The Babysitter: Killer Queen (2020)

[runningscared]

Movie: The Babysitter: Killer Queen (2020), directed by McG

Watched on: Netflix

Ran: 7.13 miles, 9’08”/mile, 01:05:13 (light run)

 

Not all that long before I started this ridiculous blog, I happened to catch the Netflix original The Babysitter during a late-night treadmill run and I fell in love with its odd mix of humor, splatter horror, and genuine heart. While rehydrating and reading more about this little gem of a film that I’d somehow missed for a couple of years, I discovered to my delight that a sequel was already in post-production! Ah, the occasional joys of being perennially late to the party. Fast-forward to today: The Babysitter: Killer Queen dropped this very morning, and I wasn’t going to wait around for long before checking it out. Would it succumb to the all-too-common yet dreaded sequelitis, and be a pale and unnecessary shadow of the original? Or would it join the rarefied ranks among the very few sequels that surpass their forebears?

 

Good news! The answer to both questions is “kindasorta”!

 

I won’t go into detail about what happened in The Babysitter (just watch it already, for cryin’ out loud, it’s great), but the one-sentence summary is that Cole discovers that his super-cool babysitter and her friends are actually a Satan-worshiping blood cult who perform human sacrifices in his living room after he’s gone to sleep, so they try to kill him, too, but he takes each of them out over the course of the night in a sort of horror-movie alternate timeline version of Home Alone. Caught up now? Great. Moving on.

 

TB:KQ picks up the story two years later: Cole is a high school junior now! Unfortunately, he’s deeply unpopular, in large part because no one believes his crazy tale about his satanic babysitter (despite the otherwise inexplicable deaths of multiple local kids and two cops, but whatever), but also because he voluntarily wears brown corduroy suits to school. You gotta feel that the second thing is pretty much all on him.

 

Anyway, concerned about his continuing “delusions,” Cole’s parents are about to ship him off to another school that specializes in psychiatric cases—in a nod to Halloween fans, the brochure says it’s in Haddonfield, IL—so Cole skips school AND town with his best-friend-and-crush Melanie to spend a weekend at a beach cabin, which would be ideal if not for Melanie’s boyfriend and a couple of his friends tagging along.

 

Well, things are looking up with kissing games and other teen hijinks, but then wouldn’t you know it: Satan stuff happens. Ain’t it always the way? The teens Cole killed two years ago are back from Limbo until sunrise, and if they can complete a certain ritual involving Cole’s blood before daybreak, they’re back for good. So Cole has to team up with the new girl, Phoebe, in hopes of keeping his blood in his body and away from any undead-raising rituals, and now he’s got to kill these demon-teens all over again, in (of course) the most entertaining, gory, and CGI-heavy ways possible.

 

Is it entertaining? I certainly thought so—it’s full of laughs and gore and almost everyone in the cast seems to be having fun with it. But here’s the thing: I’m inherently wary of any movie that has four credited writers. TB:KQ is absolutely one of those sequels where the folks in charge said “don’t worry about whether the plot makes sense—let’s just take all the things that made the first movie so popular and then do them again, only more and louder and maybe on a BEACH!” I have no doubt that The Babysitter has fans who mostly liked it for the kills and the pop culture references and the funny dialogue, and those people will probably love TB:KQ because all that stuff is cranked to 11. Unfortunately, the thing that I felt really gave the first movie a soul—Cole’s relationship with his babysitter Bee—is all but absent, and the result is a very fun movie that is nothing but empty calories. (Not that there’s anything wrong with that. Sometimes you just want a cupcake for dinner.)

 

Actually, you know what it reminded me of? Charlie’s Angels: Full Throttle. (Bet you didn’t see THAT coming.) McG has directed a lot of stuff over the years, including the music video for “All Star” by Smash Mouth—so, uh… yeah—but to be honest, before the Babysitter flicks I only know him from the early-2000s Liu-Barrymore-Diaz Charlie’s Angels movies, which I actually kinda love for their sheer exuberance. It’s maybe a little weird how much TB:KQ feels like a McG Charlie’s Angels movie, from the bright colors and pop culture references and one-liners and incomprehensibly schizoid music choices (“Police Truck” by Dead Kennedys during a boat chase? Really?), all the way down to weirdly out-of-place-in-a-horror-flick elements like a bikini beach party in the blazing sun and a Hong Kong wire-work martial arts fight scene between oddly well-trained women. And while TB:KQ is clearly chock full of horror stuff like satanic blood cults and heads getting slowly torn off, the movie is shot and edited like a super-slick music video, so the tone is not at all what you might expect from a horror movie.

 

But overall, yep, I definitely enjoyed this sequel, and to say it’s better or worse than the original is kind of moot, because in some sense they’re totally different animals. I think maybe even those who made The Babysitter were surprised to have captured lightning in a bottle, and when they tried to reverse-engineer the process for TB:KQ they wound up with a hip new lightning-branded energy drink instead. It’s still a hell of a rush to drink it, though.

 

<BONUS WEIRD ASIDE> I feel like I should also mention that this movie has not one, but TWO ex-Disney Channel stars in major roles! Bella Thorne, who plays Bella Thorne Allison, was CeCe on Shake it Up!, while Phoebe is portrayed by none other than Jenna Ortega—Harley from Stuck in the Middle. I’m always happy to see Disney Channel alums graduating to horror. Go check out Sierra McCormick (Olive from A.N.T. Farm) in Some Kind of Hate if you want to see someone who dove right into the deep end. Also, I haven’t seen it yet, but Ross Lynch (Austin from Austin & Ally) played Jeffrey Dahmer in My Friend Dahmer before joining the cast of Chilling Adventures of Sabrina, and I’m also excited to see Dove Cameron (Liv and Maddie’s Liv… and, um, Maddie) in Issac next year. </BONUS WEIRD ASIDE>