90's Watch: Don't Tell Mom The Babysitter's Dead (1991)

Watched:  02/09/2023

Format:  HBOmax

Viewing:  First

Director:  Stephen Herek

Sometimes a movie goes off the rails so fast and so hard, feels cynically produced on top of that, that it's hard not to just get mad, fold your arms and complain til the credits roll.  For the past 32 years, I'd successfully not seen Don't Tell Mom the Babysitter's Dead (1991), which came out when I was 16 and was working through my Gen-X feelings of rejecting things I felt were marketed at me - but specifically at a very dumb version of me the people selling me stuff mostly took to be an idiot.

In 1991, Don't Tell Mom the Babysitter's Dead was *heavily* sold at teen audiences with ads on MTV and elsewhere running seemingly non-stop.  Certainly I saw  trailers before other movies.  And you always knew:  if the movie looks like this, and they're advertising it this hard, it's because it sucks and they need to get people in before word spreads.  

There was a long tail of 1980's-style comedy into the 1990's, enough so that it probably deserves its own niche, but this movie feels like a 1987 release more than something that would hit at the same time as Home Alone. 

The pitch is this:  

Kids are left at home for two months under the care of a mean old lady.  She dies in the first ten minutes, and the kids dispose of her and accidentally the money they were to survive on.  For reasons, they do not want Mom to know (and Dad has some mysterious shadiness about him that is never teased out).  

Instead of BOTH teens getting jobs so they can survive, only one does (Applegate).  She works for a day at Clowndog (which looks like a very bad job, but a very fun place to eat), and then lies her way into a job at a fashion/ uniform company as an executive assistant.  And never worries about getting caught.  Even as she steals from the petty cash.

Kids learn life lessons.  Romance is found.  The ending makes zero sense.

You can blame the director for this, but Stephen Herek directed a number of watchable films, from Critters to Bill & Ted's Excellent Adventure to some big-budget, successful, live-action Disney films. In short - I think he knows what he's doing, or especially did in the 1990's.  But if he also shot what was on the page for this movie, then... you know, these writers more or less don't have a track record after this movie that I'd write home about.

Curiously, this entire family lacks scruples while also having a complete lack of charm or any redeeming qualities.  Movie:  this stuff is important if you want people to care about the ending.  Counting on the audience being dumb kids only sells so many tickets.  At least try to make us care whether the children live or die.  I mean, we've already shown a curious callousness to life and death once in the movie.  What's one or two kids less?  But the kids all get one character goal and spend the duration whining about whatever their thing is.  There's no love or even hate between them.  They merely co-exist in space.

Despite a really solid title that promises a dark comedy full of hijinks, we get a pretty basic "fakin' it til you're makin' it" comedy made popular in the 80's with Working Girl and The Secret of My Success welded onto a teen summer romp about being a dipshit.  And, despite the fact it looks like a comedy, there's almost nothing present to illicit actual laughter.  I laughed audibly exactly once, at a supporting character's choice to clutch a jar of M&M's as a coping mechanism.  

The set ups of the film intended to provide our hero with challenges all seem to point to:  this girl is going to jail.  And she is going to jail because she's an idiot and everyone else in her family is an asshole, from youngest kid to absentee, lying mom who has skipped the continent to go bang a shepherd. 

What's odd about the "makin' it" business aspect is that she... doesn't?  She hands all of her work to Kimmy Robertson, and her solution for saving the company is to turn their industrial uniforms into highly 1980's-specific and impractical designs that seem like they'd just bring more shame on the workers than a smock or a golf shirt.*  

Either one of these movies might have been fun on their own, but together...  

It feels like no one sat down with the script and said "does this make sense?"  Like - ok, I'll buy the shitty mom also didn't tell the kids who she was hiring to babysit them for two months.  I'm not sure how this old bag was qualified or why she thought making the kids miserable was not going to get back to the mom.  Ignore all that.  Babysitter is dead within 10 minutes.

But I also don't get what the kids thought was going to happen when they had to explain to their mom they threw away a corpse.  Like - that woman presumably had friends and maybe people who loved her...  The movie could have set it up so that wasn't true, but it didn't.  They just throw her away.  (Apparently Bad Mom also left 2 months worth of cash?  Jesus, lady.).

But it also does weird little things like - they give the kids two cars, but then one is stolen partway through the movie (by drag queens.  And that plot point never, ever returns...  when it so easily could have).  Like... why?  Why one car?  It makes whole chunks of the movie not make sense.  Like - did they call an ambulance to the farm?  Did they get a ride?  

Look, I could spend an hour naming Things In Don't Tell Mom the Babysitter's Dead That Could Have Easily Not Happened And/ Or Been Fixed.  I will spare you.  When other people think that's criticism, I find it both dubious and annoying.  I mean, I am 100% right about all my thoughts on this, but I doubt I will sway anyone who loves the movie for any reason.  Shine on, you crazy diamonds.

But, jesus.  This is the laziest @#$%ing movie.

It also costars Joanna Cassidy, who I know mostly from Blade Runner, and who is clearly in a wig here but allowed to be over 40 and hot, which is shocking for the period.  And it has John Getz, who was the main guy in Blood Simple, here being horny at Christina Applegate.  Josh Charles plays Applegate's paramour and he's... fine.  David Duchovny is there to show you what happens when no one knows what to do with you as an actor.  I think the secretary/ Josh Charles' sister played Admiral Cornwell on Star Trek: Discovery.  

The movie is wisely anchored by Applegate, who was most famous at this point as Kelly from Married... With Children and seemed ready for bigger things.  If the movie is watchable, it's that Applegate is watchable and likable, and not playing a broad, dumb character.  Her scenes with Joanna Cassidy and John Getz suggest a better movie that doesn't exist when they aren't on the screen.  But it's hard to sell to boys wanting to see Applegate a movie when she's on TV every week, and I don't think the movie did a great job of marketing the Makin' It portions of the film.  Applegate's career is worthy of discussion because she's proven multiple times she's hilarious, but she has to be the straight man here to literally everyone.

Who knows what happened from script to production to the editor's block?.  Anything could have.  And probably did.

I will possibly try this movie again in another 32 years to reconsider.  

 

*I say this as someone who worked back-to-back at Chuck E. Cheese and The Disney Store