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A nine-month-old crawls across Chicago following the pictures in his storybook while the three kidnappers chasing him absorb every injury a John Hughes script can invent. John Hughes wrote it, America ignored it, and it ran for months in Kolkata.
Rik Mayall in a green-and-yellow striped suit, taped inside a jack-in-the-box, back to wreck Phoebe Cates's life for her own good. Gene Siskel called it one of the worst films he had ever seen. A generation of kids rented it until the tape wore out.
A brilliant six-year-old book-lover discovers she has telekinetic powers — and a tyrannical principal to use them on. Danny DeVito directed, co-produced, narrated, and played the crooked used-car-salesman dad in this 1996 Roald Dahl adaptation, which stumbled at the box office and then became a VHS staple kids rewatched forever.
Junior, the seven-year-old in the red bow tie adopted by John Ritter's hapless Ben Healy, is pen pals with a serial killer and a one-boy demolition crew. Critics loathed it, 70 percent of a test audience walked out, and by its writers' account it became Universal's most profitable film of 1990.
Macaulay Culkin, four years after Home Alone, ducks into a library to escape a storm and gets melted into a cartoon, where three talking books and Long John Silver, Moby-Dick and Dr. Jekyll chase him toward the exit sign. It cost a reported $34 million, made $13.7 million, and was the last animated feature 20th Century Fox released with hand-painted cels.