It’s perhaps slightly difficult to review, “The Babysitter: Killer Club,” if your trajectory towards the film is like this reviewer’s: being told, and reading through reviews, that the original, “The Babysitter,” was a surprise Halloween treat from Netflix in 2017, retroactively viewing it and discovering that’s not at all the case. Directed by McG, the Costco brand of Michael Bays, “The Babysitter”—which was about a boy in love with his babysitter only to discover she’s part of a Satanic cult— isn’t very good, and ultimately rather juvenile and crude. But fine, for the sake of the argument, one can see how the combination of the charming and appealing Samara Weaving (“SMILF”) and the wild horror genre twist and irreverent teen comedy riff on “Adventures in Babysitting” could be entertaining for some audiences. Brian Duffield is a crafty writer, and it’s possible it read clever on the page, and on the screen, in this director’s hands, it became, well, rather sophomoric.
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But if “The Babysitter,” was charming, entertaining, funny, irreverent and featured a magnetic performance by its lead (Weaving), the sequel, which is not written by Duffield, and barely features Weaving outside of an obligatory, presumably handsomely paid cameo at the end, is the exact opposite of all the aforementioned descriptors, a hamfisted, pedestrian and cheap sequel that feels like one of those cheapo knock off made to cash in from a surprise success that none of the original creative principles want to have anything to do with and aren’t involved with.
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Only, this time, filmmaker McG is definitely still back and left with no blueprint of a good script to save him other than his own worst sensibilities of vulgar, loutish taste and puerile humor. He’s actually the first of four writers credited on the script which is kind of, to be honest, hot infantile trash that feels like the nee plus ultra of everything McG was one accused of on his career—being an oafish, senseless fratboy and Michael Bay knock off.
‘Killer Queen’ picks up two years later after the events of “The Babysitter,” and feels ripe for exploring the relevant idea of trauma, gaslighting and the warped idea of what’s actually truth in a topsy turvy 2020. The young Cole (Judah Lewis) is now in high school, traumatized by his near-death experience in the first film, is seen as a freak with mental health issues because evidently all traces of the dead Satanic cult from McG’s first film vanished. No one believes his story, including his parents— played by Ken Marino, Leslie Bibb, one of the few exceptionally bright elements of the original and this version—and everyone feels like the timid and sensitive teen experienced some made up episode in his head.
But if there’s good emotional ideas to be examined—and yes, this is a silly horror teen comedy and I’m not expecting much— McG’s film pretty much leaves them all unexplored, aside for a few opportunities at half-witted laughs. So, no one believes Cole, Melanie (Emily Alyn Lind), who loved him last time, is suddenly interested in meathead jocks, and the high schooler is basically right back where he was, but worse: unpopular, bullied, but also ridiculed crueler than he ever was. It’s almost shocking how lazy the story is and just how much the filmmaker just wants to immediately fast forward in recreating the exact same antics of the first film. Sure, there’s a new odd girl at school introduced, Phoebe (Jenna Ortega), but aside from that, the plot is nearly the same, but just modified because Weaver is certainly not going to bother to sit through the same story. This time, there’s another game of spin the bottle, this time including Cole, Melanie, and a new set of teens, only to suddenly reveal Melanie and are friends are also part of the same Satanic Cult of the first film, only they’re the new generation, OMG! Worse, then all the other Satanic Cult members of the original— Andrew Bachelor, Robbie Amell, Bella Thorne, Hana Mae Lee—return (minus Weaver) because why not and hey, what a great way to reference all the dumb jokes and gags of the original yet again (Spoiler: the hot but empty Bella Thorne character gets shot in her precious boob again!). It’s yet another race to kill Cole and get his blood, which is 10x more gruesome and odious than the original, McG’s ideas of ramping up the stakes as loathsome and overexcited as one might imagine. The ensuing hour + of the movie is desperate to entertain with discursive asides, mindless blood splatters, and other nonsensical tangents, and terribly its tedious. Weaving returns in the end in sad attempt to redeem her character with some emotion, but it all falls embarrassingly flat (the film seems to take its title from the fact that it was able to secure that rights to that Queen song and tacked it on at the end for seemingly no discernible reason other than its title).
There was a time when McG seemed to play for the respectability that had alluded him most of his derided career, “Terminator: Salvation”—which was so awful, it even turned Christian Bale into a monster on set— or maybe to a lesser extent “Three Days To Kill,” which flirted with family drama elements, but remained another cheap “Taken” knock off from the Luc Besson movie mill. But “The Babysitter,” and especially the execrable “The Babysitter: Killer Queen,” seem to suggest a filmmaker saying f*ck it, and embracing all his worst tendencies, both from a sophomoric, varsity sports team worldview, and the boorish, lowbrow and overwrought cinematic one that became his bread and butter. The now pat, unimaginative knock on McG was that he was the Guy Fieri of filmmakers, — loud, crass, garish, tacky, hacky, double fisted with Monster Energy drinks and reeking of Ax Body Spray. But you know what? Sadly, that shoe seems to snuggly fit and he seems more than willing to wear it. [F]