Au Pair - Una nemica in casa

My review was written in May 1991 after a Cannes Film Festival Market screening.

Well-titled for the video market, "Au Pair" is a botched thriller that wastes a good premise: a killer nanny.

Nicholas Guest is miscast as a thriller writer who travels from London to Mozambique (acually South Africa, where bulk of the pic was lensed) with wife Jocelyn Broderick and daughter when Broderick is assigned as a war correspondent there.

They hire an au pair girl, mysterious-looking Portuguese actress Ana Padrao, to take care of the kid while Broderick is away in the bush checking out military skirmishes. Predictably Guest and Padrao become romantically entwined making Broderi the odd woman out.

With too much foreshadowing that telegraphs to the viewer Padrao's psychotic tendencies, film is not very suspenseful. Lack of heat generated by the Guest-Padrao pairing robs the film of exploitation value in the crowded erotic thriller genre inspired by "Fatal Attraction".

Helmer Heinrich Dahms does a competent job of storytelling, but film suffers from inferior production values, most notable in a distracting, shabby-looking interior set for the climax. Both leads are bland, especially harmful as Padrao's vapid performance robs her role of the potential chills of a Bette Davis in "The Nanny".