There is unfortunately no other way to say it. The Babysitter: Killer Queen, McG’s follow up to his 2017 Netflix horror-comedy The Babysitter, is terrible. In fact, if you want to be more accurate to the trailers, it’s bloody terrible. As much as I enjoyed the first film, which saw nerdy preteen Cole (Judah Lewis) discover that his cool babysitter Bee (Samara Weaving) and her friends are a part of a Satanic cult, the sequel tries too hard to be edgy, and ruins everything good about the first film.
Set two years later after the first film, Killer Queen finds Cole in his junior year of high school, bullied by literally everyone. His only friend is Melanie (Emily Alyn Lind), his cute neighbor from the first movie who still has a crush on him despite having a dumb jock boyfriend now. Cole’s status as a social pariah despite his achievements stems from the fact that after he killed Bee and her fellow cultists in self-defense, their bodies and the evidence of their actions had mysteriously disappeared – leading everyone to believe Cole just made it all up. Even his supportive yet ditzy parents (Leslie Bibb and Ken Marino) don’t believe him and are even considering sending him to an institution. When Cole finds out about their plans, he decides to take Melanie up on her rebellious offer to ditch school and instead spend a night partying at the local lake with her friends.
What was supposed to be Cole letting off steam turns into another bloodbath, when the old cult members sans Bee – shirtless dumb guy Max (Robbie Amell), woefully clueless Allison (Bella Throne), fast-talking John (Andrew Bachelor), and morbid Goth girl Sonya (Hana Mae Lee) – somehow return from the dead. New student Phoebe (Jenna Ortega), not too far from crazy herself, is dragged into Cole’s now recurring nightmare when she stumbles into the whole bloody affair. Cue lots of running, screaming, and people dying in literal volcanic eruptions of blood.
The ludicrous amount of blood on display is highly laughable, and reminiscent of some classic camp horror flicks of the 20th century. This is actually done for the benefit of the film, as you will be hard-pressed to actually find anything else to laugh at. Gone is the clever wit of the original, replaced by the lowest of low-brow humour. Instead of taking the piss out of horror tropes like the first film, there are literal jokes about pissing…oh, how the mighty have fallen. The characters aren’t much better – everyone you meet, no matter how fleeting their screen time, has seemingly had their normal dialogue replaced by a sewer-pipe-flow of punchlines to jokes that fall horribly flat. Original screenwriter Brian Duffield, who tempered director McG’s more egregiously over-the-top tendencies with oodles of heart and charm in the first film, is no longer involved, and this is extremely obvious. The combined result is that Killer Queen, co-written by McG and three other writers, is paradoxically a study in both phone-it-in creative laziness and the perils of sequel excesses.
Story beats, gags, and even character wardrobes are copied straight from its predecessor, often spoiling any surprise or enjoyment as you will know exactly where things are going. But then the film goes into some really unexpected places as well, which, in hindsight, I would prefer to not have visited. Instead of a standard hand-to-hand tussle between two characters, one scene is turned into a Street Fighter-esque video game battle complete with life meters and fireball special moves. Instead of an awkwardly cute teenage sex scene, we get montages of vienna sausages slipping into hot dog buns. There are song and dance numbers, pointless homages to old movies, flashback montages, and more. The list just goes on and on, gimmicks and gags just lumped on top of each other with random abandonment.
If there’s a saving grace in this film, then it’s that some of the previously mentioned gory deaths are ridiculous enough to be fun. Leslie Bibb and Ken Marino also have some genuinely great lines and delivery, even if they’re not given much to do, and Robbie Amell and Bella Thorne’s “dumb popular kid” shtick is brilliant here. Then there’s the film’s fantastic soundtrack of classic rock tracks, including its titular Queen banger. Just why the movie is actually called Killer Queen though, is never once explained. In fact, there’s a lot of the script that is just straight-up head-scratching, including the entire idea that nobody believed Cole when this happened the first time (Bee and her troupe slaughtered police officers as well, who just went missing). When the big reveal eventually shows up as to why and how this is happening again, it arrives with a resounding, convoluted “Huh?!”
That’s the same response that I have to the fact that McG has plans for a third film in the series (which, unsurprisingly, is teased in the film’s post-credits stinger if you stay around long enough to see it). If this proposed threequel follows the downward spiral of creative quality that gave us The Babysitter: Killer Queen, then I would rather just have a cult take me right now.
2/5 STARS