This is the Christy pick for October. She doesn't like horror movies so she just picked this from a list on Rotten Tomatoes so in this instance she can't be blamed for how shitty it is, since it's sitting at an 86%. But it is shitty.Samantha (Jocelin Donahue) is a cash-strapped college student looking to get her own place outside of the dorms so when she sees a poster for a babysitter, she figures it's worth a shot. Over the objections of her friend Megan (Greta Gerwig), Samantha drives to a huge house in the middle of nowhere. The owner (Tom Noonan) seems nice but also really desperate and admits that the child he and his wife (Mary Woronov) had is an adult and long-gone. Instead of getting the fuck out like a rational human being, Sam agrees to stay and look after the aged mother-in-law instead of the kid she was expecting while the homeowners go out to see the lunar eclipse.
This is clearly based on the slow-burn horror thrillers of the 1970s and early 80s as much as the "Satanic Panic" phenomenon on which it's supposedly predicated. Filmmaker Ti West wrote, directed, and edited, making this as close to a one-man show as possible, so there's no reason to expect things weren't done on purpose here. Which makes some of the resulting decisions absolutely baffling.
For starters, this film is an hour and 33 minutes long, which is fine, except that nothing happens for an hour and twenty minutes. The last 13 minutes are jam-packed but at that point it feels like a waste. There is some good imagery being put to use in those crammed final minutes but it's not enough to bring back my interest.
Pumpkin rating: 2.9/5
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