Sitter, The (DVD)

Steve Barton |

Jun 19, 2008

Starring Stacy Haiduk, William R. Moses, Gail O’Grady, Marianna Klaveno

Directed by Russell Mulcahy

I know … being a parent can be hard. Especially when you have more than one kid to look after. There are just so many hours in a day, and when you’re running a household, time is not a luxury that comes easy. What’s that? Me? No, I don’t have any children. But that doesn’t mean I wouldn’t want to hire a hot psychopath to throw a sexy kink into my home-life so that she can off the people around me whom I really don’t like. I’m just being practical, ya get me?

Here’s a life lesson for you … no good deed goes unpunished, and for our loving (and filthy rich) family that fact is about to become painfully apparent. After being rescued from her bat-shit-nuts mother, little Abby finds herself carrying a torch for the lawyer (Moses) who was instrumental in getting her removed from mama’s twisted clutches. While growing up, she kept tabs on her knight in shining spectacles. He eventually married and had two kids that are now at the age at which a live-in sitter could do the self-absorbed family the most good. Enter adult Abby (Klaveno). Finally she’ll have her chance to live with the man she’s adored for so long. All she has to do is get rid of his bitchy wife (O’Grady) and anyone else who dares to rock the boat … by any means necessary.

The Sitter first aired on The Hallmark Channel and is now hitting DVD in an unrated form. The term “unrated” has been so over-used that it’s become a cliché in and of itself. Considering that the source material was made-for-TV, I really wasn’t expecting much. To my shock The Sitter sports a couple of good kills. While they’re not shockingly gory, they are still pretty extreme for TV standards, and I applaud director Russell Mulcahy for having the gumption to shoot them.

Surprisingly enough the film as a whole isn’t half bad either. In fact, I’ll admit it, it had me enthralled into seeing where it was going to go. This was due mostly to the spot-on performance of Klaveno. This chick slides effortlessly between saccharine sweet to scary murderous nut-job. Her delivery and biting bouts of lunacy really kept this ship afloat. Everything was moving along at a great pace, but then at the very end, with just thirty seconds left, one of the characters delivers a one-liner that was so nauseating that it nearly ruined the whole movie for me. Seriously, it came that close. It’s amazing how things like that can happen. Suffice it to say everyone who decided to leave this ludicrously stupid moment in the film deserves a quick and solid shoe to the ass. I mean, come on!

In terms of special features, keep looking. This flick doesn’t even have its own IMDB page. In fact the only thing that I was able to find online pertaining to it was the trailer that appeared on YouTube. Weird.

If anything good at all can come from this experience, I hope that it’s Klaveno getting some more work in the genre. She’s the only reason to watch this flick, and I’d see another film with her in it just because of her screen presence (that is providing it’s a horror movie and she’s doing more evil). In the end The Sitter is a decent little time killer, but it’s also ultimately forgettable. Give it a spin if nothing else is grabbing you.

Special Features

One of the worst last lines of any film, period.

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