Christmas movies aren’t for the weak. The hapless characters in these holiday favorites endure suffering worthy of an Eli Roth film. But how severe are their injuries? Fatal or just debilitating? Recently, YouTubers Mark Rober and Jake “Vsauce3” Roper decided to find out by “myth-testing” such films as A Christmas Story, Elf, and that eternal source of Yuletide nightmares, Home Alone. What they found was quite disturbing. First, though, some good news: A ricocheting projectile fired from a BB gun will probably not shoot a person’s eye out. Roper and Rober set up an experiment in which Rober shoots a cow eye with an official Red Ryder BB gun, just like the one Ralphie Parker had in the movie. When Rober fires the gun directly at the eye, the BB penetrates it easily. Ouch. But when the BB has to ricochet off a steel plate first, it just sort of bounces off the eye. Rober does point out that a cow eye is thicker than a human eye, so Ralphie may still be in some trouble.
In the second round, Roper and Rober replicate a scene from Elf to determine whether a snowball traveling at 95 mph would knock a person over. Long story short: It probably wouldn’t. But then it’s time to test the infamous blowtorch-to-the-skull scene from Home Alone, using a fake head with a layer of chicken skin. Joe Pesci’s character would receive third-degree burns and would need skull reconstruction. Hilarious.
On his own channel, Roper runs through a whole gauntlet of Home Alone-based experiments to determine just how much the Wet Bandits suffered at the hands of sadistic Kevin McCallister. A lot, it turns out. That paint can to the face, for instance, would probably end anyone’s burglary career. But what about that super-heated doorknob? The method shown in the movie is actually not that efficient, Roper proves, plus the door would probably catch on fire.
[via Esquire]