girl.
  • In hindsight, Kara Strait as Harry.
• Death by Adaptation: When Harry is arrested at the end, he stabs a cop to get free and continue his pursuit of Kevin, and is shot down.
• Deceased Fall-Guy Gambit: After Harry gets killed in the final confrontation, Kevin blames him for all the damage to the house.^note To be more specific, Kevin does this while Harry is still alive, but since Harry shortly thereafter gets mowed down by gunfire, it's not like he could refute said claims.
• Defiant to the End: As the cops open fire on Harry, Kara tries to exploit Jon's homebrew damage rule so that she only takes 1 point of damage... only for Jon to bluntly point out that bullets don't apply. When Kara insists, Jon decides to have Harry take one point per bullet of damage, on top of knockdown and stun. As such, Kara keeps trying to insist it's one total point of damage, and she's actually fine... as Jon rattles off the damage total Harry takes as he dies in a hail of gunfire.
• Demoted to Extra: Kevin is now the only major member of the McCallister family. The rest are only mentioned in passing.
• Didn't See That Coming:
  • Inverted: When Paulo becomes mortified over Marv getting hit in the throat with a crossbow bolt, Kara calls him out for being shocked given how Jon just said he had rolled for the neck for Marv when doing the randomized hit location.
  • When Harry is gunned down by the police at the end of the campaign, Paulo openly admits he didn't expect a "hail of bullets" ending.
• Disney Death: It seems like Marv will be Killed Offscreen when he gets stuck in a window in the burning house, but he (barely) gets out of there alive.
• Double-Blind What-If: When discussing how violent the movie originally was, Paulo concludes that Home Alone feels like it was already a reroll in and of itself; namely, that it was originally an innocuous family film, but once Joz started playing Kevin, it turned into the movie we all know.
• Earn Your Happy Ending: Parodied: Jon claims that the campaign ended happily for everyone^note Kevin got reunited with his mom, and Marv reinvents himself as a circus performer... even though the house got destroyed, and Harry died.
• Enforced Method Acting:
  • Joz hadn't seen Home Alone since she was a kid and didn't remember much of it, so Paulo told her not to rewatch the film in order to not just copy the original traps but instead come up with her own.
  • Kara and Paulo actually leave the room when Joz / Kevin sets up the traps, so that they won't be prepared for them.
• Entertainingly Wrong:
  • Kevin builds puppets out of balloons, bedsheets and coathangers to fake a well-attended party. The bandits fall for it and think it has to be some form of political rally, making them more eager to enter the house.
  • When the bandits reach the now rather disheveled master bedroom, they believe that someone else has already robbed the house.
• Epic Fail: invoked When the possibility of Marv getting decapitated is broached, Paulo likens the situation to Murder, She Wrote... only to immediately realize he meant Death Becomes Her.
• Epileptic Trees: In-Universe. Paulo theorizes that the One Ring might be in the boiler.
• Failed a Spot Check: When Kevin sneaks into the army surplus store, Jon draws the "audience"'s attention to the fact he managed to trip the silent alarm.
• Film Within a Film: On the topic of Angels with Filthy Souls (Home Alone's own example), Paulo expresses a desire for Joz to have Kevin keep watching in order for Jon to invent the rest of the movie. Kara even suggests out and out rerolling it (or just the idea of rerolling a fictional film within another film).
• Fingertip Drug Analysis: When Harry dips his finger into the remains of the goop from one of Kevin's traps, Kara asks if he's going to taste it and then gets sidetracked into a rant about the trope.
• Five-Second Foreshadowing:
  • When Marv triggers a trap while trying to go down the stairs after the fog-covered hallway, Jon makes a roll, and the end result horrifies him and Joz. Paulo assumes this was a Crit Fail, only for Jon to clarify that he was rolling a randomized hit location, and that he had gotten the neck... This quickly becomes relevant when he soon informs Paulo that Marv got shot with a crossbow bolt.
  • Similarly, after the bandits get down the stairs and go into another room, and Marv triggers another trap, Jon matter-of-factly says he doesn't need to roll for a hit location on this one^note as Paulo "[stepped] in it" due to a failed Perception roll, but rather needs Paulo to roll if it goes left or right^note 1 to 3 is left, 4 to 6 is right. As such, Paulo's roll tells Jon that it's the right leg that steps on the Bear Trap.
• Foreshadowing: Towards the end of the campaign, when discussing her limited range of voices, Kara alludes to playing Muldoon, only for Joz and Paulo to state that hadn't come out yet.
• Gadgeteer Genius: Kevin, listed on his character sheet as a "Boy Engineer".
• Gave Up Too Soon: Discussed: After a certain point in Part 1, Marv talks Harry into abandoning the McCallister's house in order to rob the other houses on the block. And in the middle of robbing one, Harry comments that it doesn't feel the same, opening up to Marv how he's had dreams of robbing a house like the McCallister's, prompting them to resume their persuit the next day.
• Genre Shift: As Paulo points out during Part 2, because of Joz's take on the traps Kevin sets up, Home Alone becomes more akin to a psychological horror.
• Hunting the Most Dangerous Game: Harry believes that this happening to him and Marv (though they later admit that they are not very dangerous.) Given how deadly the traps are, he's not completely wrong...
• Ignoring by Singing: At one point, when Kara and Paulo want to discuss the bandits' strategy without Joz hearing, they suggest she do this, but she decides to go into the next room instead because singing over the discussion would make it hard for the audience to hear what was going on.
• I'm a Doctor, Not a Placeholder: While Harry is giving first aid to Marv, Kara attempts to say "Dammit Jim, I'm a bandit, not a doctor!" but manages to get most of the words in the wrong order.
• Iron Butt Monkey: Unlike in the original film, Marv is the sole victim of nearly all of Kevin's traps. Ironically, he's also the only one of the bandits to make it through the campaign alive.
• Jumping Off the Slippery Slope: Harry's original intent was to rob the McCallister's home without much incident. It is only through the barrage of Kevin's traps (and Kara's own mounting anger over Jon repeatedly screwing the Wet Bandits over) that he eventually decides that no one is getting out of this alive, and openly tries to kill Kevin. He even goes so far as to stab a cop to try and complete this goal.
• Kangaroo Court: Kara Strait feels that Jon Miller turns the whole campaign into one of these. Jon eventually admits that he really wanted to see the bandits die.
• The Last Dance: With the cops approaching Harry towards the campaign, Kara decides to have him stab a cop in order to get to Kevin, openly asking if she has anything to lose by not doing this.
  Kara: I'm sorry, would someone like to tell me what I have left to lose, would anyone like to tell me?!
• Long Speech Tea Time: At the beginning of part two, when Jon is explaining the adaptations he's made to the damage rules so that Harry and Marv won't be killed outright by the first trap, his explanation is interrupted by Kara snoring.
• Made of Iron: The game is played under customized damage rules — the main feature being that no attack will ever cause more than one point of damage — to mimic the bandits' ability to take damage and keep going in the movie. When the cops open fire on Harry, Kara cites the damage rules to argue that Harry might survive, but Jon plays through the encounter one bullet at a time to show that even at only one point of damage per bullet, a hail of bullets is still lethal.
• Man on Fire:
  • The first trap Marv encounters is a bucket filled with flammable hair gel which falls down on his head. The gel is then ignited by a spray can and a lighter, burning away Marv's hair and (temporarily) crippling his arms.
  • Kevin tries repeating the trick later by lighting up a puddle of oil on the front door steps. This time, Marv manages to avoid the fire, but it still traps him inside the house, and eventually lights it ablaze.
• Mistaken Identity: Kevin thinks the large, white-bearded Vietnam veteran he encounters is Santa.
• Ninja Pirate Zombie Robot: The bandits become convinced that the McCallister house is full of "Metrosexual Politician Gangster Beat Poet Hairdressers."
• Nobody Calls Me "Chicken"!: Subverted. Kevin tries to rile up Harry by calling him a chicken. He responds by saying that he's so hungry that he might actually make some chicken if Kevin would just let him into the kitchen.
• No Fair Cheating: Variation: At the start of Part 2, Kara stubbornly tries to retcon an advantage for the Wet Bandits, either by trying to argue for them to show up earlier (thus negating the trap setup Kevin had done), or trying to claim to have items while also refusing to let Jon know^note specifically, firecrackers on the grounds of using "Gizmo" to have them appear. For the former, Jon ultimately rules that he can issue out two random bad events that can occur while the Wet Bandits take on Kevin^note with the first one being that Harry had a bad case of the shits, meaning they had to wait until the night to return to the house. For the latter, Jon forces the formation out of Kara by threatening to non-declare said items if she tried using them later.
• No Inner Fourth Wall:
  • At the start of the home invasion, Harry openly calls out Jon for denying him and Marv free will when Marv points out they originally intended to show up earlier.
  • After Harry drops a Precision F-Strike, he outright lampshades that the movie has turned "hard R".
• Not Listening to Me, Are You?: At the beginning of part two, when Jon Miller is explaining the adaptations he's made to the damage rules and Kara Strait is manifestly not concentrating, Jon throws in "and that's why we're starting [Kara] off with a halfway-broken leg and one arm and also only one eye" to recapture her attention.
• Off the Rails:
  • Averted at first. The bandits several times have to talk themselves out of just giving up and bringing the story to a premature close. More significantly, the story nearly goes off in a completely different direction right at the start when Joz does too well on her first die roll and Kevin wakes up while his family are still in the house; Joz lets him get distracted and stay upstairs until they've gone, though Jon says he also had prepared for the possibility of Kevin going to France with everyone else.
  • In the end, the greatest changes to the plot are that the McCallister house is utterly demolished in the climax, that Marv manages to escape, and that Harry is apprehended by the police rather than Old Man Marley, and is shot dead when he stabs one of the cops with a knife.
• Original Character:
  • Tim, the Straw Nihilist supermarket cashier.
  • Harold, the Vietnam veteran and Army/Navy store owner Kevin mistakes for Santa. He ends up training Kevin and selling him weapons to defend his house.
• Photographic Memory: Variation: When Jon does the Angels with Filthy Souls scene, Paulo and Kara call attention to the fact that he did it off the top of his head^note Paulo admits to usually having the film's dialogue on hand whenever he reenacts a scene from the source in a reroll.
• Politically Incorrect Villain: Harry and Marv dislike blind people, because they always wear sunglasses.
• Reincarnation: While Jon is wrapping up the characters' fates at the end, Kara asserts that Harry was reincarnated nine months later, as a baby who, in defiance of all known medical science, already had one gold tooth.
  Jon: (silence; bluntly) Harry is forgotten.
• Pyromaniac: Joz and Jon openly admit to being like this as kids, in particular in regards to setting hair spray on fire. Jon even made a flaming sword out of rubber cement.
• Sanity Slippage: Harry (and quite possibly Kara) suffers from one throughout the campaign, where growing more and more obsessed with Kevin and his house, to the point of being willing to burn to death in it than giving it up.
  Harry: Like with Heaven with Earth, so above, so below, as outside as inside, Marv!
  Marv: I am so disappointed.
  Harry: The inside's gotta be so good, like a beautifully roasted bronzino. Let's light this house on fire and eat it! I want to become the house! I want to consume it! Make it mine and I will be part of it! I want to take his house... off!
• Screw This, I'm Outta Here: When Harry becomes obsessed with killing Kevin to the point of disregarding the most basic precautions, Marv decides that he's had enough. Even so, it takes him considerable effort to get out of the house in one piece.
• Shout-Out:
  • Kara, regarding Kevin's ability to edit movie dialogue on the fly: "Adobe Premiere Pro? We don't need no stinking Adobe Premiere Pro!"
  • Kara initially has difficulty remembering whether her colleague is Harry or Marv, prompting the suggestion that it's a Tyler Durden situation and there's really only one bandit... or that both bandits are Durdens to Kevin, who's really trying to kill himself. (The players agree that this is a bit of a dark turn even for a movie about an eight-year-old who designs death traps.)
  • Kevin picks up a licensed He-Man toy sword to defend himself.
  • Harry and Marv discuss the idea of leaving behind The Joker's calling cards to pin their crimes on him.
  • Kara calls the basement a "wretched hive of scum and villainy."
  • When Harry and Marv believe that some sort of political conspiracy is going on in the McCallister house, the phrase "Follow the money" gets thrown around.
  • In order to trick the burglars that there are people in the house, Kevin puts on the movies It's a Wonderful Life (the French dub - giving Paulo Quiros a chance to show off both his French and his Jimmy Stewart impression) and Miracle on 34th Street. (Joz would have picked The Muppet Christmas Carol, but it wasn't out yet in 1990.) While they're in the house, she tries to scare them off with bits of Heat, The Good, the Bad and the Ugly, and Annie.
  • When Kara strikes a pose the audience can't see — this being a podcast and all — and says she did it for herself, not the audience, Paulo interjects, "For England, James?".
  • Harry declares that they can't just give up because they have to show that they're men, Marv says, "Are we?", and Harry replies "Well, either that or Devo."
  • When the bandits run into the saw blade trap, Marv says "only the penitent shall pass" over and over again.
  • There is a Running Gag about Harry referencing things which either didn't exist or weren't famous in 1990 (such as The Cabin in the Woods and Kanye West) and asking Marv to write them down.
  • At one point, Harry and Marv have a moment of Medium Awareness and wonder if they're real or just trapped in some kind of game. Mr Smith's "What good is a phone call if you don't have a mouth?" line from The Matrix gets quoted, suitably adapted for the situation. Harry tells Marv to "take the red pill", then when Marv doesn't know what he's talking about because The Matrix post-dates Home Alone, justifies it by claiming that he's brought along some performance-enhancing drugs in red pill form and thinks now would be a good time to take some.
  • When Kevin puts on a movie with children talking, Marv wonders if they are in a Lord of the Flies situation. Harry asks him if he means The Lord of the Rings.
  • Marv compares his and Harry's plan to stab Kevin with the arrow he was hit by with Jack Sparrow shooting Barbossa with his only bullet. Harry lampshades that said movie has not been made yet.
  • The phrase "walk through the foyer" prompts musical renditions to the tunes of "Walk Through the Fire" from Once More With Feeling and the first line of "Gangsta's Paradise".
  • When Marv tries to get Kevin to join the bandits, his monologue includes references to Taylor Swift ("we used to have mad love, but now we've got bad blood") and Revenge of the Sith ("Only a McCallister deals in absolutes" and several quotes from Obi Wan's final confrontation with Anakin).
  • The players feel that Paulo Quiros' Marv voice sounds a bit like Daffy Duck. Later, when Marv's neck gets impaled by an arrow, they compare his voice with Donald Duck.
  • Kevin's method of using fire clouds as emergency flares is compared to the guitarist from Mad Max: Fury Road.
• Sliding Scale of Free Will vs. Fate: Discussed: At one point early in Part 2, Kara (as Harry) bitches that Jon is openly screwing over the Wet Bandits:
  Harry: That means everything's still going as planned!
  Marv: The plan was to show up when no one was home-!
  Harry: (cuts Marv off) Marv, shut your mouth! That plan was before the GM told us we couldn't have free will! So now, we're gonna deal with the hand we've been dealt!
• Smoke Out: Kevin uses smoke bombs to confuse the bandits. He may have gotten the idea from the smoke machine he accidentally turned on earlier.
• Soundtrack Dissonance: Sweet heartwarming music accompanies the sequence where Joz describes the lethal traps Kevin is laying for the burglars.
• Spoiler Title: Parodied. The players treat their announcement of which movie they're gonna play through as a big reveal, even though it's clearly stated in the title.
• Take a Third Option: After Kevin tries to taunt Harry and Marv into following him into the kitchen, Harry reflects that either the kitchen is a trap or the kitchen contains something important that Kevin's using reverse psychology to keep them away from. Rather than waste time on I Know You Know I Know speculation, he opts for a third option: ignore the kitchen, and go rob a part of the house they now know Kevin isn't in.
• The Talk: Harry and Marv try to give this to Kevin, as they are convinced that people have origies in his house. According to them, sex consists of "penetration, fluids and enthusiastic consent."
• Tempting Fate:
  • Early in the home invasion, Harry tells Marv that they need to be careful, as they're dealing with a psychopath. Marv doubts things could get much worse given how he'd already gotten set on fire. As it has been made clear several times over on this page, getting burned would be the least of Marv's injuries.
  • Later on, after Joz messes up a roll to sneak past the Wet Bandits, Paulo remarks that so far the bandits have been rolling well and Joz has been rolling poorly, and gets an angry reaction from Kara because saying so out loud is a sure way to jinx it. And sure enough, they immediately fuck up on their Perception roll, and fail to see Kevin sneak past.
• This Is Reality: invoked Discussed: After mentioning how they try to stick to the tone of the original movies they reroll, Paulo openly admits it would've been funny to do a Home Alone reroll with normal damage rolls, so that Kevin's first trap immediately kills the Wet Bandits, and the rest of the campaign sees Kevin going through the criminal justice system.
• Trash the Set: Kevin and the bandits manage to flood, burn down and demolish the McCallister house during their struggle. (In the end, all the damage is blamed on Harry.)
• Understatement: When the revenge-obsessed Harry is going after Kevin with a knife and is apprehended by a police officer, he stabs the cop:
  Kara: I stab the cop!
  Jon: The cop doesn't like that.
• The Unintelligible: Marv temporarily becomes this when he gets shot through the neck with a crossbow arrow. Amazingly enough, this doesn't kill him, and it only lasts until Harry pulls out the projectile and binds the wound. The only lasting effect is that Marv's voice gets raspier.
• Vocal Evolution: Over the course of Part 2, Paulo's voice for Marv turns into Daffy Duck, and after the crossbolt incident, it becomes (per Jon's description) the voice Harvey Fierstein used in Death to Smoochy. Meanwhile, Kara finds herself raising the pitch of Harry's voice to match Harry's now-gravelly voice.
• What Do You Mean, It's for Kids?: invoked Paulo eventually makes the argument that the actual "Home Alone" feels like it itself was a reroll of an innocuous family film, given how Kevin's traps involved nails in the foot, setting heads on fire, and lobbing paint cans on ropes.
• Wise Beyond Their Years: Kevin has "Mature For Your Age!" as a wildcard skill, covering such skills as Diplomacy and Housekeeping.
• With Friends Like These...: Discussed: After Harry dies, Kara (in a defeated tone) accuses Joz of wanting to kill her for the past two years of the podcast, something she denies.

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