Delayed Reaction: Better Watch Out

Premise: A babysitter is terrorized by the kid she is babysitting.

 

I love the inventiveness of horror. Because the genre has a lower acceptable quality threshold (i.e., technically bad or cheap filmmakers are embraced easier), filmmakers in the genre feel emboldened to try out every crazy idea they come up with. Even the worst horror movies have a pitch that would be great if they could pull it off. You're Next is an example of this working out well. The idea is simply "what if home invaders accidentally target a group with a woman in it who was trained for specifically this scenario?" That idea could go south fast, but it was executed well and ended up being a really fun movie. On the other end is something like The Collector. I strongly disliked that movie but the idea "what if someone goes to rob a house on the same night that another criminal has targeted the house and set up traps." is undeniably awesome if they can make it work.

 

I'll go ahead and say I didn't love Better Watch Out as much as I wanted to, but it's has an undeniably good pitch and twist. Going just off the trailer, this is a movie about a babysitter and the kids she's watching turning the tables on a home invader. Sort of a gory Home Alone. It turns out, there's another twist buried in the movie: the kids are actually the villains. I was already interested in the movie, then when it got to that reveal in the movie, I was stoked for what the next hour would look like.

 

However, at that point, I realized the core problem that the movie wasn't able to overcome: kids aren't that threatening. No matter how good he is at playing a sociopath, I'm just not intimidated by a 13-14 year old Levi Miller. And the movie isn't quite the comedy I expected. It's actually more about revealing the horror in what should be a funny premise. A kid as the threat is funny. The idea of them recreating Home Alone traps that are actually quite dangerous sounds like dark comedy gold. But the movie opts to play up the horror rather than the comedy. It just didn't work for me.

 

Enough bits and pieces work though that I still came away slightly favorable about the movie. Olivia DeJonge is a good final girl. I like that it's a stealth reunion of the kids from The Visit with DeJonge as the babysitter and Ed Oxenbould as Levi Miller's friend. It has some clever use of Christmas imagery. Like, it's not a new idea, but I love the visual of tying someone up with Christmas lights. Miller's masterplan turns out to be pretty clever overall. The way the very end plays out is pretty fun. The Christmas Horror Comedy genre is surprisingly crowded, but this is a nice addition to it, even if it doesn't quite measure up to its pitch.

 

Verdict: Weakly Recommend