Starring Alex D. Linz and Haviland Morris Directed by Raja Gosnell Rated PG, with cartoon violence and mild profanity Running time 95 minutes We give this film a rating of 4 out of 10

(Dec. 12, 1997) -- Apparently there are insufficient supplies of garlic and crucifixes in the multiplexes of America, because they are about to be infested with the second John Hughes remake of the season.

"Oh no," I can hear the studio folks saying, "Home Alone 3 isn't a remake; while Hughes' Flubber is a painful, brainless rehash, Home Alone 3 is a sequel."

That just means they haven't really watched Home Alone 3, which IS a remake of Home Alone -- only this time it's been filtered through a prism, so there are now four bad guys instead of merely two.

And, oh yes, Hughes has tacked on an obligatory, far-fetched plot device to kick the whole thing into action. Otherwise, the two are as closely related as Flubber is to The Absent Minded Professor.

Hughes, who is too busy cranking this offal out as a writer-producer to actually direct the movies, has simply recycled the plot of the original, with a new set of villains and a new kid (now that Macaulay Culkin has grown into a gawky, sulky teen). The house is different; the suburb is the same -- the affluent, apparently Caucasian little burg of Evanston, Ill.

The set-up is sequel-stupid: A bunch of smugglers are transporting a stolen computer chip back to the United States from Hong Kong inside a radio-controlled toy car. But their bags get switched at the airport security checkpoint in San Francisco (this could happen) and they track down the switcher to Chicago (only in the movies could this happen).

Their quarry is a cranky retiree named Mrs. Hess (Marian Seldes). When she discovers that her San Francisco sourdough bread is the aforementioned toy car, she gives it to her 8-year-old neighbor, Alex (Alex D. Linz), as payment for shoveling snow.

The quartet of thugs are a precision, high-tech group, as opposed to the appealingly low-class crooks played by Daniel Stern and Joe Pesci in the original. The joke is supposed to be that, for all their Secret Service-style gear, they're no match for a second-grader.

It's also a gloss on the boy who cried wolf: Alex, who is stuck at home with the chicken pox (while his mom and dad have to go to work), spots the bad guys breaking into the other houses in the neighborhood, looking for the car. But each time he calls 911, the cops arrive too late. Because the crooks are pros who are looking for a specific item, nothing is disturbed; hence, no one believes Alex's stories of spotting burglars.

Like the first two films, this one offers only minor giggles for the first 75 minutes, before the actual assault on the house. It's like an elongated Roadrunner cartoon in which nothing happens to Wile E. Coyote until the final seconds.

Hughes and his puppet director, Raja Gosnell, turn young Alex into young Edison, which will delight children and leave sentient viewers rolling their eyes at the kid's mastery of hardware that gives adults problems. But the young viewers will eat up the slapstick, which is the point of the whole thing.

It's all quite imaginative, and far more complicated than one kid could ever pull off. And that's including if, like Alex, he worked all night without waking up anyone in his family, none of whom notice the multiple boobytraps the next day before they leave for school and work.

Home Alone 3? John Hughes, leave US alone!