In short: Babysitter Must Die (2020)

aka Josie Jane: Kill the Babysitter

Apparently, the end of the world as we know it is pretty easily achieved. It’ll only take a home invasion in a very special house with something very bad secretly slumbering under it (locked up but not guarded), and a bit of ritual sacrifice of the unknowing family living there, while these sacrifices are wearing some very special masks also conveniently hidden in the same house. So do at least say three rather hapless cultists (Melinda Yaeman, Nic Fitzgerald and Nathan Stevens). Little do they expect that the main problem standing between them and their pined-for Armageddon isn’t their inability to actually find the stupid masks, but the family’s babysitter Josie (Riley Scott). Josie has acquired every single summer camp merit badge imaginable, and is therefore, once roused, an excellent anti-cultist warrior who can only be beaten by a horror movie bullshit ending.

Well, say what you will about this okay home invasion movie by Kohl Glass (who apparently started in the Kickstarter-funded kind of indie movie), but adding cultist and some pulp cosmicist lore to the standard home invasion tropes does make the old lady look a lot livelier again. Not that this is the only film trying to work that kind of magic on the tale of those bad, bad poor people beleaguering the totally innocent rich, but I still appreciate the effort.

The resulting film is certainly no masterpiece or future major cult hit, but as a focussed low budget bread and butter horror comedy, this is not bad at all. Glass certainly knows how to pace these things, entering the actual home invasion meat of the film as quickly as possible, only providing us with enough backstory and the two or three character traits Josie needs to keep a viewer’s interest, and then letting things commence.

The suspense set pieces as well as the humour are decently staged and realized – they only lack some final bits of imagination to make them special instead of solid. This is rather more pedestrian than something like the comparable Becky but still fun enough to watch.