It’s always rare for a horror remake to beat the original but this is one of those rare times where it worked out. Now this still isn’t some amazing film or anything like that so lets not get ahead of ourselves. That being said, it is well above the average horror title so you love to see it. Add a few more interesting characters and you could almost have made a good film out of this. The potential is there at least.
The movie starts with Jill getting ready to babysit for some rich folks as they head out for a while. It should be an easy gig and the kids are very young so they’ll just be sleeping the whole time. Yeah it doesn’t get much easier than this but then things begin to get a little tricky when she receives calls from a nefarious character. He starts out by being really silent but then starts to threaten her life. He intends to murder her before the night ends and makes it clear that he can see her. Jill has to find a way to murder this guy before she is destroyed but can she pull this off?
The whole film is basically her in the house trying to figure out what’s going on. For this reason the film can be a bit of a slow burn. Things don’t really happen until we get near the end so they do overplay the phone calls a little bit. I feel like he probably calls her at least 20 times during the film and each time she has to try and scramble to gather her bearings. She does call the police which is good but they basically say they can’t help her out since the threats haven’t been direct enough and it might be a prank caller. I dare say this is where she should have exaggerated a bit and talk about glass breaking and loud explosions in the background. Something to get the cops here a little quicker.
Where the film also drags a bit here is that Jill is basically your average main character. What that means is a lot of tears and panicking the whole time after each of the calls. It’s realistic perhaps but not the most entertaining. I’d like to see her talking smack back to the guy, grab a baseball bat and get ready or something like that. Unfortunately she makes a ton of the rookie horror main character mistakes. For one thing she turns off the alarm system for a while. Gee I hope he doesn’t get in the house while she was messing around….
Jill takes a massive risk in running next door to the spare house in case a neighbor was back home but this was a pretty bad call. There’s no positives to doing this since she had already called and there was no answer. So either the neighbor has already been murdered or he is the villain. In either case going there by yourself and leaving the kids is a bad move. In fact I’d argue she should have brought the kids with her way earlier in the film. Find a room and barricade yourself in or make a break for it with them. By staying so far apart you’re just creating a whole lot of vulnerable areas for the guy to make his move. Trust me that’s exactly what you don’t want to do.
There isn’t much of a supporting cast here which is another weakness. You can tell the film does not care about anyone other than the lead and villain so the rest of the characters are paper thin. You have Tiffany who apparently worked as a homewrecker in cheating with Jill’s guy which hurt their friendship. Things don’t go well for her and there’s actually not a big body count here but the rest of the victims are basically non characters here too. The way the film forces characters into this abandoned house plot can be a little funny but the film should have leaned into it more. Have the milk delivery guy show up, maybe a debt collector, etc. Have a bunch of people show up to get bumped off. It would be a little dark but you could also play it up as some dark humor for a while.
Where the film works is a lot of the scares are more about the atmosphere as opposed to being over the top violent. Knowing that there is someone out there getting ready to murder you is pretty unnerving. Particularly if you aren’t able to do a whole lot about it at the moment. The attacker usually has the edge over the defender for this reason because Jill has to be tense and stressed out the whole time while the murderer can relax and choose when he wants to make a move. The rich house makes for a good backdrop since it is absolutely massive which means there are a ton of hiding places available.
There’s an entire mini river in the house after all and it’s all super dark. Again this is why you need to pick a room or escape as soon as possible. One thing I was surprised didn’t happen was for Jill to use the emergency system to her advantage. When she tripped the alarm at the start is caused security to call her right away. So trip it again and if they call say it is a real emergency this time. Or if it’s later in the film and she can’t come to the phone then they should ideally show up pretty fast.
I was going to take some points from Jill at the end for when she stabs the guy and then runs off instead of finishing him. It’s still a risky move and I get that it’s a stressful situation but if you have the guy on the ground you have to finish him right there and then because it could be your last chance. Fortunately the film basically ends there so no harm no foul. We do get one of those sorta twist endings but it’s very weak compared to most. It’s clear the film wasn’t trying as hard as it could have to get the sequel set up. I mean it makes for a bit of a happier ending sorta compared to what it could have been but the twist ending is a horror staple. You have to have that!
Overall, This film was better than the original in just about every way. I’d still say it was not a particularly strong film because there are no real likable characters and there just isn’t much to it beyond being a horror film. You have a bunch of jump scares and a tense atmosphere which works well enough but you aren’t given enough of a reason to really care about anything. The villain not having a character was actually a good move though. Don’t give me some kind of tragic sob story. It makes sense once in a while for the villain to not have some kind of personal relation to the main character. He’s just a random psycho who happened to target her this time, sometimes it’s scarier for it to just be random like this. If you like the premise t hen give this one a shot but it’s really nothing special.
Overall 5/10
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I’ve seen that movie a lot since it came out, and honestly, it’s strength has always been its realism. Yes, the acting is weak, but everything else is real enough that it makes the whole premise scary. A teenage girl with teenage problems babysitting children because she needs to pay off her parents for blowing up her minutes by arguing with her cheater of a boyfriend, with all of the teenager drama that it involves, and then making mistakes in handling a threatening situation is real enough to me. Yes, she lets the system unarmed, and the curtains open, and runs to the guest house, but this is not an adult who knows how the world works, this is a panicked teenager who’s got no clue what to do and who, probably, lead a very safe and protected life until then. If her acting like the biggest problems in her life right now is being phone and car less is any indication. Even the police writes her off as a overemotional teenager girl, then she sees the maid’s car and since she’s got no reason to suspect that the maid is dead, she lets herself be gaslit by the cop that she’s not in danger. Again, pretty darn realistic. If she’s not in danger she doesn’t need to get the kids and lock herself in one room. By the time, she realizes that she is in fact in danger, that’s exactly what she does though. She locks herself with the kids in the kid’s closet… and he bashes in the door. So, pretty useless after all. By locking yourself in one room when you’ve got no way to defend it, you’re only putting yourself in a corner.
She doesn’t think to trip the alarm system because she’s too scared of opening the doors because her assumption is that he’s outside, until she’s up on the top floor with Tiffany’s body and by then it’s too late. Again, pretty realistic behavior. Then there’s the chase scene, and she stabs him in the hand with the fire poker. She doesn’t finish him off, because we’re talking about a teenage girl who’s at most 5 foot 2 and 120lbs, and he’s a grown ass man. Let’s be real here. She wouldn’t have won. Either she would’ve tried killing him by using brute force. Not happening. Or she’d need the fire poker currently in the guy’s hand and through the floor, her only advantage. Pulling it out to knock him out would have been too high of a risk for very little chances of success. Good luck bashing his skull in first try with teenager girl strength. Her only option to survive was to run out the door. Plus, believe it or not, but most people’s first instinct when being attacked is not killing, especially not people that young, most people run. The fact that she never confronts him directly is one of the strength of this movie: she knows she’s got no chance to win, and she’s right. She uses her brain instead: she latches the closet door with the lamp’s cord, then escapes out of a window and down a tree, hides in the water, kicks the pier over with him on it, locks the indoor garden’s door on him while he’s too busy pulling her by the hair, she tries running up the stairs, tries hitting him with the tequila bottle, turns on the fireplace, then stabs him with the fire poker and runs. The only time they get face to face is on the stairs and when they crash down in the living room, and he pretty much throws her around like a weightless doll before starting to strangle her, because yeah. That’s what would happen.
Also, she doesn’t have a personality per se, because she doesn’t need one. She’s not one person, she’s every girl. She’s supposed to represent all the teenager girls before her who’s babysat kids alone late at night. Same thing for the villain. He represents any unknown adult man with violent desires towards said teenager girls. He doesn’t need a name, he doesn’t even need a face. He’s The Stranger you shouldn’t let inside the house when you’re alone. Neither need a personality, it’s not the point of the movie.
The premise of this movie, and the 70’s movie it was based on, was taken from a urban legend called “the babysitter and the man upstairs”. A guy keeps calling the babysitter telling her to check on the kids, she ignores him, but he keeps calling back, she gets scared, calls the cops and when they end up tracing the calls, they tell her to leave immediately. Then she learns that the calls were coming from upstairs where the guy already killed the kids. What they did is that they took this urban legend and made it a movie. That is why this movie is scary. Because urban legends don’t just exist. Some guy somewhere probably did exactly that, or some variation of it for the urban legend to appear. Some guy killed some babysitter, just because, and it’s become a cautionary tale turned horror movie.
I’ll end on this: because you don’t understand why this movie is scary, I bet you’re a guy.