The Babysitter (2017)
Directed by McG
When Cole stays up past his bedtime, he discovers that his hot babysitter is part of a Satanic cult that will stop at nothing to keep him quiet.
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What critics say influenced The Babysitter
It’s a little bit Girl Next Door , a dash of Home Alone , and a sprinkle of familiar horror films like Friday the 13th and I Know What You Did Last Summer, which the meta movie both subtly and overtly references.
And so we’re off on a horrific Home Alone riff (the film even openly acknowledges the debt via dialogue at one point), with Cole trying to stay out of the cult’s clutches as the body count rises and the claret is spilled with gusto.
For here is a movie with a screenplay by Brian Duffield that puts more effort into explaining why Bella Thorne is in a cheerleader outfit than it does into rationalizing why young Cole would run back in the house to Home Alone the Devil worshippers after already escaping; it is ultimately a case study in half-hearted banality.
It’s a little bit Girl Next Door , a dash of Home Alone , and a sprinkle of familiar horror films like Friday the 13th and I Know What You Did Last Summer, which the meta movie both subtly and overtly references.
For another, she’s the kind of “cool girl” who can go answer for answer at sci-fi trivia games and quote along to a cult movie like Billy Jack (screenwriter Brian Duffield might be indulging in a little wish fulfillment here, bless him).
Bee and Cole are special friends who giddily (and cloyingly) discuss Predator and Aliens , and watch Billy Jack projected onto the back of Cole’s shed.
Cole and Bree chat about who they’d pick for their Intergalactic Dream Team (Jeff Goldblum from Independence Day , my girl) and nosh on homemade pizza.
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Where Ti West took VHS horror and emulated it via style and tone replication with The House of the Devil, McG seems to be filtering that same brand of lo-fi genre freak out though his own bubblegum lens, and the results are borderline unwatchable.
The Babysitter sits comfortably somewhere in between the smarter-but-less-gory Buffy the Vampire Slayer and the gorier-but-cheesier Evil Dead franchises.