Don’t Tell Mom the Babysitter’s Dead can be considered the quintessential film of the latchkey generation. Watching the movie today reminds of the 1991 era when parents didn’t bother checking up on their kids, house parties existed, and Christina Applegate was the girl you wanted to take home. Such expectations arose from the movie applegate’s appearance in another coming-of-age classic. Reminds of Tom hanks in Big or Jennifer garner in thirteen going on thirty, and this is why Hollywood was always bound to be looking for a remake of Applegate’s popular character on the big screen. Any such revision would need to appeal to a quite different generation that in several respects seem to have been forced to mature even quicker than their predecessors.
Thanks to Paramount streamer BET+, the reboot does not just understand the assignment, but also does it perfectly. The new film appeals to the wit and charms of the original film but with a twist. This time the black comedy is about a Black family living in Southern California. Other elements of the two-part movie are swiped around and additional characters that had minimal influence, have been dropped. Nevertheless, the writer Chuck Hayward sticks closely to the original works written by Neil Landau and Tara Ison. Both these authors have story bylines, and they are executive producers along with Tyra Banks. In his first feature film, director Wade Allain-Marcus has created a film that demonstrates what future reboots should look like.
This time, it is Tanya Crandell, a focused seventeen year old hoping to go to college, who is affected when her widowed mother, an inappropriate comic, uses Tanya’s vacation money due to her nervous breakdown. Uaddis, Patricia Williams’s character, takes this vacation money on a yoga trip to Thailand. Ms Sturak, who is already in her 90s, is seen next babysitting Tanya with her other siblings, Kenny, the dope, Melissa, the goth, and Sasha, the innocent one. But it doesn’t take long before Ms Sturak removes the sweet old lady face she wears and shows her true self as a racist Karen who screams at children because she has the urge to gun them down with her pistol.
Although Ms Sturk met her gruesome death on a night the kids never cared about, the kids did not mourn. Those angered children, instead, came up with a creative and evil plan on how they could cover the body without arrest. They almost succeeded but even this came to an end when they were so careless that they called 911 forcing cops to inspect the area right at the time they were about to dump the old lady into the freezer.
This is one of the many earned moments where the film thinks what would have changed had the story been about black latch key kids getting together and doing involuntary manslaughter. However, rather than a wayward discursive lesson on Black history along the lines of a Kenya Barris rendition, it is sufficient for Kenny to drop a name on the sheriff, who was once a lacrosse coach, so that he can evade trouble first and then reprimands his brothers and sister for their lack of seriousness with their delicate freedom. “He aint’ even believe we live here!” explains Kenny, speaking of the cop, who was relentless in trying to assess the scale of their big house. Fast fashion, food insecurity, cult of masculinity and college all get made in just as incisive ways. If anything is really jarring in the script, it is the frequent use of the N-word and that more than probably explains how they bumped the rating from PG-13 to a hard R.
The children end up placing Ms Sturak’s corpse into a lake together with her vehicle and the money their mother had saved for their sustenance. The younger siblings have no choice but to force Tanya to engage in the labour market; Melanie and Jack forge Tanya a job in a once glamorous fashion label, whose sole remaining employee is a perpetually enthusiastic woman named Rose, “a reality television starved Nicole Richie.” As she puts it, “the stick up her ass keeps the bug up her ass,” speaking of Caroline (Iantha Richardson who plays Will Trent’s staff), whom Rose, the staffer she took out for the job of her dreams, considers to be an enemy.
When the strong Caroline was more involved in the demoralization of Crandell Sue Ellen Applegate, then in the remake, she spends more of her screentime with Rose’s f-boy Gus, played by Jermaine Fowler, and Tanya’s love interest Bryan, portrayed by Miles Fowler. It is also evident that the revival improves on the prototype in one aspect where the characterisation of all characters, not solely the first Crandell child, receives time and attention.
Who could forget the attire, the fashion nuance, and the photography of the film as these encompass an elusive quality that will remind one of the characters from the HBO series ‘Insecure’, whereby Allain Marcus, was well-known as the rational and forlorn man called Derek DuBois; All the while, the reboot also takes one back to the events of the 90s version through certain cameos(no spoilers – I Promise) and pull quotes ( such as ‘I’m right on top of that, Rose!), with the cuts interspersed with a feel-good sound bed that ranges from Curtis Mayfield to Libra Jolie. Allain-Marcus even positioned the new family in a Santa Clarita house in which the Crandell’s white family used to live.
The term has become awash in so much Hollywood collective crack brain that the reboot bears the dreadful subtitles ‘studio shrub’, a project in its own right aimed at the bottom line. But Don’t Tell Mom is a legitimately touching accomplishment that makes latchkey kids from different eras feel understood. Unbelievably, it signifies genuine evolution for an industry which perhaps should be allowed to continue on auto-pilot.
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