Your immediate instinct, the kind that comes from the part of the brain pretty much unchanged from the time of our lizard-like ancestors, should tell you that a third Home Alone movie is to be avoided at all costs. As it so often is, that part of the brain—the same part that learned to discriminate the tasty berries from the poisonous ones and determine which species would kill you on sight—is right again. Alex D. Linz fills in for the now-aged Macaulay Culkin as the adorable tyke left home, alone. This time, instead of fending off the advances of two fumbling burglars, he's forced to take on a group of four fumbling terrorists who desire a top-secret microchip of which he's somehow taken possession. As with almost all John Hughes-scripted films in recent years, Home Alone 3 displays a queasy mixture of sentiment and sadism, and as with almost all child actors of the mid- to late-'90s, Linz is truly terrible, and possesses so much hair that it looks as if he's wearing a modified Chewbacca mask. While simply being worse than Home Alone 2 would already place this squarely in the ranks of the decade's worst movies, Home Alone 3 crosses the line into the unconscionable by including a wisecracking parrot and an elaborate bludgeoned-nutsack gag involving a trained pet mouse and a snowsuit.