‘My Girl’ (PG)

Sometimes a reviewer has to be a big meanie and call a holiday movie -- in this case, "My Girl" -- the Thanksgiving turkey that it is.

It's a tough job, especially when the gobbler in question is about an adorable, lonely young girl coming of age and losing her bestest friend in the whole world. And especially when it's the nation's No. 1 movie moppet in that open casket.

But sometimes a reviewer just has to blink back the tears that have been mechanically jerked from his eyes and think up more fitting titles for a movie like "My Girl." Call it "The Manipulator II." Or maybe "Dying Even Younger."

It's the summer of 1972, and 11-year-old Vada Sultenfuss, a tomboy teetering on the verge of puberty, has a hopeless crush on her teacher, and no friends but faithful, frail Thomas J., who's allergic to everything (uh-oh: foreshadowing).

So far, so like "The Wonder Years."

Then it gets weird. Vada, who feels responsible for her mother's death, lives with her depressed, inattentive father (a lumpen Dan Aykroyd), a mortician who works on dead bodies in the basement. Vada's a morbid quick study who reads the cause of death as each corpse comes in, then runs to the town doctor (named Welty) with her latest batch of symptoms.

Every now and then, first-time screenwriter Laurice Elehwany tosses in another "zany" character: There's the grandmother with Alzheimer's disease, who rises occasionally from her catatonia only to interrupt the funerals of strangers with renditions of saloon tunes. And Shelly (Jamie Lee Curtis), a kooky beautician who comes to work at the funeral parlor and falls in love with Vada's dad, agitating Vada's adolescent anxieties.

None of this stuff is even hinted at in the movie's misleading trailers and advertisements, which promise a lighthearted kiddie frolic. "My Girl" may well have been intended as a tender way for parents to explain Difficult Subjects to their kids, but this botch of a movie explains nothing. Its fake nostalgia and cod compassion are as painfully awkward as adolescence itself and about as funny as a corpse.

"My Girl" is being sold on the reputation of Macaulay Culkin -- it's the first movie the towheaded twinkler has made since the unforeseen mega-hit "Home Alone." But Culkin is merely bait for your movie dollars -- his Thomas J. has precious little to do but follow Vada around and act like a kid, which he does very nicely.

Vada is played by Anna Chlumsky, the winner of a nationwide search, and you can see how the producers thought they had found Culkin's girl counterpart, a kiddie cash cow. Chlumsky's got it all -- the blonde hair, big velvet-painting eyes, oversized and precociously smart mouth -- but little of Culkin's natural charisma. Who wants to bet she'll be playing Julia Roberts's kid sister by this time next year?