Director: Don Henderson
Writers: James E. McLarty from a story by George E. Carey and Don Henderson
From: Cult Cinema (only 3 Cult Cinema remain; only 5 overall!)
A man hooks up with his kid's babysitter while his wife gets entangled in a drug-smuggling run.
From the makers of The Babysitter comes the same plot again. The titular babysitter shows up on a night when she hasn’t been called (“night” despite all the establishing shots clearly being in the middle of the day) and the husband suggests to his wife that they take advantage of the mix-up and go out to dinner. Wife immediately gets angry because she has to be unreasonable and shrewish to justify everything the husband’s going to do for the rest of the movie and we can’t blame him for the choices he makes.
Sorry, that’s the practical reason. The narrative reason is that the wife is going to take the kids to spend time with their grandmother and they’ve been planning this for a while. She resents the husband asking her to change everyone’s plans to accommodate his passing whim.
What then transpires is the husband spending the weekend with the babysitter while the wife gets entangled in a drug-smuggling plot because she’s a junkie. Yeah, while the husband is fooling around with a teenager, the wife goes through b-grade Requiem for a Dream crap. She has to take her dealer and his team onto the husband’s boat so he can bring in a drug shipment from Mexico. We’re about 50 minutes into the movie when both of these stories really pick up steam, by the way. Until then we’re watching the husband, a director about to make a movie about youth culture, get introduced to the “real” youth culture, ie. he gets high once and screws a teenager.
The husband finds out the wife took the boat instead of going to see her family and then gets word that the authorities are searching every boat that comes into harbor. He gets into his private plane (fuck this guy and this movie) and finds his boat en route to the harbor. The man piloting the boat decides to dock at an abandoned pier, but the dealer kills him. Then the wife pilots the boat to the abandoned pier. That’s essential for the morality of the ending, which I’ll get to later.
Husband calls up the babysitter’s biker friends and they all head down to the pier where the dealer is getting off. The gang corners the dealer, chains him up, and dumps all his heroin. The husband swims to the boat and sails off with the wife. The babysitter watches from a cliff and says, “Ciao.” THE END
My big complaint with The Babysitter was that it’s was the writer/producer/lead’s sexual fantasy put on screen. In other words, he made us pay to watch his kink and that movie had the expected leering, exploitation tone such a project would have. Weekend With the Babysitter is an attempt to do the same thing but as a legitimate movie. The production is better and it eschews a lot of the exploitation elements. The reason that’s a problem is the movie hasn’t changed its central purpose: old man creeping on young girls. I mean, we get a shower scene where he’s soaping up her ass. You’re not fooling anyone George.
To compensate for the exploitation roots of the picture, the movie tries to include some moralizing and self-awareness. The former is not that surprising. Only a fine line separates exploitation films and morality plays in general—think of scare-mongering propaganda films like Reefer Madness or Sex Madness. The purpose of these movies was to profit from salacious and taboo material but to get around censors and local outrage groups by presenting them as warnings or cautionary tales: you get to see some titty, and that dirty titty gets punished for showing itself therefore you’re absolved. Likewise, I can’t find the quote now, but there’s that old adage that you can have as much sex and violence in your picture as long as its a religious epic. I mean, Passion of the Christ is straight-up torture porn, but it’s about Jesus so take the kids.
Anyway, the moralizing comes through the wife’s story. She’s a junkie forced into withdrawal by her dealer, has to steal the husband’s boat, and, while there, is forced into a three-way with the dealer and his girlfriend. This final moment is contrasted with the husband hooking up with the babysitter. Literally. The two scenes are intercut with the scores for both being different so you really feel the effect: the husband, who is good, gets to have fun fulfilling sex while the wife, who is bad, has to suffer through a lesbian experience for her next fix.
Let’s not unpack lesbianism as punishment trope nor the dealer shouting racial slurs at one of his underlings. Hopefully what’s wrong with all that is obvious.
The morality part climaxes with the dealer murdering the ships pilot. He has to for the ending to carry the proper moral weight. Like I said, the biker gang chains up the dealer and dumps out his stash. What I left out is his underling, who’s a junkie, is there as well and left sitting in all the spilled and spoiled heroin. He’s not physically restrained like the dealer, but he’s metaphorically chained to the junk and just as undone. The man piloting the ship had been a junkie, but is currently clean and, more importantly, kind to the wife. He’s morally tainted, though, by having been a junkie and being involved in the smuggling. We’re getting kind of Old Testament here, but as I’ve said in other reviews, exploitation movies tend to do that. Having sinned, he has to be punished so he’s thrown overboard and killed by the dealer even though, in terms of plot, his death doesn’t mean anything. They still pilot the boat to the place he was planning to take it. All it does is clean up the final punishments. If he were still alive he couldn’t justifiably be punished by the gang, he couldn’t remain on the boat because the husband has to come and save that, and he couldn’t just walk away. So he’s killed because you can’t even flirt with the underground.
So, here’s a shock: I hated it. I did laugh out loud a few times at how ham-fisted and awkward the movie was, like when one of the hippies is explaining weed to the husband. Those moments were too few and far between, though, and what is there is, as I note throughout this review, pretty awful on every level. On top of that, like The Babysitter, this is boring while also trying to be salacious. What it has over that film is a lighter touch, a less leery tone. The Babysitter felt like it could turn into a snuff film at any time; Weekend With the Babysitter feels like corporate remake of that exploitation content. Unfortunately, once you remove the exploitation edge, you lose a lot of the narrative energy. Since the movie’s not willing to push boundaries or break taboos, nothing seems to carry that much weight. I hope I don’t have to say this, but don’t see this movie about an elderly man hooking up with a teenager.
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