I came to a crossroads the other night. Do I head to bed, or do I find a short run time movie? In hindsight, I should have went to bed. Instead I watched The Babysitter Must Die.....well mostly. It was free and only ran for 76 minutes. If we're completely honest, I did sleep through a chunk of this. I got enough from what I saw to formulate an opinion on this movie....and actually, I probably knew before I selected this flick what I was in for.
The Babysitter Must Die has a few major problems. The first is that the creators missed their mark on the tone of this movie. I don't mind that the movie uses the tone that it did, but it really wasn't set up for the audience that way. The title throws us off first. Then the character build of the babysitter misleads us again. Yet again, we're misdirected by some freeze frame exposition about the babysitter's skillset. This is set up to be a movie, perhaps in the vein of Scott Pilgrim or Kill Bill. You know, a movie with some tongue in cheek dialogue and maybe some dark comedy. It doesn't do this.....at all.
Another problem is the cultits, if you can really call them that. They bring no sense of dread to the movie. Sure they kill of few people in cold blood, but they come off more like regular people we might encounter at the supermarket than they do as servants of the devil. There's a movie called You're Next that I think this movie wanted to be. The antagonists in You're Next were just hired thugs in animal masks, but masks or not, they brought a sense of dread upon first arrival. The cultists in TBMD never hit the mark with this major characteristic.
Another smaller problem is with the lead actress. She really didn't have the charisma to get the audience on board. She was clearly too old to be playing this role, but she also just didn't have the "it" factor. She didn't need to be a stone cold fox for this to work....she wasn't. But something just felt off with her. Really, the only character that did work in this movie was the little girl being babysat.
The Babysitter Must Die is just another movie in a long list of bad movies that is part of a bigger problem of the oversaturation of the streaming industry that we are experiencing right now. These streaming platforms either fill their libraries with B and C level garbage or worse yet, they promote their "original content". I'm not sure which catagory TBMD lands in, but either way it is a cut rate movie that will be seen by more people than it deserves. There are too many ways for movies to be made or picked up for production or to be broadcast to a wide audience. And coupled with the amount of people in the world now who have ready access and time to view these vacuous libraries, more and more of this second and third tier product will be made.
Netflix hit the jackpot with Stranger Things. That was a pretty early on "original content" win. Then Netflix went back for more....and more. Then the other platforms jumped into the game. Pretty much all of it failing horribly, but people watch this stuff, so everyone thinks these are high quality productions. These platforms need to learn their place. They aren't creators. They're messengers. Bring the content, don't make it. You're no good at it.
