As Elisabeth Shue so famously warned in Adventures in Babysitting, “Don’t fuck with the babysitter!” It’s a quote that Angie Albright (Sarah Thompson, Cruel Intentions 2) neither utters nor paraphrases in Babysitter Wanted (which should not be confused with the ’80s Touchstone teen comedy), but certainly embodies, if a little too late.

Angie’s a good, Christian girl-next-door type who moves away from her devout mom to study art history at college in a small town where young women have been disappearing. Smooth move! Needing money to buy a bed, she takes a job babysitting one night for Sam (Kai Caster), a cute but shy only child who always wears cowboy gear and drinks buttermilk. He lives with his parents in a middle-of-nowhere farmhouse.

Everything goes well until the some big, bald man with scars all over his face tries to bust his way inside, recalling — how could it not? — John Carpenter’s Halloween. But debuting co-directors Jonas Barnes (who also wrote) and Michael Manasseri have a trick up their collective sleeve, and odds are that you won’t be able to guess at least the most twisted part of it.

Unfortunately, from there, this otherwise better-than-expected Babysitter loses all its juice. Its greatest asset, Thompson, spends most of the remaining time tied up and gagged, listening to one character go into exposition overdrive for a situation that could be explained in just a couple of lines. It’s not the great Bill Moseley, incidentally, who plays a cop sympathetic to Angie’s plight. She’s so darned cute, who wouldn’t? —Rod Lott

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