The Babysitter

Couple (Patty Duke and William Shatner) hires an orphaned teenage girl (Stephanie Zimbalist) with a dark and mysterious past as a nanny. At first she is perfect and keeps there house in top shape and makes life much easier for the couple, but as time goes on she becomes destructive and turns Duke and Shatner against one another and the house is becoming a total mess. She then starts to show her true colors and people start to drop like flies. Sometimes haunting and disturbing TV film is given lush direction and entertains untill it crumbles apart at the end. Zimbalist makes a good psycho, but Shatner is miscast.

Not Rated; Violence.

A family thinks they've hit gold when they hire the almost perfect Joanna Redwine as The Babysitter. They'll soon find out that they should have done a background check first.

The Benedict family just moved into a beautiful house on the water just outside of Seattle. Tara is a spoiled problem child for her parents Jeff and over protective/worrying mom Liz. One day while outside playing, Tara sees this beautiful 18 year old girl named Joanna. She's very mysterious and almost mesmerizing in the way she talks and walks around, and she grabs a hold of young Tara's impressionable innocence. After we see her cause Liz to get into a car accident, Liz decides to hire Joanna as her live in nanny for the summer responsible for cooking/cleaning and taking care of young Tara.

All is well at first. Tara and Joanna get along perfectly, Joanna cooks amazing food for the family, and she starts a deep friendship with Liz. The friendship seems caring at first, with Joanna helping Liz with her self confidence as a mother and wife, but quickly turns a bit dark as she starts pushing Liz to drink after a year of sobriety. Eventually she gets Liz out of the way (thanks to her alcoholism) and seduces Jeff into beginning an affair with her. As Joanna's past starts to come to light thanks to a nosy neighbour, she gets backed into a corner which causes her severe dangerous side to come out.

The Babysitter is a fun little early 80's movie that is really about two different stories melded perfectly into one film. On the one hand, it is about a mysterious and dangerous girl who works hard to break up the Benedict family. On the other hand, the movie plays into the failing marriage between Liz and Jeff. It's kind of sad to watch them crumble even when Joanna doesn't try to ruin things for them. The ending is unfortunately kind of lackluster and doesn't provide that big pay off I was hoping for. We get an idea of how psychotic Joanna is and what she did to families before the Benedict's, but it only touched on that topic and never dived deep into it.

It is a bit of a slower paced made-for-TV thriller, but there is something about the story and the mystery of Joanna that keeps the viewer glued to the screen. Stephanie Zimbalist performance as Joanna is definitely mesmerizing and hypnotizing, not only to the family she's manipulating, but the audience as well. Patty Duke is a definite standout for me. She does a good job as the alcoholic mother who is desperate to keep her family together while she battles the bottle. William Shatner is his usual self, with a couple of over the top moments in his performance.

All in all The Babysitter was an enjoyable movie, especially for Made-for-TV fans like myself. It loses marks with how slow it runs (the middle frame is a bit dull), but the acting by Zimbalist and Duke along with a compelling mystery kept my attention the whole way.

6/10

Good acting by a solid cast makes this somewhat-familiar material worth slogging through, even though the issues it raises seem to get all fouled up. Patty Duke Astin plays a doctor's wife who has hired a mysterious young woman to care for her rather hapless daughter, which causes friction in their already-shaky household. Quinn Cummings, fresh off her stint on TV's "Family", has a few surprisingly strong scenes standing up to babysitter Stephanie Zimbalist, but Zimbalist's role is a wash-out. Her character isn't given the grand, juicy build-up that villains usually receive in television suspensers, but perhaps this time it was a mistake (director Peter Medak is so overly-cautious letting the pieces fall into place that he becomes unintentionally coy about the whole thing). The film is shrouded in murk; Medak, going for a low-key mood, doesn't allow the drama to take shape, and as a result the story and characters become lethargic blobs.

In THE BABYSITTER, a family is undermined by the cunning manipulation of a beautiful, young woman named Joanna (Stephanie Zimbalist). After insinuating herself into the family, she begins seducing the husband (William Shatner) and emotionally sabotaging the wife (Patty Duke).

Knowing nothing of Joanna's extremely dark past, the family is unaware of just how dangerous she is, though the 12 year old daughter (Quinn Cummings) seems wiser than her clueless parents. Will they realize what Joanna is doing, before she causes irreparable damage, even death?

Duke is great, and Shatner is less Captain Kirk than usual. However, this is Zimbalist's movie, and she is the blackened sun at it's center. There's even a LEAVE HER TO HEAVEN moment on the lake! Mostly though, THE BABYSITTER prefigures the future POISON IVY, only in a more "family-friendly", made-for-TV form.

Co-stars John Houseman as a doggedly suspicious neighbor...

This had potential, and it actually did realize some of it. However, the dialog is hard to hear in places, and the editing is just bizarre, several times jumping from a tense moment straight to another scene without resolving anything.

My biggest objection, though, is more fundamental: for the first two-thirds or so of the movie, the fascinating "babysitter" seems to have some kind of supernatural... something. It's never clarified what, but she seems to be almost mesmerizing people on occasion; at another moment, she is unfazed by a car nearly hitting her, almost as though she is in control of the situation more than the driver is. Then in the last third or so, that "something" seems to vanish and she is just a crazy young woman.

Zimbalist is captivatingly beautiful here and seems game to bring her character to life, and the other players are all fine in their roles. However, the story just doesn't quite make sense in spots and the relationships feel hurky-jerky. A bit more time invested into the writing would have helped, as would a better job on the sound mixing and the editing. Lacking those things, I can only give this a 4, as I ended up just wondering what the point of this was. Still, if you're a fan of stalker/psycho movies, or of Shatner or Zimbalist (or anyone else here), you will probably enjoy this at least a little bit.