The Babysitter

Hugo Weaving's niece in a swimsuit, with a kitchen knife or a shotgun, take your pick. A horror take on Home Alone with a dash of Satanism. The opening with the nanny that every boy (and not just boys) dreams of having sets the right tone and then spills over into the bloody destruction of the beautiful blonde's evil plans. It's often overwrought and McG seems to have ditched consistency and drama, but I enjoyed it unexpectedly a lot. (01/03/2023)

It may be an eclectic pariah of all manner of stylistic tropes and clichés, but it's also so irresistibly quirky, fun and creative that I ended up quite liking it. A few scenes are downright stupid, and the pursuit of style sometimes makes it a parody even in moments when we should be at least a little scared, but some of the formal games are amusing (the intertitles), and the script in the second "slasher-exploitation-home invasion" half makes good use of the motifs outlined in the introduction (while being funny by reversing the roles, when the bad guys are gradually murdered). If it were more verbally humorous and more creative in generating tension or in the murders, I'd actually be very satisfied, this way most of my memories of the film will move to the third male hemisphere between my legs and involve Samara Weaving, who, if I had her as a babysitter, I'd quickly change my mind about whether it's really best to spend my evenings at the pub. (12/25/2017)

The Babysitter is a conspicuously mishandled combination of subtle black comedy and fantastical splatter. McG completely mindlessly mixes modern visuals with the most stereotypical teen characters, unoriginal gore scenes, ineffective allusions to cult films and stiff humour, and tries to string it all together in the story of a 12-year-old boy, another outsider who gets bullied at school. It could have worked within certain boundaries (if he woke up from a bad dream at the end, for example), but it shouldn’t have been so moronic and divorced from reality. (10/16/2020)

Bloody fun. Immensely stylish (when I think about it, McG is actually my favorite, but he does not tend to get very good scripts) and with a hugely likeable young hero. Don't expect horror stuffiness, it's mainly a parody. With liters of obviously fake red liquid and the famously used song “We Are The Champions." (12/26/2018)

It delivers pretty much what the trailer promises: sterile, wannabe cool entertainment with pretty people in front of the camera, a light script and a serving of gory deaths that teenage boys might wank to. Of proper horror there isn’t even a pinch, of course, but nobody was expecting that from McG. The comparison to the recent Better Watch Out is an affront to horror fans. The two stars do deliver at least some decent craftsmanship in my eyes. In short, a perishable seasonal product. (10/14/2017)