THE BABYSITTER
A film review by Andrew Hicks
Copyright 1995 Andrew Hicks / Fatboy Productions
(* out of four)
I'm really starting to wonder about Alicia Silverstone. Sure, she is one of the most beautiful creatures on God's green earth (second only to that Movie Critic at LARGE guy), but when it comes to choosing what movies she stars in, she always strikes out. The Crush was a slow-moving, predictable piece of fluff. Hideaway was a horrific novel adaptation Alicia had only a minor role in. CLUELESS was an annoying, unfunny waste of time. And people have e-mailed me too, saying CLUELESS is a good movie and that I'm the only one who doesn't like it. One girl said if I'd seen the movie with "an open mind," I would have enjoyed it. Nothing could be further from the truth. I went into the theater expecting to love the movie. The preview looked good and of course I'm crazymadinlove with Alicia, but the movie was a bunch of bad jokes coming from whiny, unlikable characters. Almost everyone I saw the movie with felt the same way. When we were walking out of the theater, one guy (and it wasn't me) yelled out, "That was the worst f$&#in' movie I've ever seen" and the rest of us had to laugh in agreement.
So last night I walked into the video store and saw Alicia's pretty face on the cover of some made-for-video thriller called The Babysitter. I knew it would be bad but some inner compulsion I'll probably never understand made me rent it anyway. What I got was 90 minutes of regret--the worst Alicia Silverstone movie ever. And you already know from the last paragraph what the competition is like.
Where to begin in criticizing this movie? The plot is a thin shred that moves slower than a glacier, the writing could have been done (and for all we know it was) by a ten year old, Alicia is the star and she's still wasted in a movie that has no appeal whatsoever. There is zero humor, zero suspense, zero drama and zero action, until the last ten minutes, when the story is needlessly and pointlessly concluded with a violent sequence. Zero plus zero plus zero plus zero equals zero. So why does this movie get one star out of me? Well, Alicia spends twenty minutes of the movie in the bathtub. And if it wasn't bubble bath, The Babysitter would have instantly joined the ranks of our other four- star features, but you settle for what you can get.
Alicia plays a babysitter who's spending Friday night looking after two kids whose parents are out getting drunk at a cocktail party. And of course anyone as beautiful as Alicia automatically spends their Friday nights at home (at least that Movie Critic at LARGE guy does). As the movie trods along, we discover she's not only the mostly-silent star of the movie but also the object of every male character's fantasies (and probably every male viewer's too). The drunken father thinks she's just the thing to recapture his lost youth, her boyfriend lets his imagination run wild while spying on Alicia from outside, even the prepubescent boy looks in on Alicia through the bathroom keyhole while she's taking her bubble bath. They even throw in the middle aged wife's fantasies about a male counterpart at the party. Not that any of us asked or ever even thought about seeing this 200+ pound woman in a black silk teddy.
At least none of the sex fanatasies ever leave the realm of the PG-rated. In fact, I could imagine THE BABYSITTER becoming a Cinemax late-night staple if not for the fact that there's absolutely no nudity in it. So you can't call it a sex flick. I've already pointed out that it can't fall under drama, comedy, thriller or action, so what do you classify THE BABYSITTER as? Bad.
-- Visit the Movie Critic at LARGE website at http://www.missouri.edu/~c667778/movies.html
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