The old black-and-white gangster flicks seen in the first two Home Alone movies have become almost as iconic as the films they’re featured in. In the original Home Alone, Kevin McCallister (played by Macaulay Culkin) pops in a VHS copy of Angels with Filthy Souls, which appears to be an authentic 1930s film noir at first. As we watch along with Kevin, a guy in a trench coat who calls himself Snakes is dropping off some “stuff” at the office of a man named Johnny. Things get ugly when Snakes asks Johnny for the money he’s owed for said “stuff”; Johnny then gives Snakes just ten seconds to leave before shooting him dead in three. When the smoke clears, Johnny gleefully tells Snakes, “Keep the change, ya filthy animal!”
This footage comes in handy for Kevin later in the movie, when he uses its audio to scare a pizza delivery boy and the burglars who try to break into his house (Joe Pesci and Daniel Stern). It makes for some memorable moments, but if you’re looking to check out the whole movie after years of watching Home Alone around the holidays, you’ve got some disappointment coming your way. You won’t be finding Angels with Filthy Souls on Netflix or Hulu or, well, anywhere for that matter because, unfortunately, it doesn’t actually exist—not as anything more than that minute-and-twenty-second clip you just watched above. And don’t feel bad for not knowing; this is something that people of all ages are still figuring out each year when they finally get around to doing some googling:
My entire childhood, I thought the old timey movie that Kevin watches in Home Alone (Angels With Filthy Souls) was actually an old movie.
— Seth Rogen (@Sethrogen) December 25, 2018
The short movie-within-a-movie was partially inspired by the 1938 James Cagney film Angels with Dirty Faces, co-starring The Dead End Kids and Humphrey Bogart. Michael Guido played Snakes, while Johnny was played by Ralph Foody, who you might also recognize from his brief appearance as the police dispatcher in The Blues Brothers. Interestingly, Guido and Foody originally had the opposite roles, but because Foody was recovering from knee surgery, he couldn’t perform the death sequence. “That was perfectly fine with me since they were both fun roles,” Guido told Vanity Fair in 2014. “But a few years later I realized that I was just about the only actor from the original film who was not invited to be in the sequel because my character was ‘dead.’”
As you probably could’ve guessed by now, Angels with Even Filthier Souls, the sequel-within-a-sequel from Home Alone 2: Lost in New York, is also not a real movie. The immortal words spoken by Johnny to his girlfriend Carlotta in that one, of course, were, “Merry Christmas, ya filthy animal…”
“…and a Happy New Year!”
The post ‘Merry Christmas, Ya Filthy Animal’: The Old Movies in the ‘Home Alone’ Movies That Don’t Really Exist appeared first on VICE.
