The Mad Man Next Door

Hey, did you know that the '80s are like, totally IN right now? 

Observe the many new horror movies to prove it.

Quick Plot: Davey is a 15-year-old Cape May paperboy with big dreams of becoming the next Spielberg. Until now, suburban life has proven to be fairly uninspiring. Thankfully, local news reports the first interesting thing to ever happen to Davey and his trio of misfit friends: someone within the island is abducting and murdering teenage boys.

For Davey, this is a chance to shake up evenings of manhunt with something actually worth being hunted. Things get especially exciting when he suspects his neighbor, Officer Mackey (Rich Sommer of Mad Men) as the killer. Knowing it will be a tough sell to the adults, Davey and his pals devote their titular summer to collecting evidence (with occasional pauses to spy on the sexy former babysitter next door).

Directed by the Turbo Kid team of François Simard, Anouk Whissell, and Yoann-Karl Whissell, Summer of 84 (and yes: I'm annoyed we don't get an apostrophe) feels heavily indebted to the current wave of nostalgia sparked by Stranger Things. That's a good and bad thing. Sure, it's fun to remember the horrors of faces you might know showing up on milk cartons and the freedom of riding your bike around town without adult supervision, but then you realize writers Matt Leslie and Stephen J. Smith (born respectively in 1980 and 1981) don't actually know how teenagers talked in 1984, and you become incredibly distracted searching for the probable (and many) anachronisms.

The other glaring issue in Summer of 84 is that it toys with its tone, constantly playing with exactly what kind of horror movie it wants to be. What starts as a lighthearted romp suddenly turns into a truly cruel finale, only to then slightly lighten up with no serious mediation in its denouement. Tonal shifts can certainly be used to good effect, but in Summer of 84, it just ends up feeling mean. Much like most visits with Freddy Krueger, the fact that our killer is most likely doing terrible, presumably sexual things to his underage victims is never given any real weight. That would be fine if Summer of 84 wanted to stay in a fluffier realm, but when it ends on such a devastating note, the nature of the entire film just feels inconsistent. 

High Points

Though the quartet of wildly different boys doesn't necessarily fit well together on the page, the young actors have nice chemistry with each other, and the moments where they actually serve as loyal, unquestioning friends are easily the film's best strength 

Low Points

Look, I'm all for including female characters in boys' stories, but if you're going to throw in a token girl, can you first take a few minutes in your writing room to figure out who she is? Maybe it's just that one of the kids is played by The Babysitter's Judah Lewis, but the whole "slightly older dream girl who knows all of your references and exists for no reason other than to be cool" is so over. It doesn't help that the character of Nikki is handled so clumsily, showing up at random moments and being sent off without any resolution. 

Lessons Learned: the 1980s Edition (cumulatively culled from the recent rash of '80s-infused horror movies)

Old meatloaf smells like werewolf crap

Hot blond babysitters love nothing more than flirting with sensitive smart younger teenage boys

All parents are absent and terrible

Rent/Bury/Buy

Look, a lot of horror fans seem to love Summer of (')84, and I'm not here to say anyone is wrong. While I was entertained (and incredibly frustrated) while watching, it's a film that has soured significantly for me the more I've thought about it. It's on Shudder, and probably worth a watch just for you to make up your own mind.

You're a Virgin Who Can't Babysit

A rock star of the post post-modernist movement in literature, author Robert Coover wrote some pretty nifty short stories for his 1969 anthology Pricksongs and Descants. From a fairy tale told by objects to the rambling un-punctuated fury of Noah's forgotten brother, these are experimental tales that are sometimes tedious, sometimes fascinating, and more often than not, fairly horrifying. The most famous of these stories is probably "The Babysitter," a dark suburban saga that follows a group of loosely connected everyday characters (the titular babysitter, her pre-teen charges, horny boyfriend, hornier clients, and so on) through their repressed fantasies that sprawl over one fateful (or maybe very ordinary) night. The story itself is separated by different third person omniscient perspectives seen from different characters as they lust for a different life.

 

Though it probably made the biggest splash, I personally found "The Babysitter" to be one of Coover's lesser stories. Once you see what he's doing with points of view, the actual reading becomes rather dull. Sure, the shock of a dead baby or gang rape or bathtub drowning isn't easily brushed away, but since everything is ultimately fantasy, it becomes harder and harder to care as the pages continue to turn. Nevertheless, the thrill of a nubile young lady being leered over by everyone from a middle aged drunk to the town bad boy is easily ripe for a Lifetime-ish film adaption, hence Guy Furland's 1995's take.

Quick Plot: An unnamed (until the end, when the reveal of her rather ordinary name isn't actually that special) babysitter heads to her night job at the Tucker residence, where dad's already three bourbons in and mom needs a hand squeezing herself into a not-so-little black dress for a house party. Meanwhile, The Babysitter's on-the-outs boyfriend (one of the Londons, and I continue my pledge to never be able to tell them apart) bumps into an old pal who's taken a turn for the wrong side of the tracks. Old Pal is played by one of my major late '90s to early 2000s crushes, Nicky Katt, who aside from appearing in virtually every movie made between 1995 and 2002, also struck my heart as a rebellious teacher stranded on the miserable Boston Public. I harp on this casting because aside from riling up some of my younger days, Nicky Katt is also costumed and styled to be the spitting image of Buffy the Vampire Slayer's Spike: leather duster, dangling cigarette, and hair slightly too high on his head. Bleach it blond and the resemblance is downright scary.

I know, I know: it's only 1995. Sarah Michelle Gellar was still winning junior daytime Emmy Awards and Kristy Swanson hadn't even DONNED a pair of ice skates yet. Stay on track Emily!

Anyway, The Babysitter's style of storytelling is as such:

-a character encounters The Babysitter
-a character suddenly acts extremely inappropriately with the underage The Babysitter
-extremely inappropriate action leads to dire consequence

-camera cuts back to reveal extremely inappropriate action with underage The Babysitter was a micro-fantasy

Surprisingly, Furland's film is an extremely faithful adaptation of a 20 or so page story. But that doesn't really make it any fun. Furland (now a veteran of directing for television, including credits for The Walking Dead and Sons of Anarchy) plays very carefully with his tone, assigning overly aggressive musical scores to blatantly show us what kind of mood the fantasy should generate (sexy saxophone for dad's porn 101 vision, playful piano for his son's naughty PG peeping, etc.). He's also not afraid to surrender to all-out sleaze, at least within the parameters of whatever rating system his film gets. The actual content is about as risque as an episode of Gossip Girl, strange when you add in uncensored use of the F word.

And smoking. LOTS of badass delinquent smoking.

As a child of the '80s and a teenager of the '90s, I have plenty of affectionate nostalgia for this era. Though cinesnobs are often eager to discount the '90s as worthless save for the occasional Pulp Fiction, I think there are plenty of gems to be found, even if they generally, well, don't LOOK good. Take, for example, Michael Tolkin's fantastically challenging moral tale The Rapture, which goes for some of the gutsiest filmmaking I've ever seen, yet visually, never seems to have a speck of ambition. I'm not versed enough in media studies to diagnose the issue, but for whatever reason, '90s films just aren't that, well, pretty.

Despite starring Alicia Silverstone in between her Crush and Clueless years, The Babysitter is also not a pretty movie. Sometimes, this feels smartly intentional, even if it becomes insufferably grotesque. Poor Lee Garlington is saddled with the horrid character of a plump, insecure housewife whose idea of sexy is having her neighbor George Segal pour champagne down the side of her mouth. There's girdle humor/horror, which somehow always feels misogynistic when executed in front of your eyes. Indeed, watching a middle aged suburban mom humiliate herself at an insufferable cocktail party is horrifically uncomfortably, as is seeing a seedy J.T. Walsh leer over an extremely young Silverstone. Aside from Dolly, everyone's fantasy seems to be the same: have sex with Cher. And yes, that includes her 10-or-so-year-old babysitting charge, who sneaks in the sorta R-rated nudity via a girlie magazine.

When I heard that a film had been made based on Coover's story, I assumed it merely lifted the concept of a cute teen babysitter lighting the libidos of every male who came across her path. That IS the case, but Furland should certainly be credited with trying to maintain what made the original tale so memorable in the first place, namely, the multiple points of view. The problem, however, with such a concept on film is that we as an audience can't possibly care about anyone. We're never given enough time with any individual characters to form any sort of connection, although the simple fact that all are horrible people with dull rape fantasies would make that impossible anyway.

High Points

As I mentioned earlier, the blatantly stereotyped use of music does a deceptively good job of mirroring a character's point of view

Low Points
The fact that everyone in this movie is neither interesting nor likable

Lessons Learned
A small ice cream stain on one's dress generally calls for a luxurious bubble bath

People in the suburbs are really turned on by the idea of soaping one's back

In the '90s, cool kids always toasted with lit cigarettes

No woman has ever mastered the art of flipping her hair with more skill than Cher Horrowitz

Rent/Bury/Buy
As both a token of its time and ambitious attempt to adapt a literary experiment, The Babysitter certainly has some merit for those looking for something different. Its somewhat experimental approach will probably surprise anyone looking at the shadowy cover art and reading the premise. Perhaps if this movie was made during a grittier era, the risk would have paid off. Instead, we're left with a rather ugly tale about ugly people.