by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2018 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
Last night Lifetime ran a
“premiere” movie called Babysitter’s Nightmare and then a relative oldie from 2017 called The
Bachelor Next Door — I’m not sure why
Lifetime chose these as double-bill partners unless it’s that actress Brittany
Underwood was in both of them, in a supporting part in The Bachelor Next
Door and as the lead in Babysitter’s
Nightmare. The plot of Babysitter’s
Nightmare, written and directed by
Jake Helgren and set in Los Angeles (though our only real clue as to the latter
is the mention of Lankershim Boulevard, famous as the location of Universal
Studios), deals with nurse Daphne Hart (Brittany Underwood), who’s just been
fired from her hospital job because a child she was supposed to be caring for
died under her watch. She protests that the responsibility really lay with the
attending physician, who sent her out for coffee and then himself turned away
from watching the monitor and getting to the child in time to save its life.
But she gets laid off anyway and the experience leads her to leave the city and
break up with her boyfriend, resident physician Jeremy (Mark Grossman), who’s
training to live up to the old joke, “What do you call a person who thinks he’s
God? A schizophrenic. What do you call a person who knows he’s God? A doctor.” She moves to L.A. and gets a
live-in job taking care of Toby Andrews (Jet Jurgensmeyer), son of a well-to-do
couple who are leaving town for a month to visit family. Toby is staying behind
because he has an intense fear of flying; he’s also diabetic and requires
regular insulin injections, so Daphne figures it’s not just a babysitting job and will tap into at least some
of her skills as a nurse.
She’s encouraged to take it by her African-American
best friend back at the hospital, Dr. Kaci Washington (Shanica Knowles) — and
of course the moment we realize the heroine’s best friend is Black we can start
measuring her for her coffin. The film starts with a prologue whose connection
with the main action doesn’t become clear until much later: another young blonde woman with a live-in babysitter job
is awaiting the arrival of a pizza delivery person — we hear enough of her end
of the phone call between them to realize she’s expecting more from him than
pizza — and later we learn that she was found in the hills, murdered. Daphne
soon realizes she’s being stalked by the same pizza guy, who turns up
unannounced the day after he’s delivered to them claiming that she overpaid him
and asking her to do lunch with him sometime, and other things start to happen
to indicate that she’s being stalked. At one point a young dark-haired woman
named Audra (Arianne Zucker) shows up and says she is a newly assigned worker
for the Andrews’ maid service, which explains why she has the key to the place,
only later on Toby’s mother Karen Andrews (Reagan Pasternak) says in one of her
ongoing phone calls to Daphne that they’ve never used a maid service. Kaci
comes out to visit Daphne and the two of them find themselves menaced inside
the Andrews’ big house by a sinister, unseen assailant. Daphne’s ex Jeremy also
shows up, but the mystery assailant — who wears a hood and a black cloak that
resembles the legendary Grim Reaper, though without the scythe — sneaks into
his car while he’s exploring the house, and when he returns to the car the
killer strangles him with a leather cord and leaves him in his car in front of
the house.
In the end the killer traps both women in the house and turns out to
be [spoiler alert!] not the
twitchy pizza guy but Audra, who was the mother of the child who died in the
hospital under Daphne’s care and who determined to avenge herself against
everyone she held responsible for the death, including her own babysitter (the
earlier victim) as well as Daphne. The three women use a variety of weapons
against each other, and at one point Audra breaks a wine bottle to get a sharp
instrument with which she can stab Kaci — though Kaci makes it to the
next-to-last act (it usually doesn’t take that long for Lifetime writers to dispatch the
heroine’s African-American best friend) and when she dies it’s not from Audra
stabbing her with one end of the broken bottle, but Audra knocking her over
until she picturesquely falls on the shard of the other end. In the end Daphne
manages to knock out Audra and eventually the police, called by Karen Andrews
after Daphne’s frantic pleading for her to do so, come and save the day.
There’s also a cute guy playing a cop, Gavyn Michaels as Officer Chase, who
shows up when Daphne makes a 911 call and then feels embarrassed that it’s just
the maid (and it’s only much oater, of course, that both she and we realize
it’s the principal villainess posing as a maid!), and for a moment it looked like they were setting the cop
up as a replacement boyfriend for Daphne once Jeremy got killed, but they
didn’t go there and in the end Daphne decides to move back to her home town,
Atlanta, and go back to medical school to become the doctor she really wanted to be. Babysitter’s Nightmare is pretty routine stuff, though the final
half-hour is a quite nicely honed, almost wordless tale of suspense and terror;
a pity Helgren’s writing before that is pretty slovenly and by-the-numbers
Lifetime formula!
