Review: The Babysitter (2017)

The Babysitter (2017)

Rated TV-MA

Score: 4 out of 5

Hot damn, who knew McG of all people had this movie in him? Joseph McGinty "McG" Nichol is a director and producer who started out in music videos, and who I've often dismissed as a poor man's Michael Bay even on his better films like the first Charlie's Angels movie. But here, he turned out an incredibly entertaining mix of a throwback slasher, a kids' adventure film like The Monster Squad, and a very fun twist on a classic horror movie setup. It has no aspirations beyond being a good old-fashioned B-grade horror-comedy, playing largely to nostalgia for both of the varieties of '80s films it's riffing on, but it proceeds to go all-out with its setup by delivering buckets of gore, some big laughs, and a number of great fist-in-the-air moments. Netflix has been killin' it this October.

Our protagonist is Cole, a dweebish twelve-year-old boy who gets picked on relentlessly at school and only has two real friends, his girl-next-door neighbor Melanie and his babysitter, a gorgeous bombshell high schooler named Bee who stands up for him against the bullies. One weekend, with Cole's parents away, Bee decides to invite some of her friends from school over to the house, the jock Max, the cheerleader Allison, the goth Sonya, the class clown John, and the nerd Samuel. Cole, wondering what Bee and her friends are gonna get up to, stays up past his bedtime and secretly watches from the stairwell -- where he sees them brutally sacrifice Samuel before talking about heading upstairs to collect the "blood of the innocent". The group catches Cole during his attempt to flee the house, and now, he must fight for his life as teenagers who, in any other horror movie, would be stock victims instead turn out to be a Satanic cult looking to get rid of the witness.

There is nothing in this movie that is not completely over-the-top. The performances and writing for the teenagers, save for Bee, are all heightened, whether it's Bella Thorne playing up Allison's ditziness, Andrew "King Bach" Bachelor's reactions as his character John constantly gets sprayed in the face with blood, Robbie Amell interrupting Max's chase of Cole in order to teach him to stand up to a bully egging his house (even a murderous Satanist jock has his limits), or Hana Mae Lee as Sonya threatening to make Cole into a "human self-centipede". The most obvious pop and rock songs are played in various key scenes, from Peaches' "Boys Wanna Be Her" for Bee's introduction to Queen's "We Are the Champions" for the climax. The deaths are gratuitously violent, as people get stabbed through the skull, blasted across the room with a gunshot, impaled through the eye with a fire poker javelin, blown up, and decapitated with a shotgun blast, the camera happy to show everything in gory detail while letting the blood flow like the Mississippi. The first act is spent setting up all the little things inside the house and in Cole's life that will inevitably be used to kill, maim, or otherwise get people into trouble, from the butcher's knife in the dishwasher to the mousetraps in the basement to Cole learning how to drive. Cole suffers absolutely no mental trauma from the things he sees, and comes out of it having become a man. This is hardly a subtle movie, and while McG does handle the horror side of the equation pretty well, more often than not it comes with a heavy dose of comedy to it -- an air that doesn't actually make the film less scary so much as it makes the humor feel a lot darker.

The central members of the cast are Samara Weaving and Judah Lewis as Bee and Cole, the most grounded characters in the film and the ones who get some real characterization and development. Bee starts the film as the sort of "cool" babysitter that any kid would love to have, one who stages dance-offs, indulges in their geeky discussions, and slips them a shot of Dad's liquor (even if it's to drug Cole so they can take his blood without waking him). It's all an act, of course, as Bee becomes a monstrous inversion of the archetypal "final girl" role, spending the third act hunting down not a psycho killer, but a scared adolescent boy. For Cole, meanwhile, the entire experience is almost a ritual in its own right, specifically a coming-of-age ritual as he learns how to take on bullies and stand up for himself without Bee to have his back. I loved Weaving and Lewis in their roles, the latter especially so given that he's a child actor, and the two played off of each other very well both before and after Bee's secret was revealed. Leslie Bibb and Ken Marino had much smaller roles as Cole's parents, but they made the most of their presence before they left on their getaway. I did find myself wishing that Melanie got a bit more to do here, as she virtually vanishes after the first act and only shows up again briefly during the climax; while her schoolgirl romance with Cole was cute, it felt tacked on more than anything. Shame, because I liked her actress.

The Bottom Line

It's a simple, straightforward horror-comedy that does exactly what it sets out to do. It is ridiculous, true, but it's got a fun mix of big laughs, gory sight gags, and a likable hero.