It feels safe to infer that the percentage of humans who had strong feelings about the news that “Don’t Tell Mom the Babysitter’s Dead” was being remade is statistically insignificant. Stephen Herek’s 1991 film, which starred Christina Applegate as a teenage girl who found her vacation plans spoiled when an absent mom and a deceased babysitter forced her to spend a summer caring for her four younger siblings, was dismissed as a forgettable riff on the “Home Alone” formula upon its initial release. While it eventually built the kind of modest fanbase that physical video stores often facilitated, the intellectual property was neither overdue for an update nor too sacred to touch.
That mass apathy ensured that Wade Allain-Marcus’ new remake had a wider berth for success than many of the comparable low-budget remakes that have been dumped on streaming services in recent years. There’s no denying that “Don’t Tell Mom the Babysitter’s Dead” is a phenomenal title for a movie, and the original film’s minimal cultural impact meant that anyone tackling a remake should have felt free to run wild with the idea. Unfortunately, this one didn’t set its sights quite so high. Allain-Marcus and his cast deliver a perfectly competent feel-good story that might please fans of the original film, but it’s hardly enough to justify a second take on a movie that never justified its existence in the first place.
Like most 17-year-olds, Tanya Crandell (Simone Joy Jones) is well aware of how agonizingly close she is to the freedom of early adulthood. She was excited to enjoy her first brush with independence by spending the summer in Spain with her friends, but finds her plans thwarted when she’s hit with the one-two punch of not being able to afford the trip and watching her mother undergo a nervous breakdown. When her mom (Ms. Pat) announces plans to head to Thailand for a three month mental health retreat, she ends up stuck at home with her three younger siblings and a babysitter from hell (June Squibb).
While their eponymous babysitter emits nothing but grandmotherly warmth during their first meeting, she quickly turns into a racist drill sergeant once their mom is on the plane. (Her first private words to the kids are “I watch ‘Madea’ movies. I know how to discipline you little N-words.”) But in a stroke of good fortune that will only be a spoiler to those who stopped reading halfway through the film’s title, it isn’t long before she dies in her sleep. Rather than alert the authorities and give up even more of their independence, the enterprising kids decide to hide the body and form their own little family unit until their mom returns.
Tanya cons her way into a job at a fashion brand in order to pay the bills, and quickly distinguishes herself as a stellar executive assistant despite her lack of qualifications. Her brothers dip their toes into domestic chores like cooking and cleaning while she tries to balance her career and a budding romance with an architecture geek (Miles Fowler). Tanya soon find that her summer of imprisonment has become the most eventful stretch of her life as she manages to speed-run adulthood while still navigating the endless complications of life as a teenager.
The true flaw at the heart of “Don’t Tell Mom the Babysitter’s Dead” is that its title implies a dark comedy before squandering most of its potential on a simple story about kids learning to fend for themselves. It’s not hard to imagine a galaxy of more interesting directions that such a film could take, like having the kids kill the babysitter themselves or go to more extreme lengths to avoid telling Mom that she’s dead. At the very least, the film would have benefitted from making the villainous sitter a larger presence instead of just vanishing after the cold open. On some level you can only give a remake so much blame for making the same mistakes as its predecessor, but this one certainly doesn’t get credit for fixing them either.
In the end, this iteration “Don’t Tell Mom the Babysitter’s Dead” is a safe viewing experience that’s likely to evoke even less emotion than the film that inspired it. But the project still hides a pearl of wisdom that Hollywood executives would be wise to jot down: If you’re looking to remake something, you could do a lot worse than finding an underperforming film with an endlessly catchy title.
Grade: C
“Don’t Tell Mom the Babysitter’s Dead” opens in theaters on Friday, April 12 before streaming on BET+ beginning on May 16.
