Headscratchers / Home Alone 3

Chicken pox

• The reason the boy is left behind every day is because he has chicken pox and therefore is not at school (the disease is contagious so that makes sense). We see he has some spots on his belly, but that's about it. Chicken pox usually has other symptoms than the rash just being there, like it being itchy, the child will usually have a fever, nausea, and bad headaches. While those last three are maybe okay to leave out, the itchiness of the disease is practically standard for all entertainment, but it never shows up. It's really hard, watching the movies to believe the kid is sick at all. I'm not asking for it to disable him or anything, but a reminder now and then that the reason he's home is that he's sick would be nice.
  • Plus his siblings around around him and then go to school. Even if they've had it before, the disease is highly contagious. I wonder how many people they infected?
    • Then they infected some children who will spend a few days at home. Chicken pox isn't the plague; the whole family doesn't have to go into quarantine.
  • He is itchy though. Mrs. Hess calls him out on "scratching in front of a lady", his parents tell him not to scratch, and his brother makes a joke about the resulting scars. They probably, off-screen, slathered him in calamine lotion and had him take oatmeal baths (which really cuts down on the itching).
    • You even see Alex's mom putting calamine on him before she leaves for work, the first time.
  • Home Alone 3 came out in 1997. The chickenpox vaccine became available in the US in 1995. Perhaps he was vaccinated and his case was very mild.

Alex calling the police

• I get that the movie set Alex up as having called the police so much that they probably wouldn't have believed him if he called when the terrorists were in his own house, but if the police get a call, aren't they obligated to respond whether they believe it or not? If Alex had made a call and they chose to ignore it, only for him to turn up injured (or worse), it wouldn't have looked very good for them.
  • He's got in trouble for it before and each time the burglars had eluded the law anyway, not to mention by now he's realized that they aren't ordinary burglars since they can re-route phone calls and are after military technology. It's perfectly reasonable for a young kid (which, again, answers 90% of the complaints on this page) to simply decide that the police aren't going to be of any help in this situation, and he's arguably correct.

Press record

• If Alex had to press the record button to get footage, wouldn't that have given away his position to the spies when they reviewed the tape?
  • It did. The reason for the phone call was to confirm that he still had the car, since they didn't see him take it back inside after taking the tape. The spies were almost caught breaking into three houses in failed attempts to retrieve the car and wanted to confirm it was in the house before breaking into it the next day, so the woman called and pretended to be a mother accusing him of stealing it.