Hi friends. For this next installment of 10 Weeks of Spooktober: 2 Spook 2 Tober, we’ve got another sequel. It’s not that I’m attempting to do a bunch of sequels for the sophomore run of this blog. It’s just sort of turning out that way.
Anyhow, this week, we’re looking at the new Netflix film The Babysitter: Killer Queen, which apparently is the “long awaited” sequel to The Babysitter, starring Samara Weaving, whom I loved in Ready or Not, the movie I covered for the FIRST EVER Spooktober post. So basically she’s legendary. Do you see how I’m creating my own Spooktober mythology here? Spooktober is undeniable.
The reason I put “long awaited” in quotes is because… was anyone really awaiting this movie? Apparently when this sequel was announced, people were excited? But I have to say I watched The Babysitter when it first came out, and I don’t remember being very impressed. Honestly, I don’t remember ANYTHING about it. I had to look through this blog to make sure I hadn’t covered it already. It left such a non-impression on me I couldn’t even remember if I had or hadn’t written about this movie franchise before.
So did this HIGHLY ANTICIPATED sequel live up to the non-hype?
Uh… No. This movie was really dumb, and I hated it.
That’s it. That’s the review. Bye.
Okay fine. I’ll give you more.
This movie, like its predecessor, is directed by McG. If you remember The Babysitter at all (I don’t), this one picks up two years after the events of the first movie. Events I had to look up on Wikipedia because all I remembered about the first movie was Samara Weaving plays a babysitter in a cult. Turns out that’s all you really need to know.
Cole is a survivor of a satanic blood cult, but no one believes this really happened. His parents have him on all types of pills to try to take away the hallucinations, and the kids at school make fun of him for being “crazy.” All of this gave me icky feelings about how the movie treats mental health. But to be fair, as a counterpoint, the movie does include a long sequence in which one of the characters points out to Cole that everyone has mental health problems and is coping with it in their own way. Counterpoint to the counterpoint: there is a person with OCD who is jokingly called “Howard Hughes,” and the illness is used as a punchline. So… we still end on the negative side of mental health representation here.
What else do you need to know? A new girl shows up. Her name is Phoebe. She’s played by Jenna Ortega, and throughout the whole movie I was trying to figure out why she looked so familiar. It wasn’t until I sat down to write this that I realized she’s Ellie in season 2 of You. So there you go. We know she’s a “weird girl” because she jokes about being pregnant even though she’s not, screams in the middle of class, and has rumors going around about her that she killed her parents.
The other character that you need to know about is this blonde “fun girl.” Her name is Melanie, and she’s played by Emily Alyn Lind, whom you might recognize from Doctor Sleep. Fun girl Melanie convinces her BFF Cole to ditch school and run off to a cabin for a partaaay. Somehow Phoebe also winds up there. And then guess what? Satanic rituals start going down all over again.
At this point in the movie, I paused to see how much longer we had left, because surely this nightmare had to be over soon, right? No. I was only 45 minutes in, and I had an hour to go. Why was this movie so long? Why?
I love a good horror comedy movie, so it’s not that I hated this movie because this movie mixes horror and comedy. No, it’s that the comedy is so horribly unfunny. Several characters, minor and major, go into long tangential jokes about sex and masturbation. We get a weird scene with a woman wearing only a bra in a gas station selling Cole Magnum XL condoms for no good reason whatsoever.
LOL. It’s funny because he has big dick energy? I guess?
As I mentioned, there are also plenty of "jokes” made at the expense of people with mental health issues. And oh yeah, the only Black character makes a lot of jokes (clearly written by a white person) about how he’s Black. Really cool.
The only shining moment of this film is that (minor spoiler) Samara Weaving does return at the end, though the story arc in general doesn’t feel earned. Overall, there’s very little to redeem this film, but I can’t say it was a disappointment, because I forgot this film franchise even existed. So… better luck next time, spooky friends?
Spooktober came a day early this week, but I’ll see you next week at our regularly scheduled time. And that’s Saturday, in case you were wondering.