Hi, hi, and hello, it’s Burl here, once
again dredging up a c. 1990s movie review from back in my old reviewing days! I
suppose I was asked to see the picture at some kind of advance preview screening, and I can’t
imagine I was too excited about the prospect! As with If Lucy Fell, this is something I saw at a review screening back when it came out, have never watched since and will never watch again; so in keeping with
my goal to eventually review all the movies on this site, I’ll transcribe my 1995 notice for
you here and call it done! The picture in question, by the way, was based on a popular series of
tween-girl books by someone with a name similar to that of the woman who played Alice on The Brady Bunch, and is called The
Baby-Sitters Club!
The
Baby-Sitters Club takes place in Stoneybrook, a
small American town more friendly and benign than Blue Velvet’s Lumberton, but no less creepily artificial! Here, everyone
fits into a comfy middle-income bracket (ha ha, those who don’t do not stay
long), and even the kids are savvy, capitalistic pursuers of the American
Dream!
In this eerie bourgeois paradise, seven
tweenage girls have carved out a profitable niche in the babysitting business!
They work together to provide the town with reliable, one-stop child care: if
one sitter isn’t available to work, another will be! The club is never
hard up for employment, as the parents of Stoneybrook are only, endlessly interested in stepping out for the evening so as to briefly escape the boredom of their snug middle-class
lives!
The girls have their own problems, ha ha!
One needs to pass a summer school science test (it’s nice to see an Asian kid
in a picture who for once isn’t a natural science whiz); one wants to hide her
diabetes and young age from her seventeen year-old Swiss boyfriend; and the
main girl, Kristy, is troubled when her estranged father returns to town and
for some reason makes her swear to keep his presence a secret from her mother!
As Kristy is torn asunder by conflicting loyalties, the club faces such
additional obstacles as three wicked girls who hate them for no reason, and an
evil next-door neighbor played by Ellen Burstyn from The King of Marvin Gardens, whose distrust of pubescent girls might
be excused by her experience with Regan in The
Exorcist!
Drably directed by Melanie Mayron, whose
acting we may recall from Drop Zone,
the picture is as rote and flat as one of those Disney Sunday Night Movies,
like Rock and Roll Mom or some other! It was shot by Willy Kurant, the French cinematographer who
photographed Godard’s great banana Masculin/Feminin,
but on this one he was unable to give over much visual pep, I’m sorry to say!
On the other hand the girls are all
talented actors, and there’s a gallery of familiar faces in the margins around
them: Bruce Davison from Lies and Spies Like Us, Brooke Adams from Invasion of the Body Snatchers and The Dead Zone, Peter Horton from Children of the Corn, Colleen Camp from D.A.R.Y.L. and Track 29, and Harris Yulin from Night Moves and Fatal Beauty! Some
welcome humour is derived from the weird behavior of the little kids enrolled
in the club’s summer day care, so while young teenage girls would probably enjoy the
picture just by default, it’s antic enough for younger folk to appreciate as well! It’s
not my kind of movie, but I guess even taking that into consideration I’m
going to give The Baby-Sitters Club
only one and a half plaid ballcaps!
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