Police Are Patrolling the ‘Home Alone’ House for No Good Reason
The holiday season is here — that special time of year when we gather with our families to celebrate the small child who tortured two impoverished home invaders after being abandoned by his wealthy family.
Yes, Home Alone has become a seasonal staple for those of us who find that Joe Pesci’s smoldering flesh just puts us in the Christmas spirit. But while Bedford Falls is totally fictional, and Tim Allen doesn’t really own a massive compound at the North Pole, Home Alone is the rare Christmas movie with a central location that actually exists in the real world.
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As fans of Home Alone are likely aware, the house that stood in for Kevin McCallister’s home is still standing in Winnetka, Illinois. And it looks exactly the same. Well, it looks the same from the outside. The inside has been completely uglified.
The house is currently up for sale for just over $5 million, which is a lot, but presumably you can make a lot of that money back by scoring free pizza with old VHS tapes of gangster movies.
Understandably, the house has become something of a tourist attraction. And reportedly, those tourists have noticed that the police are routinely patrolling the house and parking squad cars outside of the property. The Winnetka PD told TMZ that there haven’t actually been any incidents at the house, which does make one wonder why they’re keeping such a close guard. These cops know that movies are fake, right? Like, they’re aware that the Wet Bandits are totally fictional, surely.
Other than the fact that spending taxpayer money to protect a multimillion dollar mansion from children taking selfies is objectively ridiculous, this does also seem kind of suspicious. Remember, Home Alone begins with a “police officer” patrolling the neighborhood, and checking in on the McCallisters, purportedly to make sure everyone is safe.
Of course, it was really Harry (of Harry and Marv fame) casing the joint. Are we sure that these cops are even real? In light of the events of Home Alone, the whole thing seems kind of suspicious. How do we know that they’re not burglars too?
If they are indeed real, you’d think that cops would want to stay far away from the Home Alone house considering how terrible they come off in the movie. When Kevin’s mom tries to inform the police that her son is alone and in danger, nobody seems to give a shit. They treat her like she’s calling to complain that her cable is out.
And when an officer does pop by the house, which he’s been told contains an unsupervised minor whose family is out of town, he knocks on the door twice, peeks at the exterior of a window without leaving the porch, and decides to call it a day.
That said, the Home Alone franchise’s most damning statement about modern policing may be the fact that Buzz canonically became a cop.
