The Babysitter 2: Killer Queen Kills The Original
Major Spoilers Ahead: I watched the 2017 horror movie The Babysitter as part of the 2017 31 Day October Horror Movie Challenge and I was pretty down with it. In fact, it one my award that year for Most Surprising Slasher. It was a modern slasher classic, focusing on a young boy named Cole who spies on his babysitter one night after he is supposed to go to bed and discovers she and her group of friends are meddling in occult practices. As Cole struggles to get away from his demonic babysitter, he finds himself in deadly situation after deadly situation.
The Babysitter really hits the slasher nail on the head, and what I thought was going to be a terribly made goofy horror actually surprised me by being good. There were heaps of pretty cool actors in it that I liked, including Bella Thorne, Robbie Amell, Leslie Bibb and Samara Weaving, plus Cole's parents were hilarious!
And like all slashers that turned out to be successful, a sequel had to be made to capitalise on the money from the first one. But what resulted in an accidentally good horror movie to begin with was completely uprooted and destroyed with The Babysitter 2: Killer Queen that was released on Netflix in September.
The Babysitter 2: Killer Queen is basically a redemption story for the babysitter Bee (played by Samara Weaving) who the producers realised that people actually liked her character in the first one. Despite being the villain of the first movie, Bee is completely likeable. She's hot and popular and funny, cool to Cole, and had no original plans to kill him (simply to take his blood while he slept). She just happened to be in a weird blood cult that her friends went crazy over, so during The Babysitter 2 we discover that she is behind her friends rising from the dead in order to help Cole and her first baby sitting charge, a new girl named Phoebe (who is arguably the best new character in the movie), move on. We discover she sold her soul to the devil in exchange for Phoebe's life and that all of this has just been to try and help her.
But the movie still needs a villain, so instead the producers created the exact same replica of Bee - only extremely wooden, boring, and annoying - to replace Bee's evilness so that she can return triumphant. This replica of Bee is Melanie, the young girl that Cole was in love with in the first one, only gone is her innocence and sweetness. Melanie (played by Emily Alyn Lind) is easy to pick out as Bee's replica from the moment she sashays onto the screen with her hair perfectly curled, an annoying as fuck boyfriend and a denial of Cole's experience despite being in the first movie and hunted herself. She lacks all of Bee's tenacity, charm and wit and is the most boring character I think I have ever seen in a horror movie.
Let's be real - I rooted for her to die. Which is what the producers wanted. They want us to be frustrated with this dull as dishwater mini-me and be happy when Bee emerges from the lake to seemingly take whats hers. And we do. But God could it not have been done in a better way?
It's like the producers realised that utilising new extremely annoying characters as copycats of the originals just wouldn't fly in the sequel, so instead they decided to bring back the original friends of Bee to hunt down Cole for a ritual to become human again. This whole idea is rather problematic, even for a slasher film where reason goes out the window.
To begin with - these characters were brought back specifically to die, all except Andrew Bachelor's character John, who came back to be the Randy Meeks and provide commentary on not having the black guy die first. They really tried to add in pro-black sentiments into the horror movie, including referencing black power, but the result seemed like a cheap shot at tokenism. Let's just make the black/ethnic character survive next time shall we? Anyway, the characters death scenes are also remarkably worse than the original Babysitter movie. Like, legit the worst. Bella Thorne gets stuck in a boulder 127 hours style (and I must say she doesn't really look stuck) and Cole and Phoebe simply pull on her legs until her head separates from her body.
It was such a shitty death scene, and the rest of the deaths weren't much better.
Also, can we talk about how the friends originally died and apparently there was "no evidence left behind?" Like how is that even possible? Robbie Amell hung from a tree with his neck snapped, the character of Sonya was blown up with a firework. Even when Bee did escape at the end of the first film there was no way she would have cleaned up her friends bodies in time in order to leave no evidence, especially as she was injured. Did the devil simply take their bodies with them and that's why Robbie Amell is shirtless all the time? It makes no sense!
Speaking of things also not making sense - what was with the disco style dance scene that Cole and Phoebe embarked on during that period of time in the movie where they were supposedly having sex? I know their characters are in high school, but considering that sex scene was pretty crucial to Cole delivering the final blow to the killers, it kind of would make more sense to have focused a little bit more on it, rather than cutting to terrible dancing. It was just so stupid!
Ugh. Unfortunately, even the hilarious antics of Cole's parents didn't even reach the heights of gold from the first one and even Bella Throne's hilariously awkward entrance couldn't save The Babysitter 2: Killer Queen. If you liked the first movie, I highly recommend you leave it there.
I give The Babysitter 2: Killer Queen 1 star.
