Released: 10th September
Seen: 11th September
In 2017, Netflix released the horror-comedy film The Babysitter and it did pretty well. It wasn’t exactly exceptional but it was a serviceable slasher that had moments of creativity but was mostly just kind of inconsistent in what it was trying to do. It was kind of halfway towards where it was trying to go, hence why I gave it a halfway positive score in my review. Of course the funny thing about that movie is that it kind of ends with everyone being dead and that’s really hard to sequelize… I’m just kidding, this is a slasher movie, death is meaningless and nothing has any actual consequences.
The Babysitter: Killer Queen picks up about 2 years after the original. Cole (Judah Lewis) is having a lot of nightmares, understandable when a blood cult tries to use you as part of a ritual sacrifice. It’s causing enough problems though that his parents are thinking about putting him in a crazy home, but fortunately his friend Melanie (Emily Alyn Lind) has an idea… get Cole to join her, and a few of her friends, as they skip school and get on a boat for a bit of fun.
Unfortunately, things aren’t going to just remain a fun happy time in a boat because at some point we must return to everyone wanting to do some murder and Cole is right there waiting to be murdered… also everyone who died in the last movie comes back because death means nothing and we might as well get some familiar faces back for the bulk of the movie since we can only afford Samara Weaving for around 15 minutes.
There’s a definite improvement from the last Babysitter movie in terms of a consistent tone. This film flat out just cops to being a cartoon with over the top splatter effects and gigantic comedic sequences that wouldn’t look out of place in a Road Runner cartoon. We’re talking things like a giant boulder falls from the air and lands on top of somebody, all that’s missing is the slide whistle. Once you accept this broad tone it becomes easier to go along with the film, the sillier decisions make more sense now because everything is so over the top that we can have stupid pratfalls and hammy performances, providing everyone is on the same page.
Fortunately they are as everyone here has decided to just be over the top as hell and for the most part, it kinda works. Robbie Amell’s return as the eternally shirtless jock who wants to both kill and be a big brother to Cole is still the comedic highlight of the film because he is so damn committed to the bit, Hana Mae Lee’s return as Sonya is sadly brief but provides possibly the best combination of dialogue and flamethrower that I’ve ever seen in my life and then Bella Thorne… well, at least while she’s making movies like this she isn’t accidentally destroying Onlyfans and hurting sex workers, so she’s fine.
Everyone else is pretty much just fine, considering half of the cast is basically just copying the personality traits of the returning cast from last year (Seriously, there’s one character who is trying to do the same schtick Amell does, he just can’t even come close to making it as funny).
The problem with The Babysitter: Killer Queen however is that we can’t take this film seriously at all, so none of the deaths matter and there’s no tension and it all just feels kind of pointless. Again, people returning from the dead isn’t exactly a huge deal in horror movies (Jason Voorhees has returned from the dead so many times that I’m pretty confident they just stopped bothering to bury him because there’s no point) but there should still be some kind of tension, both for the horror element and for the comedy element.
There isn’t any tension at all here, we’re at ‘throw it all out, something will stick” and I’m sorry to say that most of the ‘jokes’ don’t actually stick. Everyone kind of just talks in the same voice, even the parents act like teenagers. Maybe it’s just me but I’m not laughing much during the minute long “Oh are you going to use that lotion to jerk off” joke that happens in the first 20 minutes of the film. Most of the jokes have that feeling, I can see what they were trying to do but it didn’t land.
I also really don’t like the effects work in here. It’s mostly digital and you can tell, digital gore just always looks wrong and every one of the effects could’ve been much cooler with a practical effect instead. It makes the movie feel even more fake than the acting, taking away so much of what I could grab onto and enjoy.
Hell, we don’t even have the titular Babysitter for most of the movie (because Samara Weaving would be a much more expensive get right now) so while a lot of elements are here to make this movie feel a lot more cohesive and potentially interesting than last time, there’s also enough missing and enough that just doesn’t work for it to still kind of stick to being average despite it’s best try.
The Babysitter: Killer Queen is certainly a good switch your brain off movie, there’s a few interesting ideas and jokes but it all just felt like a MAD TV skit that went on for way too long. The film does set up for a third movie and I guess if we’re going to have to deal with that in a few years, fine (I can’t wait to hear the never ending jokes about how they have to kill from 6 feet away, you know it’ll happen) but on the whole it’s a film to watch if there’s nothing else available, it’s just fine.
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