Customer Reviews

The Babysitter [VHS]

5 star:		(1)
4 star:		(0)
3 star:		(2)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

Well-made TV movie from 1980 has a mysterious girl being invited to be the live-in housemaid and babysitter for a family who needs to come together with a bit more love and caring for each other. What they get when they hire Joanna is anything but love... Although quite slow-paced, director Peter Medak and screenwriter Jennifer Miller have created a very effective piece of film. Acting is excellent as well. Recommended, but I must say that if you're looking for something in the tradition of "Fatal Attraction" and "The Hand That Rocks the Cradle," this film is a bit more on the slow side and pays more attention to psychological terror rather than the traditional 'femme fatale' type of movie. Well done.

I picked this one at random from the horror films shelf at the local dive video store and was pleasantly surprised. I didn't even know that Patty Duke Astin and William Shatner were in it until I started to watch it, and to tell you the truth I don't know what it was doing in the horror section. This is technically a drama.

Worth dipping into if you can find it at a video rental place somewhere, but not really suitable to own.

I know I watched this film when I was younger and what I remember is the ending confused me as it would any kid. I recently watched it and I was surprised.

The music is very much of its time and Shatner and Astin occasionally overact, but are both very good in their respective roles as Jeff and Liz Benedict. Quinn Cummings is also very good as Tara, their daughter.

The best in the film? Stephanie Zimbalist, who gives a masterful performance, with range and a quiet intelligence/malevolence throughout the film. She has to be friend and then harsh mother figure to Tara. The good housekeeper and best friend to Liz. The housekeeper and then seductive woman to Jeff. At the end, when she is yet again to be fired, things fall apart for her and she unravels, reliving her prior employer's tragic ending, or at least trying to, and taking the movie to a whole other level.

I've watched this film now about five times. It is a unique piece of art. I loved the introduction of Joanna (Zimbalist) with a close shot of just her eyes. There are many unique moments in this film, which I believe was shot almost entirely in and around Puget Sound near Seattle.

It is a psychological thriller and don't expect a high body count or many intense scenes but the underlying thread of Joanna's character constantly manipulating the family one way or another is kinda fascinating. There is a scene when Jeff comes home from the party alone (his wife stays til the end), goes to his bedroom and finds Joanna looking at herself in the mirror, dressed in his wife's lingerie. Zimbalist is particularly effective here as she introduces herself as available to him. She follows this up a few days later on a boat ride when she is almost clinical in her analysis of how they would be together. As she says 'I was never a child', we believe her.

The ending is all Stephanie Zimbalist as she struggles to explain her cirumstances. I found it heartbreaking because she really is damaged goods, from a lifetime of being put out from one family after another. As she explains she is 'not a piece of blank paper to be scribbled on, filed away, taken from one drawer and put into another over and over'. That is terrific writing and apropos to the character, who is clearly intelligent, which works against her because she cannot reconcile the hand life has dealt her. Zimbalist is absolutely brilliant in this penultimate scene and we can't help but feel for her.

I am sure such films are often overlooked and dismissed as simple psychological thrillers, especially the actors but overall, this is a superior film.