We watch several movies a week. Every Friday, we'll talk a little about some of the movies we watched that we felt were Worth Mentioning.
ARE YOU IN THE HOUSE ALONE? (1978)
Back in 1978, Dennis Quaid got married to actress P.J. Soles – and for a brief moment, it looked like they were going to share the screen as ill-fated characters Bob and Lynda in the John Carpenter slasher Halloween. Unfortunately, Quaid ran into scheduling issues and had to drop out of Halloween... and odds are that the movie he worked on instead was the made-for-TV horror movie Are You in the House Alone?, which aired on CBS in September of ‘78, the month before Halloween reached theatres. We know Halloween was a huge success that spawned a franchise, but Are You in the House Alone? has a cult following of its own and Quaid has a much larger role in this movie than he would have had in Halloween, so it can’t have been too much of a heartbreaker. Especially in retrospect, as it’s clear that not being in Halloween didn’t have a negative impact on Quaid’s career. He’s still around and doing well.
In this movie, Quaid plays high schooler Phil, who is dating Allison (Robin Mattson), the best friend of the lead character: 16-year-old Gail Osborne, played by Kathleen Beller – who turns in a great performance as this virginal horror heroine who has put through the wringer as the story plays out. Gail and her parents (Blythe Danner and Tony Bill) have recently moved away from the dangers of big city San Francisco to a supposedly safer small town... but she quickly discovers that this place isn’t so safe. Someone is stalking her at her new school and leaving threatening notes in her locker. Coincidentally, Gail is a babysitter, just like the heroine in Halloween, and when she’s working she gets prank calls from the stalker – something that also brings to mind the following year’s When a Stranger Calls.
Gail just wants to pursue a relationship with nice guy Steve (Scott Colomby), but everything else around that romance is a mess. This stalker keeps terrorizing her, her parents have hit a rough patch, one her teachers seems to be a creep, and nobody takes the threats against her seriously. Her parents, Allison, the school principal, they all just brush it off. They should take the situation seriously, because when Gail is babysitting one night, the stalker shows up to move on from notes and prank phone calls to physical assault.
Are You in the House Alone? is a good movie with some creepy, intense moments, although it also handles its troubling subject matter in the way you would expect from a ‘70s TV movie. It had to be safe for the average member of the CBS viewing audience. But it still makes for an interesting viewing experience more than 45 years after it first aired, so if you haven’t yet seen this story of an endangered babysitter, it’s worth seeking out.
THE DIVE (2023)
A few years ago, I wrote about writer/director Joachim Heden Norwegian/Swedish thriller Breaking Surface, which I ended up enjoying well enough despite the fact that there were unnecessary elements of dog neglect and violence and the lead character irritated me by making a series of stupid decisions. Since then, Heden has teamed with German filmmaker Maximilian Erlenwein to make The Dive, an English-language remake of Breaking Surface... and I don’t know if it was the influence of Erlenwein or if Heden was eager to fix his mistakes, but the issues I had with the original film were not present in this remake.
The set-up is the same: two sisters – in this case, Louisa Krause and Sophie Lowe as May and Drew – get together to go scuba diving in a remote location. A rock slide hits while they’re underwater, with May getting trapped under a rock at the bottom of the sea. Now it’s up to Drew to save her life. Of course, the rock slide further complicates the situation by making sure some of their oxygen tanks are now out of reach, so Drew has less tanks to work with as she struggles to make sure her sister doesn’t run out of air... and their phones are also out of reach behind fallen rocks, so she can’t even attempt to call for help.
I don’t remember exactly what the character in the original film did to irritate me so much, but for the most part I was on board with what Drew was doing – and I was very glad to see that there are no dogs in the movie at all, so there was no chance of the remake making the same questionable choices regarding those animals. Krause and Lowe both turn in good performances, and even though The Dive felt like it was going on for a bit too long toward the end (at 91 minutes, it’s 9 minutes longer than Breaking Surface, even though it gets to the diving sooner), I was left with the impression that it was a step up from its predecessor... which is an impression I hardly ever get when watching remakes.
DON’T TELL MOM THE BABYSITTER’S DEAD (1991)
Although Critters and Bill & Ted’s Excellent Adventure director Stephen Herek’s film Don’t Tell Mom the Babysitter’s Dead has achieved cult classic status in the decades since it was released, this was a movie I strongly disliked when I first saw it on VHS when I was around 8 years old... and have gone on to dislike every time I’ve caught glimpses of it in the years since then. That’s because it wasn’t what I was expecting it to be. I felt like the movie’s title and marketing pulled a bait and switch on me.
When it was heading into theatres, I was hyped for it. Not hyped enough to get my mom to take me to see it on the big screen, but excited nonetheless. The story centers on the five Crandall siblings: Christina Applegate as Sue Ellen (or Swell), Keith Coogan as Kenny, Christopher Pettiet as Zach, Danielle Harris as Melissa, and Robert Hy Gorman as Walter. When their mom heads out of the country for a two month vacation, the kids think they’re in for two months of freedom... but it turns out that mom has hired an elderly woman named Mrs. Sturak (Eda Reiss Merin) to babysit them the entire time. And while Mrs. Sturak puts on a gentle and sweet act in front of the mom, as soon she leaves, this old lady is revealed to be a whistle-blowing taskmaster who manages to piss everyone off very quickly. She assigns daily chores, has the kids wear name tags and write reports, turns off the TV, interrupts a date, and even makes Swell’s tomboy sister Melissa wear a dress. The majority of the film’s trailer focused on Mrs. Sturak upsetting the kids, so I assumed that would take up a good portion of the actual running time. The trailer also reveals that Mrs. Sturak eventually drops dead and the kids have to conceal her passing so they can go ahead with their days of freedom. So I imagined that this was going to be a dark comedy about an old lady pissing off a bunch of kids, who then have to figure out what to do with her corpse once she passes away. And once the body is hidden, it’s party time.
Truth is, the babysitter and her death are a very small part of the screenplay written by Neil Landau and Tara Ison, which is why the title on their script was The Real World. Mrs. Sturak is only in the movie for seven minutes. She dies at the end of her first day of work and her body is quickly disposed of (dropped off at a mortuary) soon after she dies. She’s no longer a concern after that. The issue the kids have to deal with is the fact that they didn’t realize Mrs. Sturak had the money their mom left to take care of them on her when they dropped off the body, so now they no longer have any money to live on while their mom is on vacation. (And apparently their father cares so little about them, they don’t even bother to get in contact with him.) So Swell has to get a job while the irresponsible stoner Kenny stays home and watches the younger kids.
And that’s what the movie is really about. Kenny cleaning up his act, the other kids turning their lives around, and Swell having a surprising amount of success in the corporate world while lying her way into a job at a clothing company. This was not the dark comedy I was looking for. The story of the mean old lady came and went very quickly. There were no corpse-hiding shenanigans. I had been bamboozled into watching a movie about a stoner cutting his hair and learning to cook. About a teenage girl working at a clothing company and putting together a fashion show. I wanted none of this.
After thirty years of disliking Don’t Tell Mom the Babysitter’s Dead, I was recently able to gain an appreciation for the movie... to start accepting it for what it is rather than what I expected it to be. What the trailer had made me think it would be. Now I understand what Herek, Landau, and Ison were going for with this one, and I can see that it actually tells a pretty nice story. I wanted a movie about kids behaving badly, and they do that for a while, but as the story plays out, they start to turn themselves. They improve themselves. And Swell comes to learn that she can have success in the adult world. This is actually a much more pleasant movie than I thought it was going to be – and while that disappointed me when I was 8, I understand it as an adult.
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