The Night Sitter
Amber needs to get her head in the game and keep her eyes on the goal but she can barely keep her eyes on the road, almost knocking down a pedestrian so focused is she on her messages as she drives to the suburban mansion where she will be acting as the night sitter for young Kevin as his father Ted goes out on a date.
Slightly disappointed that Amber doesn’t know who he is, the famed Ted Hooper, Paranormal Investigator, he’s far from a master of detection, offering her a drink rather than checking her references and asking her to lie should anyone question what she is doing that night, and alarm bells should already be ringing.
Pulling double duty as Ted’s date Charlotte arrives and drops off her son Ronnie as they leave, Amber can’t wait to get the boys off to bed with a scary tale so she can get down to the real business of the night, robbing the Hooper household blind, but with an office full of supposedly cursed objects this is a job she perhaps should have turned down.
Written and directed by Abiel Bruhn and John Rocco who previously collaborated to spring A Not So Pleasant Surprise, their latest film The Night Sitter is bathed in a neon eighties silliness as it draws together the pieces which will shape Amber’s evening, two boisterous kids, a badly planned heist and the story of the Three Mothers.
“Notorious child killers who bled children dry, the lucky ones died first,” the tale goes, and eventually they were caught, one hanged, one burned, one drowned, but now they seek revenge using Amber’s associates to perform the deeds, particularly the easily-possessed Lindsey (Amber Neukum) who believes dressing as a cat burglar means donning pointed ears.
Regrettably, despite the setup, what could either be played as a slasher or a spoof falls too flat to fulfil either expectation with endless bickering and timewasting in place of peril or character and plot development, the characters doing little more than running from room to room and screaming, and much like Amber’s faked resume The Night Sitter promises more than it can deliver.
As Amber and Kevin, The Walking Dead‘s Elyse Dufour and Jack Champion, currently engaged on James Cameron’s Avatar sequels, make the best of the material and carry more than their share of the weight, making their mismatched and incongruous alliance in the face of danger more interesting than the script would suggest.
With sinister design work, delirious lighting and a soundtrack all deserving a far more interesting film, the biggest disappoint is the Three Mothers themselves who serve no purpose other than generic basement and closet-lurking killers in a film which desperately wants to channel Evil Dead but is edited to kill any sense of pace or urgency.
The Night Sitter is available now from FrightFest Presents
